BEFORE: Back from Christmas break, I hope your holiday (or non-holiday, or Solstice celebration, or whatever...) was enjoyable and peaceful and not as frantic and drama-filled as ours. The casino stop on Christmas Eve (which we were JUST shy of telling my family about this year...) was a wash, I lost just $6.75 on the slots after winnings were calculated, but I probably gained that back at the buffet (Hey, Mom did say she'd be busy with church, so we should find some food on the way...). Then we had to assist my parents with a difficult decision - my niece and nephew had been sick in the weeks before Christmas, and needed an extra day to recuperate. Nobody wants to tell kids they can't celebrate Christmas, but nobody wants to catch stomach flu either - my Mom was all raw emotion about it, my Dad was more logical, and we had to mediate. In the end, Christmas just sort of went into overtime, and got extended to 4 get-togethers with different family members over 3 days.
I left this film out of my annual romance chain back in February, after asking around to determine if this was best treated as a romance or a Christmas film - with the acknowledgement that it could conceivably be both. However, co-workers who had seen the film recommended it for Christmastime viewing, so while we're still within sight of the holiday, let's cross it off the list.
Now you see why I ended the Christmas animation chain with "Arthur Christmas" - Bill Nighy, voice of GrandSanta in that film, carries over (as does an actress, the voice of Santa's North Pole computer system). You do see it, right?
THE PLOT: Follows the lives of eight very different couples in dealing with their love lives in various loosely and interrelated tales all set during a frantic month before Christmas in London.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Valentine's Day" (Movie #775), "New York, I Love You" (Movie #782)
AFTER: I can sort of see where this film sort of spun out of "Four Weddings and a Funeral" - it opens with just one of each type of service - and together both films perhaps kicked off the genre of the meta-romance, jam-packed with stars and interlinked characters, pitched to the public with the philosophy that "more is more". The problem, however, is that sometimes more ISN'T more - some of these romances could/should have been complete developed movies on their own (the Prime Minister storyline, for example, could have been the U.K.'s version of "The American President") but just weren't fleshed out far enough.
As I've discovered by programming movies for February, love is a valid theme, but it's a loose theme. What kind of love? Young love, lost love, long-lasting committed love, love with temptation, love triangles, etc. There are as many types of love as there are types of people - it almost feels like this film is trying to pack as many different types in to cover all of the bases, or appeal to the largest number of people - but in trying to be everything to everybody, it risks having no point when all is said and done.
And some of the romances weren't given the time here to really even count as plots, so in essence they're more like subplots. The couple that meets on the set of a movie - are they actors, or just stand-ins? They get naked together, but is it soft-core, or hard-core? Are they candid with friends about their profession and how they met? Did they both quit the business when they found they were attracted to each other, or did they carry on with their "acting"? I've got so many questions about this, and zero answers. Do they regard their attraction as any less valid than that of other couples, because it had its genesis in stage directions? (I don't mean to belittle the off-camera romances between actors, which do take place, but you kind of see where I'm going with this, right? Love sometimes follows participation in a love scene, which seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse...)
The opening songs of the film tell us that "Love is All Around" (though this is quickly amended to remind us that in fact, it's Christmas that is all around...) and then "All You Need Is Love". Barring the Beatles' attempt to ignore the fact that people also need food and shelter, the film goes on to contradict itself by showing that relationships are a lot more complex than that song title suggests. Love is no good without opportunity, or at least proper timing, and even then, a fair amount of self-confidence and communication skills are also required to act on said love and make the connection with another human. Love is great, but by itself, it only gets you halfway there.
Since the characters here are British (mostly), this is a valid concern - they've got to overcome the stereotypical shyness and reserve associated with being British, along with an apparent ability to screw things up just by speaking their minds. NOTE: I base much of what I know about British relationships from sitcoms like "Fawlty Towers", where miscommunications always make things worse before they get better, but the situations portrayed here just seem to back all that up.
Though it's not revealed at first, all of the people in the 8 relationship situations are connected, they are part of an extended circle of friends and family. By the time of the Christmas pageant most of the connections have been revealed (though not all?) - but still, finding out at the last minute that two apparently unconnected characters are friends seemed like a bit of a stretch. It was like an afterthought, like someone realized that one plotline wasn't intertwined enough with the others, so they'd better make this guy wave knowingly at THAT guy.
