The Impossible Movie

Rating: 10/10 (10 May 2014)

The perfect movie is not a huge, earth-swaddling epic. It is a simple thing, a small story, one that fits in a 1 1/2 to 2-hour span. "Casablanca" is the greatest, a perfectly polished little gem, the story of two former lovers who bump into each other again in the shadow of World War II. "The problems of two people doesn't matter a hill of beans..." But they make amazing movies. More is not better in movies. More is simply more.
In other words, to try to interweave more than a couple of stories together in one movie is idiotic.
Let's see. There's the new Prime Minister who gets a crush on a cute girl who works in 10 Downing Street. There's his sister and her husband, a respectable middle-aged couple with fairly typical behavior- problem kids, and a wicked secretary waiting in the wings to try and destroy it all. There is the writer whose lover jilts him with his brother, who goes to Portugal to write his next novel and becomes enchanted with his housekeeper. There's the cute couple who meet on the job--their stand-ins for a porn movie. There's the man whose wife has died recently and left him with a stepson going through his first crush. There's the aging rock star with the intoxicated leer who is looking for lasting love. There's the lovely young woman with the mentally ill brother. How many is that so far? That's not all the stories.
But not only do they work together in one movie, THEY WORK TOGETHER BRILLIANTLY!
My standing joke is somebody has to have sold his/her soul to the devil. In this case, it's writer/director Richard Curtis, who also gave us "Mr. Bean", "Notting Hill", and "Bridget Jones' Diary", to name a few.
If I haven't convinced you, maybe this will: Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Liam Neeson, Martin Freeman (as the male porn movie stand-in!), Laura Linney, and (in a support role!) Keira Knightley.
What more do you need?
If you haven't seen it, see it. Prepare to fall in love with love again. All kinds of love.