The Definition of Pap

Rating: 1/10 (14 August 2004)

This movie represents everything I despise about modern film, and many things I despise about the modern world. What the creators would have us believe is that "love actually" is a series of short, shallow vignettes that reveal how hopelessly obsessed with sex and vulgarity we as a culture have become. "All you need is love," the closing refrain begins, and I heartily agree. Try finding it in this film, and you'll be miserably disappointed to the degree you'll begin to question whether or not true love, the love of Shakespearean sonnets and classic tragedies, even exists at all.
So bleak is this film's representation of human existence that at times I wondered whether or not the film was made as an intentional, existential mockery of our lives. Alas, I don't think it was. This leads me to the mortifying conclusion that all those who produced the film, and those who enjoyed it, are fixated with pitifully infantile definitions of human relationships. It's pap, actually. Unadulterated pap.