By focusing on so many characters, there's also a lack of focus in the romantic theme, no coherent message about the meaning of love. So we're left to make our own decisions about who belongs with which partner, in an attempt to guess or second-guess the filmmakers' choices. Characters with more screen time definitely have an advantage, but what about the minor characters left out in the cold? Are their desires and attractions somehow less valid just because the storyline denies them? Why is a husband with a eye for one of his co-workers somehow "wrong" for pursuing the object of his desire, when a man in love with his best friend's wife is somehow "right" for pursuing his? Perhaps I'm oversimplifying both situations, but the implied judgment still seems rather arbitrary.
This film might have been at the forefront of the modern romance film, but you can still feel that it's become a bit dated, even though it's only 10 years old. Twice it looked like the storylines were going to feature a same-sex attraction, but it wasn't the case. So in the end, it didn't become as unconventional as it could have been, it just relied on many of the same old dated sterotypes about love and attraction, mixed together in a different way, and didn't break much new ground at all.
NITPICK POINT: By way of confirming who does end up with who, there's a scene at the end where every major character happens to be at the airport at the same time. But this takes place a month after Christmas, so why are they all there together? I could maybe see it if it were a week after Christmas and everyone was coming back from holiday, but as it is, it strains credulity. Unless there's some weird British holiday on January 25 that involves picking up loved ones at the airport...
NITPICK POINT #2: There it is again, a scene where a modern writer uses an old-fashioned typewriter, rather than a laptop or word processor. (How does he do a second draft, does he retype the whole damn thing?) I realize it's a plot point that the manuscript has not been saved or backed up, and is therefore at risk, but any writer not using proper technology in this millennium deserves to lose his work. Unforgivable, and not realistic.
Now, as for the actual word "actually" - its use has grown exponentially over the last few years, and thanks to reality TV and teen slang, it's now used way too much, and often incorrectly (it does NOT mean the same thing as the casual form of "really"). I found it on a list of "crutch" words a year or two ago (along with the similarly over- and misused "basically", "technically" and "literally") so I made an effort to eliminate it from my vocabulary altogether. I heard it misused no less than four times during a newscast the other night (to be fair, it was not spoken by the anchors, but by the interviewed masses). The reason it's a "crutch" word is that people use it for emphasis when they don't know what else to say - somehow it feels more powerful to say "I actually need to go to the store after work" than "I need to go to the store after work", when those two sentences have the same meaning. If you can remove the word and the sentence means the same, then you don't ACTUALLY need that word. The only use of the word I will allow is when someone is being corrected, or information is being supplied that contradicts previous information. Example: "You thought I was working for the CIA, but I'm actually working for the KGB." When I hear a teen talk and misuse "actually" three times in a minute, it's like a knife in my brain. Literally. No, not literally, not actually, but figuratively.
I think someone (actually) uses the word in each segment of this film, but (actually) I couldn't be bothered to (actually) find out if that was (actually) true, or for that matter if it was (actually) used correctly or not. Do you see what overusing the word does? It makes it (actually) meaningless. So let's all just cut it out.
Also starring Colin Firth (last heard in "A Christmas Carol"), Hugh Grant (last seen in "American Dreamz"), Liam Neeson (last seen in "Wrath of the Titans"), Emma Thompson (last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2"), Alan Rickman (ditto), Martin Freeman (last seen in "Shaun of the Dead"), Keira Knightley (last seen in "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World"), Andrew Lincoln, Chiwetel Ejiofor (last seen in "2012"), Laura Linney, Billy Bob Thornton (last seen in "Tombstone"), Martine McCutcheon, Kris Marshall, Rodrigo Santoro, with cameos from Rowan Atkinson (last seen in "Johnny English Reborn"), Claudia Schiffer, Denise Richards (last seen in "The World Is Not Enough"), Shannon Elizabeth, January Jones, Elisha Cuthbert.
RATING: 5 out of 10 office parties
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