Holiday Movie Review - Why You Need to Watch 'Love Actually' (again)

This is my new favorite holiday flick. It has a lot of things other movies just don't: Hugh Grant, British accents, octopi and lobsters in a the nativity scene, and Colin Firth.

For those of you who haven't seen it, Love Actually follows nine different love stories (only eight if you're watching it on tv, the ninth is a bit "mature") from five weeks before Christmas up until the big holiday. I like this movie because two of my favorite things in the world are Christmas and love stories - you really can't go wrong with that combination.

So of course I watched again for what I would estimate to be the zillionth time or so and fell in love all over again. What is it about Christmas that makes it seem so easy to fall in love? What keeps the story interesting is that there are so many different kinds of love, cheating husbands finding new girlfriends, men in love with married women, a washed up rockstar finding the person he most loves is his manager, the British Prime Minister falling for a member of his house staff. It's easy to get caught up in the movie and you really find yourself wishing you lived in London with all these wonderful people.

Quite possibly my favorite new scene of any movie out there is shown here. While I don't normally approve of men hitting on married women (even if she is Kierra Knightly), I appreciate the courage and the crazy measures that he goes to just to confess his crazy little crush. I fall for it every single time, I can't help but cry during this scene and again, despite my normal disapproval of cheating, the kiss that follows is wonderful. So here's to hoping that this movie has inspired me to also have maybe just a little more courage to tell someone how I feel this year.



And in the spirit of the holiday, I'll leave you with this quote from Hugh Grant which opens the film:
Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaking suspicion... love actually is all around.