Love Actually (2003)

Directed by Richard Curtis. Starring Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Laura Linney, Colin Firth, Liam Neeson, Bill Nighy, Andrew Lincoln, Martine McCutcheon, Keira Knightley, Lúcia Moniz, Heike Makatsch, Kris Marshall, Martin Freeman, Joanna Page, Rodrigo Santoro, Gregor Fisher, Abdul Salis, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thomas Sangster, Billy Bob Thornton. [R]

Or not, actually. Because even though this mosaic of romance among Londoners during the Christmas holiday is self-aware as being a light, loopy fantasy, it’s astonishingly naïve about “love” beyond the fact that it can be messy and illogical, and worse, it doesn’t even know how to deliver what it promises when it comes to (reasonable) happily ever after. One obligatory cliché after another with hardly a speck of internal logic, befuddled by inconsequential connections and a curious air of misogyny hanging over the whole tangled affair (not only are the boys “in the driver’s seat” in nearly every segment, but their fantasies often go fulfilled while the ladies either suffer the crash of reality or just simply wait around for things to happen to them). Hard to say which storyline is the weakest, but the one where Marshall flies to America to use his “foreigner flavor” to get some action is so head-slappingly stupid and preposterous that it must be assumed that nearly the entire thing is a hallucination/dream or a lie, right? (Apparently, it’s neither). The pic’s unabashed sentiment has earned it plenty of fans, but even the less-discriminating hopeless romantics among us deserve smarter writing and less forced cheekiness and poignancy (and a much better soundtrack, one that’s absent all those cloying pop numbers and Craig Armstrong’s unbearably high-handed orchestral swells). Screenwriter Curtis’ directorial debut. Since the cast wasn’t already overloaded enough, there are also several cameos, including Rowan Atkinson, Elisha Cuthbert, January Jones, Denise Richards, Claudia Schiffer, Sienna Guillory, and Shannon Elizabeth.

35/100