jennings rampage

Here’s a shock, I hated a movie.

December 14th, 2003 | by Scott Jennings |

On an Internet message board I frequent, many people seemed to enjoy the film Love Actually. Since I happen to be a sucker for a good romantic comedy, I went in willingly. After the film, this is what I posted to the Internet message board I frequent:

I’ve been avoiding this thread because I didn’t see the film until tonight, and I have to say: it is the worst film ever committed to celluloid. It’s God-awful. I honestly can’t believe you people.

Look: I know I have no soul. I know I hate Christmas and I hate the British. I know how bitter I am. None of that changes the facts:

1. The film is two hours and seven minutes of cliches. Wall-to-fucking-wall. By cleverly jamming the entire outline of every Hollywood love story into the film and neglecting to, you know, develop any characters or anything more than superficially recognizable, the emotions are artificially generated by ridiculous cues — be it music or camera angle or the fact that the skanky secretary was ugly so we knew she was evil. It depends 100% on cinematography, 0% on storytelling.

2. I’d be down for a cleverly intertwined look at different phases of different kinds of love, that’d be cool. But to steal a phrase, what is the writer and director’s fucking problem with reality? Were you listening to this dialogue? Could you believe that nine hack Hollywood movies were rolled into one so carelessly? Was I to believe that the Portugese hottie fell in love with the jilted British guy for no reason, or that the Prime Minister fell for the chubby girl for no reason, or that nothing that happened in the film seemed to have a REASON? Again, it’s back to the fact that the action of the film is entirely dependent on a skeleton of a cliche of a plot, instead of characters I can learn about and have an emotional reaction to.

3. I hadn’t been so sure that I was watching a dream sequence and been wrong since the third act of Adaptation. The British guy going to America storyline gave me nothing. Unbelievably horrible.

4. The top of the film sets us up for the perverse notion that all this love we’re seeing is completely generic and interchangable — sure, scenes of reunions and farewells and things like that tug at the strings, but the philosophy seemed to be all more more more; rather than give us substance, we get a glut of vapid undeveloped shells, and hopefully one of the shells is the one we can crawl into perfectly, and so we’ve connected with the film and the work is done. What a brutal approach to telling a story.

This was a meta romantic comedy, completely dependent upon the pacing and conventions of an actual story, but completely devoid of the substance. We laugh because we’re supposed to, we cry because the triggers are pulled, our heart is warmed because familiar things we like happen. The sets were eerie in their cleanness, the “dodgy part of town” looked like the Upper East Side, every computer monitor was an LCD panel, everything was brightly lit and simple.

I suppose in the end, the movie felt like a plea for life to be more brightly lit and simple. It just didn’t resonate with me at all.

Katy Jack, I’m very sorry.