Love Actually is All Around (2003)

I took a note from the pages of a favorite podcast of mine today and decided to spend my Valentine's Day watching a movie all about love. The movie I choose is Love Actually, but it turns out it's actually a story about love at Christmas time, not Valentine's Day. But I think it still was a good pick, cause love can work for any holiday. This movie has the biggest big name cast I think I've ever seen, and recently I've been saying that a lot, but I could probably fill a whole paragraph just with well over a dozen famous names and still not get them all. Just look at that movie poster there, that's only a fraction of them all! Hit the jump to see if this love filled tale could warm my cold heart on this Valentine's Day.


With the massive cast, comes a massive interwoven series of stories involving 10 or more couples that all seem to know each other in that weird 6 degrees of separation sort of way. Each story is about love, and not all of them are the same kind of love. There's new love, familial love, love for your kids, love between friends, unrequited love and love that's... well... that's complicated. In fact this whole movie is fairly complex if you really want to figure out all the overlaps, but that's not what's important. What's important is to see that love comes in all shapes and sizes and it's not always where you expect to find it.

This was a great movie. There were plenty of good emotionally moving scenes, unfortunately I seem to have become a little cold hearted lately. I could tell that I should be feeling things during a lot of these scenes, but to be completely honest only a few of them actually got to me, and even then it was only in a small way. I certainly appreciated all of the stories, and I liked all of the characters. I suppose I'll just have to learn to live with my heart of stone for now.

My favorite of all the short stories was this one with Colin Firth

Of all the stories told in the movie, I'd like to point out that my favorite was the one surrounding Colin Firth's character. He has a great little love that develops between him and a woman, neither of which understands the other. She only speaks Portuguese, and he only speaks English, and yet they seem to be of the same mind. A very sweet story.

The only two things I had with the film was the abundance of nudity, and the abundance of comedy. This sounds strange, I know. Let me just explain. For a movie so focused on love and romance, or so I thought, it was almost always interrupted and broken up by moments of unnecessary and awkward nudity, and by sudden jokes and moments of comedy. Now let me be clear, the only reason why the comedy was so distracting is probably because I thought it was so funny. There's a lot of truly funny moments in here. It's just too bad the placing of some of the jokes sometimes felt to me to be in the wrong moments.

Nevertheless, I always found myself entertained and I enjoyed the whole movie and all of the dozen or more stories that it contained. It's a miracle it all works so well with so many characters and relationships going on all over the place. This is a great movie and everyone should definitely seek it out. But, maybe save it for Christmas.