Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Love Actually

Movie Guru Rating:

Bad Karma (2 out of 5)

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The holiday sweet is too cute, too long

by Joey Cody

Pass me the gravy boat—I think I'm gonna hurl.

As if we don't already feel bad enough during the holidays. Love Actually comes along and reminds us how horrible it is to be alone or married (married with children, that is). Young, yearning love is all that matters—messy, adulterous, courtly love, if you will.

Love Actually had great potential for depicting several varieties of love, but it got lost somewhere in its butt-numbing 129-minute runtime. By the time it was over, I wasn't sure whether I more badly needed to pee, or puke.

Don't get me wrong—I'm a romantic. I still get misty when I hear "Another Auld Lang Syne." But how stomach-churning are the cinematic worlds in which lovers are always loved more in their absence than in their presence? Loving a ghost or a memory or the person married to your best friend isn't difficult at all. Try loving a live, available, aggravating human being.

So many are the romantic entanglements in Love Actually that I can't describe them all, but they involve several Londoners (in a weak and unnecessary six degrees of separation set-up) trying to couple in the weeks before Xmas Eve.

Colin (Kris Marshall) is a horny super-git that any self-respecting British girl won't give the time of day, but he believes that if he just walks into an average Milwaukee bar, gorgeous American girls will bed him straightaway. A ridiculous male fantasy that the filmmaker actually makes true. Gag me with a Budweiser. (I've never been a sucker for foreign accents.)

Another way the movie takes a dig at Big, Dumb America is with a satisfying diss of the American president, who is played with devilish debonairness by Billy Bob Thornton. The bachelor Prime Minister (Hugh Grant) stands up to the prez in a press briefing, to the delight of Brits, ex-pats, and patriotic Bush-haters all. But what's off-putting about it is that he doesn't find the character and cojones to stand up to the president's hard-line policy until he catches the Commander-in-Chief wooing Natalie, the tea 'n' bickie crumpet at 10 Downing St. (She's a much younger, sweet, ditzy, plump brunette who actually dons berets, and bears much more than a passing resemblance to Monica Lewinsky.) Right move, wrong motivation.

The PM falls in love with Natalie after seeing her shake her saucy rump on her way out of his office; the very married Harry (Alan Rickman) has the hots for Mia, his slutty secretary; and Jamie (Colin Firth) falls for his Portuguese maid after she strips and dives into a lake to save his manuscript. (Jamie ends up proposing to her after never having had a meaningful conversation with her. Isn't it amazing how sexy a woman who can't talk back to you in English can be?)

With all the male power and female subservience, it's easy to become disgusted with the antiquated sexism of Love Actually. My friend, Kelly, who endured this romantic marathon with me, remarked that in this respect the movie was "practically porn." (And that's not a reference to the couple of porn-set stand-ins, who are, ironically, the one example of genuine affection.) I'm sure new director Richard Curtis (writer of Blackadder and Four Weddings and a Funeral), wanted the moral of his stories to be: "At Christmastime, be honest—tell people how you feel," but what comes through instead is: "Shallow, lust-based relationships work. Substance sucks."

Curtis packs in solid actors like Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Keira Knightly, Laura Linney, and many others. But he has crammed in so many characters that we can't become fond of any of them. And he often neglects his love stories for so long that some abrupt cuts are required to catch up with them.

To be fair, it's difficult to do really good romantic comedy, but Love Actually begs to be mocked for its sexism, browbeating score (swelling strings, anyone?), crowdedness, and sheer length. The movie's syrupy sentiment is also hard to choke down.

As if it weren't enough of a chick flick, Curtis actually tosses in a clip from Titanic, with a widower (Neeson) and his cutie-patootie stepson acting out the famous bow scene.

The close of the movie, accompanied by a maddening loop of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows," is a montage of real-life Britons greeting loved ones at Heathrow. Should be sweet and uplifting, but makes you want to run an exhaust pipe into your window.

Curtis, for all his blundering, manages to get a couple things, right, though. Not all the stories end happily. There's sadness, loss, and dumb luck. And it's almost worth sitting through the whole thing just for Billy Mack. The fruitcake of the film is Bill Nighy (Underworld) as Billy, an aging rock star (think a staggering, swaggering Keith Richards/David Bowie) whose bluntness about the industry, his past excess, and his "crap" music makes him the black horse on the UK's holiday song charts.

Actually, wait for the video . . . and July.