Awkward, Actually

Rating: 1/10 (15 December 2018)

-I had the misfortune of watching this with a group of friends, which made it more awkward, but I would've melted into my couch with awkwardness if I watched it alone.
-There is neither love nor the spirit of Christmas in this movie. Why it was billed as both in 2003 was simply a marketing gimmick to try to extend residuals paid to the producer into perpetuity when unsuspecting people flip it on every Christmas into 2018.
-The story is jammed with 10 sub-plots, which is too many, so they have to toggle through repeatedly, giving little screen time to character and plot development.
-Some writer thought he was clever for writing parallel stories, but forgot to intertwine them, so they became totally unrelated.
-Because the lack of screen time per sub-plot, those stories can't possibly show enough depth of interaction between two actors to get the audience to buy in that there is actually love there.
-The 'love' stories are: two porn stars who film together start to like each other, another porn star flies off to the US to have threesomes, a guy is infatuated with his best friend's wife, a middle aged married man is seduced by his secretary, a woman and man who work together have awkward tension, a writer falls in love and proposes to his housekeeper and neither of them speak the same language, a little boy has a crush on a little girl, the Prime Minister falls in love with his waitstaff, who he has had one or two very brief conversations with regarding where she lives
-Let's not overlook the drawn out sex scenes and nudity (in a "Christmas" movie??) between porn stars and this one pair who are about to have a one night stand, until her mentally I'll brother calls twice and you listen to a detailed coversation between them for two minutes, while the guy sits there on the bed feeling as awkward as I did. Said sex scenes don't even change camera angles and are from fifteen feet away, so you feel like a voyeristic creep looking through a peep hole.
-The production is horrible, so you go from quiet scenes, abruptly into ear splittingly loud musical scores.
-Someone out there who thinks I've missed the point of the irony of the title, Love Actually, which is meant to point out that people don't have story book encounters of love in real life vs how they're portrayed in movies, will be disappointed to know I've already thought of that, which is the point of this review. People in real life aren't actually this impossibly weird or awkward. So this isn't ACTUALLY how love goes.
-This is the first movie review I've ever written, because this movie was THAT odd I just had to get it out of my system.