{"id":1617,"date":"2003-12-15T00:15:35","date_gmt":"2003-12-15T08:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/12\/15\/1617.html"},"modified":"2003-12-15T00:15:35","modified_gmt":"2003-12-15T08:15:35","slug":"richard-curtis-does-it-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/12\/15\/richard-curtis-does-it-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Curtis does it again"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I've been hearing pretty good things about Love Actually<\/a>, so when Mary Anne suggested it for this afternoon (as part of a sort of anniversary date) I said sure.<\/p>\n

It turned out to be fabulous. Totally utterly completely charming. It's heavy-handed in bits, and predictable in places (though several things surprised me a great deal), and one or two jokes fall flat (there are especially too many fat jokes), and a bit too sappy and obviously manipulative in various ways. But those were all minor flaws. I commented earlier this evening that this movie joins Four Weddings and a Funeral<\/cite> and Two Weeks Notice<\/cite> as one of my three favorite romantic comedies (yes, I appear to be even more of a sucker for Hugh Grant movies than I thought I was); that turns out not to be necessarily true, depending on how you define romantic comedy (Singin' in the Rain?<\/cite> When Harry Met Sally?<\/cite> Wizard of Speed and Time?<\/cite> Moonstruck?<\/cite> Better than Chocolate?<\/cite>), but it's definitely in my top ten, and among my favorite movies seen this year.<\/p>\n

And though I can't quite say it transcends its genre (somehow I always end up saying that about movies), it does have more serious stuff and more richness of character than I'd have expected, particularly after my disappointment with Notting Hill.<\/cite><\/p>\n

The cast is pretty much uniformly excellent. I don't know that I found Hugh Grant entirely believable as the Prime Minister, but he was so damn charming I didn't care. Colin Firth is lovely as always. Liam Neeson, Alan Rickman, and especially Emma Thompson are superb as usual. Keira Knightley<\/a> continues to demonstrate that she's not only attractive but also remarkably versatile, with her fourth wildly different role in as many years. (Mary Anne, I forgot to mention that Knightley was also the female lead in Pirates of the Caribbean.<\/cite> Oh, and she's 18 and a half years old.) Martine McCutcheon as Natalie and Lúcia Moniz as Aurelia also do fine work. As does Laura Linney (who was in The Truman Show<\/cite> but whose face looked familiar to me mostly because she played Mary Ann Singleton in the Tales of the City<\/cite> miniseries). Oh, and Billy Bob Thornton is suitably vile in a small part as the US President, and Rowan Atkinson does his thing well as usual in a similarly small part. And Thomas Sangster (who can't be more than ten or eleven, I think) was also great. And so on—the ads and summaries for this talk about there being ten main characters, but I count at least seventeen.<\/p>\n

If you watch this in a cynical mood, you'll hate it. If you hate Christmas, you'll probably hate this movie. If you're annoyed by sappiness, you'll probably hate it. But I totally adored it.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been hearing pretty good things about Love Actually, so when Mary Anne suggested it for this afternoon (as part…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1617\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}