Love is all Around

Chips and salsa is a breakfast food right?

Movie Review #3
LOVE ACTUALLY - Karen's pick

If you have ever liked any movie with any British actor, chances are you'll put up with 2 and 1/4 hours of Love Actually.

This movie has, I think, eight different story lines each composed of a love-agon between a love-triangle and a love-dodecahedron. It has Qui-Gon Ginn, Elizabeth Swann, Professor Snape, Mr. Darcy, that one guy from Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy and even Mr. Bean. Plus cameos by Claudia Schiffer and that guy who did the voice of Sebastian in The Twelfth Night episode of "Shakespeare: The Animated Series."

Do you know how hotdogs are made? How the butcher just saves the scraps and leavings from dozens of legitimate cuts of meat and then at the end of the day puts them all through the grinder and sells them as though pork liver and chicken fat were meant to be together? Well, it seems like that's what happened with Love Actually. They took the scraps from a dozen different movies, put them together without any care towards a common and cohesive theme, spiced it with stars galore and it sold like franks at a ballpark.

Some people try to stay away from romantic comedies. Those people are usually in loveless relationships or have been single for so long that they have to do their best to forget that Hugh Grant exists at all. Not me. I'm a big fan, and despite its ignorance of all conventions of cinema and standards of quality film, I liked Love Actually. From the "All You Need Is Love" cover in one (of eight) of the opening scenes to the cheesy conclusions of each and every unconnected storyline. It... wasn't bad.

While I would have rather watched a movie about how Hugh Grant is the prime minister of England and how he falls in love with a page, or a movie about how Liam Neeson has to help his step-son hold onto the hope of finding love in the wake of his own wife's death, or even one about how Collin Firth falls for his Portugese cleaning lady despite the fact that neither of them speaks the other's native language. Love Actually was all of these and none of these and if it hadn't pulled the wool over my eyes with a great soundtrack and Hugh Grant's devilishly good looks, I probably wouldn't have made it through.

Overall Grant, Firth, Neeson, Thompson, Knightly, Nighy, Rickman and Linney earn an A-, B+, B, B, C-, B, B+ and D, respectively.