one of the worst movies I've ever seen

Rating: 1/10 (19 February 2010)

This was one movie I watched with lots of expectations thinking that a British romcom might be much better than a Hollywood one and had to sit through endless hours of watching every cliché unroll in the most excruciating manner.
Thinking back, what annoys me about the movie are several things. 1)what stupid plot lines! The Brit P.M, for instance has only three household staff to meet, doesn't seem to care anything about diplomacy in handling international relations and seems to have more time on his hands than even a Minister has and should have.To top it all, the speech he gave on the merits of Britain boasting of Shakespeare to Harry Potter was so stupid that at first i thought he was having a dream.The little boy's love story was so annoying i don't even want to go into it. And don't get me started on the Brit who went to America and got all the American girls with his cute Brit accent. when that story started,stupid me, i thought "oh this jerk is going to come back and fall in love with one of the Brit girls he so despises". That would have been predictable, but not this stupid n pointless. The emma thompson- rickman plot had some promise, but such a waste of good actors. Adultery gets the"oh, just get on with it!" treatment that the death of the wife in the other plot gets.
2) why do when lovers meet, u need the whole world as the audience? when the p.m kisses the maid (conveniently on the stage), he has an audience to watch. so does Colin Firth's character when he proposes with the whole town watching anxiously and needing the "Yes" to be translated as well. How romantic! And the little boy has to confess his love in a crowded airport. How cute! Grrr!
3)What was the need of even attempting to bring these stories together? There was no meeting point. Emma Thompson conveniently turns out to be Grant's sister, one about whom he doesn't seem to bother that much, going by the movie. In fact, in the last scene when Firth comes back with his girlfriend, and Keira Knightley, Thompson n all meet him, i was thinking, "Do they know each other?" and only then did the very convenient wedding scene (which could have done with a lot of editing) come to my mind.I know I am repeating the word convenient many times, but that was what it was, everything was so convenient and so clichéd.
After watching the movie, i thought Curtis had unconsciously, in a sort of postmodern twist, given away the way the movie was going to be, thru that "crappy" Christmas song where the word "love" is replaced with "Christmas". Here was a movie, trying to talk about love at Christmas and turned out to be neither here nor there and was as the lines went, replacing the word "care" suggested by something so beautiful and varied as love by one stupid "show" of love.