24 movies Guaranteed to make you feel Christmassy

December 8th - Love Actually

Year : 2003 Director: Richard Curtis Starring: Hugh Grant, Bill Nighy, Keira Knightley, Liam Neeson.

Love Actually

This slice of Christmas syrup, from the pen of Richard Curtis, is fast becoming the choice of modern Christmas film. It's so rich and sweet that you will need to take indigestion tablets straight afterwards to try and cure the extreme indigestion.

Christmas time in London, England - "Love Is (supposedly) All Around". Here we see 9 loosely interrelated stories intertwined around the theme of love. The films tells the individual stories of :-

A Prime Minister falling for his p.a. but unable to express his feelings; A fading rock star who gains a christmas number one and discovers the meaning of the platonic love within friendship; a best man at a wedding who has unrequited love for the bride; a writer who is betrayed by love but then re-finds it in an unexpected place (not down the back of a sofa); a housewife betrayed by her husband and his mid-life crisis; a father coping with the loss of his wife and helping his young son who has developed his first crush on a girl at school; a woman in love but unable to pursue a relationship due to her family commitments; a man looking for uncomplicated physical love travels to the USA to see if American ladies like British accents: and finally, a couple whose job is as stand ins for bedroom scenes in movies.

Ok Richard Curtis films are all the same, stories concentrating on upper middle class beautiful people and their social network of friends, and even if there is a bittersweet element to the story you know its 95% as sweet as sugar. What is slightly different about this one is that as there are so many stories going on you have little time to form a dislike of the characters before the story moves on, and it also benefits from some unusually inspired pieces of comic writing from Curtis (who has always had the knack to produce some very funny scenes - but usually in short bursts whuich is why the format here works as well as it does). So despite its propensity to sweetness it is a really watchable movie, and due to its format I think it could have been called "All You Wanted To Know About Love But Were Afraid To Ask".

Even though I am not a big fan of Richard Curtis's work, I really hope that he decides to make many more films - anything to keep him busy so he doesn't write any more episodes of The Vicar Of Dibley.

Love Actually is placed at December 8th on our Christmas movies guide (USA edition)

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