Love Actually

New DVD About To Arrive

Love Actually is the latest movie by the team that made Notting Hill, Four Weddings And A Funeral and Bridget Jones's Diary (http://www.loveactually.com and clips at moviefone.com. The British trailer, quite different, is at http://uip.co.uk/films/love_actually/).

The writer / director does a good job of portraying the New Britain that people want to live in. Instead of the BBC productions which look on class-ridden country houses as heaven and the period from 1870 to 1920 as the Golden Era, this has multi-racial marriages, friendships across classes, pop music, trendy neighborhoods, and good-looking apartments, houses, clothes and gadgets. The British BoBo. The heroes and heroines in these movies always live a comfortable London life.

Plus, the Sixties are back. Love is in the air, every time you look around.

POSTSCRIPT: Most of the message above came from a post to the TradArch list. It turned out that some people are quite turned off by Britain's most popular screenwriter.

On 11/23/03 7:04 AM, "Robert Adam" wrote:

Following John M's interesting postings on Love Actually, I thought that the following UK reviews of the film might be a fascinating lesson in the transatlantic divide.

The first extracts are from the Spectator, a weekly right wing political and general affairs magazine which has a small readership but also very high quality contributions. The film reviews are not political but would represent a typical right-of-centre educated view.

"Love Actually is crap actually... One accepts the codes and conventions of Curtisland: the slightly snobbish classlessness, the compression of London into one hip village - here, everyone has a child, sibling, nephew or cousin at the same Wandsworth school.... This film works quite hard to be likable, it’s actually quite repellent."

The second extract is from today's Sunday Times. This is most widely read quality Sunday paper in the UK - by a long way. It is neither left nor right but represents a sort of general middle-class educated view. It is also a good example of English journalism on a cultural issue in a serious paper.

"It's like being assaulted by a gang of singing cherubs wielding sticks of candy-floss; it's like drowning in treacle and being rescued by a puppy that licks your face; it's like having your brain bombarded with Valentine-card clichés... His feelgood [Christmas] fairy tale makes Charles Dickens seem like a dirty realist.... Curtis's idea of Christmas has no connection to reality. Instead of the Queens' speech, family dinner and nervous breakdowns, we get the season to open your heart, drop your trousers and shag whomever you fancy. It's Christmas as an office party piss-up. (While we're on the subject of realism, how come broken-hearted Firth goes to France and everyone speaks Portuguese?) ... The story involving Sam and his secret love for a 10-year-old schoolgirl reaches a dramatic climax when Curtis has the boy running through an airport, chased by security guards, so he can tell her of his love before she leaves for America. Violins swell, and so does your nausea... If an American director did this, English audiences would respond with horror and hilarity. But alas, this is a Richard Curtis film, so it's OK.... The English have always assumed that when it comes to matters of taste in popular music and film, they are a touch superior to the Americans. Sentimentality, schmaltz and mandatory happy endings are something associated with Hollywood pap, but the gee-whiz optimism and fake feel good fantasy of American movies are hard to swallow if you are English and raised on irony and self-deprecation. Now though, Curtis, England's most successful screenwriter, has shown that when it comes to Hollywood pap, the English can teach Hollywood a treacle trick or two."

How was it reviewed in the US other than by John M? I haven't seen it yet, so these extracts are social comments on the different cultural outlooks of different English-speaking cultures, not my opinion of the film.

On 11/23/03 10:23 AM, "John Massengale" wrote:

I saw Hugh Grant on Inside the Actor's Studio on Bravo yesterday. At one point he discussed the fact that Curtis's movies (Four Weddings and a. Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones's Diary and Love Actually) all get much better reviews in America than Britain (and have taken in a billion dollars at the box office).

I did like Love Actually, although I never meant to imply it’s Shakespeare. I said it was interesting that it presents a popular view of British society that is very different than the one Americans are used to from PBS: a. "golden age" between 1860 and 1920 with strong class distinctions and a population that racially is virtually homogenous.

In Curtis's movies, which are a cross between the Britain he lives in and the Britain he would like to live in, most of the characters are middle-class, upper-middle class and well-educated, but a significant number are working class and not white. And, significantly, this goes without comment, reflecting a new image of Britain.

This is what the conservative Spectator calls "Curtisland: the slightly snobbish classlessness, the compression of London into one hip village…." One SUSPECTS that the author didn't like Princess Diana much either, and was appalled that in the public ceremonies surrounding her funeral the public made it clear that they preferred her compassion and public warmth to the traditional stiff upper lip. I'm sure that Robert remembers that after Diana’s death the Queen was forced to make a public statement quite out of character for her. I think I remember the BBC commentators saying the pronouncement was unprecedented for the British monarchy.

Thanks to DVDs, in the last two months my wife and I have watched several movies showing English society and life in London at different times. In chronological order, these were Room With A View, The Hours, Cambridge Spies, 84 Charing Cross Road, Darling and There’s A Girl In My Soup – the last two showing Swinging London.

There’s no question which view I found most appealing: today’s London, including Curtisland. The London of Darling and There’s A Girl In My Soup, which I expected to like, was very unappealing.

Why "England's most successful screenwriter," according to the Sunday Times, gets a bad review from the same paper is a question about which I don't know enough of the particulars to answer. Nor do I know how the film is doing at the English box office. I do know that I've long found Murdoch's Sunday Times somewhat smarmy, as opposed to his daily Times, which I like quite a bit. Many Americans may not know that the two papers have common ownership but separate staffs and identities. Although I don't like its politics, I find the Sunday Telegraph a more appealing read.

And I know that the London "glitterati" are quite cynical in general. Their level of personal criticism, gossip, innuendo and slander is usually very unattractive to Americans. The latest thing in the London papers, for example, are very well-paid restaurant critics who trash restaurants, often with little or no regard for the food. The most important thing is that the "right people," i.e. their glitterati friends, are going there. We see some of this here with Tina Brown, whose husband is the former editor of the Sunday Times, but who was fired from a New York tabloid because he was considered too venomous. And the New York tabloids are probably the most venomous of all the American papers. Curtis's movie is not for cynics. Love Actually is a British Capra film, although not as good as the best Capra. It's A Wonderful Life was badly. reviewed here when it first came out. Love Actually has had good reviews here, on the whole.

This is getting rather far away from TradArch. But tradition does evolve, as Robert often points out, and Love Actually does seem to represent an evolution in British tradition, even if not everyone agrees on what that is or if it’s a good thing. It's the nature of evolution that not everyone would agree.