“The Remake of Love. Actually.”
Like every topic in our current partisan world, there is no middle ground about how people feel about Love Actually – they love it or they hate it:
It’s funny / it’s misogynistic!
It’s clever / it’s contrived!
It’s insightful / it’s out-of-date!
Let’s agree that this movie is both good AND bad and that, due to its age, it probably does need an update. In order to remake this model of old-fashioned romantic comedy into a more current dark comedy model, the storylines about love, actually, might read like this:
The Prime Minister resigns in disgrace because he had sex with Natalie, a government employee. Natalie feels used, and the next time the U.S. President is in London, she offers to spend the night with him in exchange for a ride on Air Force One.
Colin Firth tracks down his housekeeper Aurelia who now looks like her pudgy sister because she could’t stop eating after Firth left her. He still proposes marriage but his inept Portuguese has him calling her a cow and she throws him out of the restaurant.
Joanna, the love of young Sammy’s life, kisses him goodbye in the airport and leaves for America where she records a hit album with her mother, creates a band and goes on tour. Though she ghosts him, he continues playing drums in hopes of one day joining her band.
Colin Frissell follows his dream of going to Wisconsin to have sex with American women. He ends up in a bar where he gets drunk, gets mocked for his accent, and gets his backpack full of condoms stolen.
Laura Linney turns her phone off so she can spend an uninterrupted night fucking Karl, only to discover the next morning that her brother tried to commit suicide because she didn’t answer his calls.
After standing in the doorway reading the cards on which her husband’s best friend declares his undying love for her, Kiera Knightly grabs a jacket and tells her husband that she is going out to sing Christmas carols. She then leaves her husband for his best friend.
Aging rock star Bill Nighy consummates his love affair with his manager after which they record a remake of yet another tired Christmas song which they ingloriously re-title “The Twelve Gays of Christmas”. This one does not win Christmas Song of the Year.
Emma Thompson leaves her adulterous husband Alan Reitman for her best friend Liam Neeson. Together they raise their three kids as a blended family until Neeson has an affair with Claudia Shiffer. Left alone with three kids and an outrageous mortgage, Emma straightens the sheets on their bed while poignantly re-listening to Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now.
And, finally, the couple who met on a movie set as movie-star stand- ins pretending to have sex still fall in love and still live happily ever after – because they are just too damn cute to have anything else happen to them.
Rick Doehring
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