Actually, it's not good

Rating: 1/10 (10 June 2004)

Just caught this one on DVD. It's one of the most self-indulgent, overdone movies I've ever seen. A huge, nearly formless, undisciplined mess.
There are scenes in here that, if viewed as short clips, are kind of funny and work fairly well, only to have every shred of their credibility leeched away by director Richard Curtis with some unbelievable and patently false follow-up moment.
The result is that characters move from the realm of real, identifiable people to soulless plot monkeys in the flicker of a few frames and a music cue. This is not the fault of the actors, who struggle valiantly to connect to their characters, but they are all eventually undone by Curtis' desperate preciousness.
How can Curtis be praised for his humanistic touches when he absolutely refuses to allow his characters to exist as real people?
Horrible plot thread example No. 1: Within a five-week period, a writer, (Colin Firth) is betrayed by his girlfriend and brother, goes to France to write a book and falls in love with his Portuguese house keeper with whom he's had only the barest of conversations due to a language barrier; he finishes the book, learns enough Portuguese to ask her to marry him - all while never once seeming to be in any sort of anguish or psychic pain due to the betrayal...
Wrong! False! LIE! This relationship is DOOMED! It's fraught with delusion and warning signs; and yet Curtis insists that its all cute and evidence of the wondrous mystery of love.
Horrible plot thread example No. 2: Within the same five-weeks, Liam Neeson buries his wife, is told to `move on' by a friend, and apparently seems to have done exactly that in meeting a Claudia Schiffer look-alike (played by Claudia Schiffer, how precious) at his son's Christmas pageant. So any of you out there mourning the death of a wife or husband, the message here is that if you haven't paired up again within a few scant weeks, just get over it and move on. It's been a whole month already and you are boring us all with your `grief,' which Curtis would seem to define here as self-indulgent blah-blah-blah. And for you others out there, if a friend or relative is dealing with the death of a partner, you are, by Curtis' logic, probably entitled to start mocking them within a few weeks:
`How's it going, Joe?'
`Not so good. My wife died a few weeks ago. The house seems so empty.'
Then you come back in that high-pitched mimic voice. `The house seems so empty. The house seems so empty! Well cry me a freakin' river!'
I could outline more plot threads just as horrible, but why bother? Suffice it to say that it is a sorry state of movies when I can recognize deeper and truer levels of humanity in Ron Perlman's Hellboy character than I can in any of the people here (barring the Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson story thread; they survive relatively well).
The more I think about `Love Actually,` the angrier I get. It lies and lies and lies about human nature. The fact that it is rated as high as it is on this site depresses me as deeply as the movie itself did.