LannisterAtHeart 
Pog Mo Thoín
Posts: 157
(11/15/03 2:10 am)
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Love Actually
Okay, right off the bat when my friend Laura told me she wanted to see this movie, it was a struggle not to groan. I hate romantic comedies. They're so damn stupid. The comedy is never that funny, and you always know what's going to happen.
Love Actually is different. One description of the film says it follows the lives of eight couples, but I'm not entirely certain how they got their numbers. For example, if Person A is married to Person B, but is boinking Person C on the side, does that count as one big relationship, or does Person A count twice? I don't know. I don't want to try to count. Nevertheless, the point is that there are many main characters.
Each character seems so real. Each situation, each relationship is possible. Surely some are more odd than others. But I didn't find any impossible. The comedy was far more subtle than that of any romantic comedy I've ever seen before.
Every story progresses differently; downhill then uphill, uphill then downhill, straight uphill, straight downhill, or around like a roller coaster. Just like real relationships. With so many main people it is hard to get a lot of character development in there, but thanks to some good acting, the audience shouldn't need many things spelled out for them.
Two of my favorite characters are Harry (who works with three other characters, including Laura Linney's, and is played by Alan Rickman) and his wife Karen (who is a close friend of Liam Neeson's character, and the younger sister of Hugh Grant's, and is played by Emma Thompson {hot!}). The audience is given so little information about them, but by the end of the movie I felt I could really understand them. Their marriage is not the sort of relationship that is often seen on the big screen, but I think it's also very real. Besides, Rickman and Thompson are just superb actors to the extreme. Excellent stuff.
The title Love Actually comes from Hugh Grant says as a voice-over in the beginning: "Love actually is all around us." The point of the movie is to show that love can be found anywhere: in elementary school, in the Prime Minister's household, at work, behind the scenes of a porn flick, at a bar, at the airport... Anywhere. But I think the title has a deeper meaning. This movie shows love, the way it actually is. All the ways that it actually is.
I walked out of the theater tonight feeling really good. Romantic comedies tend not to focus on anything real, and I end up depressed. "What a storybook ending. That happens so rarely... but this is the 17th romantic comedy in a row that's I've seen that ends like that," I always think. Well, yes, some of the storylines in Love Actually do end up like fairy tales. Sometimes that really does happen, too. But some of the storylines also end less spectacularly. And that happens in real life, also. For some reason, the combination of the failures and successes didn't make me think about one or the other too much, and I just wound up really happy. As a matter of fact, I'm still smiling, and I can't wait to get to see it again.
I know there's something more I wanted to say about this movie, but it's 2 AM, and I'm not sure what I've already written sounds okay at all, so I'm calling it a night. 
~Lady LaH, Knight of the Lamprey Pie
"The west is the best."- The Doors |
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