Love Actually (2003)

Starring: Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Colin Firth, Laura Linney, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Keira Knightley, Martine McCutcheon, Bill Nighy, Rowan Atkinson, Lúcia Moniz, Thomas Sangster, Gregor Fisher, Andrew Lincoln, Kris Marshall, Heike Makatsch, Martin Freeman, Joanna Page

Director: Richard Curtis

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Rating: A

"Let's go get the shit kicked out of us by love"

Love is all around.  That is, very literally, the message of the 2003 film Love Actually.  The thing is, however, that this film isn't just about romantic love, although that does feature rather heavily, as it looks at the love between lovers, friends, and family.  There's even the loss of love and unrequited love and the whole shebang.  Love is all around.

The film follows a collection of people, all intricately connected to one another.  David (Grant) is the newly elected Prime Minister of Great Britain, and develops an attraction for a new junior member of his staff, Natalie (McCutcheon).  David's sister, Karen (Thompson), is having problems in her marriage - although she's not entirely aware of it yet - as her husband, Harry (Rickman) is enticed by his flirtatious new secretary Mia (Makatsch).  Also working for Harry is Sarah (Linney) and Karl (Rodrigo Santoro).  Sarah is in love with Karl and has been since she started working at the company, although neither she nor Karl have made any moves yet.  Karen's friend Daniel (Neeson) is newly widowed and unsure of how to help his stepson Sam (Sangster), who has fallen in love with classmate Joanna (Olivia Olson).  Sarah's friend Jamie (Firth) has discovered that his girlfriend is sleeping with his brother and in order to deal he retires to his French cottage, where he meets Aurélia (Moniz), who only speaks Portuguese.  Jamie and Sarah both attended the wedding of Juliet (Knightley) and Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor).  Juliet has long thought that Peter's best friend Mark (Lincoln) hated her, when in actuality he's been in love with her this whole time.  Also at the wedding is Colin (Marshall), a British man who has decided to go to America where his accent will instantly make him a hit with the ladies.  His friend Tony (Abdul Salis) doesn't believe this is the best idea.  Tony is the production assistant of a film where John (Freeman) and Judy (Page) are body doubles for a sex scene.  Overseeing it all is rock and roll legend Billy Mack (Nighy)'s attempt to have a #1 Christmas hit, a variation of The Troggs' "Love is all Around".  Billy Mack's one friend is his longtime manager Joe (Fisher).  Oh, also, there's minor character Rufus (Atkinson) who provides a couple antics and was initially supposed to be a Christmas angel before being dropped as such - I still like to think of him as one.

This is the kind of film that movies like New Years Eve, Valentine's Day, and What to Expect When You're Expecting all try to be.  Centred around one common theme it tells the story of a bunch of different people who are all connected but at the same time unrelated.  There's the perfect amount of characters here, with the story focusing heavily on some and not so heavily on others.  There are no real twists, you can see the endings that end up happening coming for miles, but it's not really a movie that needs twists.  Each of the storylines is absolutely awesome and each of the characters is great.  Even John and Judy, who get the briefest of scenes, have the feel of being these thoroughly developed characters.  You know that they exist outside of the sex acts that they're miming.

The other thing that I really like about the film is that while you can see the endings coming, some of them aren't necessarily the ones that you want to see happen.  I always feel a but guilty as I watch the Mark/Juliet/Peter triangle, because no matter how much I know Juliet and Peter are in love and even though I think Peter's a great guy, I want Juliet to leave him and hook up with Mark.  At the same time, I want Harry to smarten up and be with his wife.  I don't care so much about some plots - like the Colin one, which I think was just for laughs, or the Sam one, which I think is a bit cliched - but Love Actually is more than just the sum of its parts.  It's just sheer awesomeness.

In addition to being a story about love, this is also a comedy, to which it does so rather nicely.  The amount of comedy is different in each plot, and to an extent so is the style, but somehow it works here.  Even with their differences, they all seem to work well together, they mesh like a really good collage - like a puzzle depicting a picture of Mickey made out of a bunch of smaller images of scenes from Disney movies.  The one-liners keep on coming in this one, as do the little scenes that are just hilarious.  If you haven't seen this movie yet, I recommend you at least look up the image of Hugh Grant dancing to "Jump (For My Love" by The pointer Sisters.

Total Recall (2012)

Starring: Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, Bryan Cranston, Jon Cho, Bill Nighy

Director: Len Wiseman

Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

Rating: B-

I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but I actually really enjoyed this movie.  The acting isn't superb, the plot is weak at points, it's not really moving on an emotional level or funny or anything.  At its core, Total Recall is a mindless action flick set in a dystopian future.  It isn't meant to have a great plot or great acting or connect on an emotional level (the lack of funny, however, is a bit of a disappointment).  It's supposed to have awesome chase scenes, mind blowing special effects, and cool gun fights.  Total Recall has all of this and more - in addition to it all, it also has this awesome futuristic world.  Sure the science is sketchy, but damnit, it's science fiction.  The science doesn't have to be right, it's fiction.

Total Recall follows factory worker Douglas Quaid (Farrell) as he begins to realize that his life is not exactly what it seems.  After a series of nightmares in which he is a spy of some sorts running from the police, Quaid decides to visit Rekall, a company that implants memories into its clients.  You can go anywhere, do anything, be anything.  While he's at Rekall, however, things go horribly wrong and before he's even put under it's revealed that Quaid is in fact a spy, who worked for a resistance movement.  From here his life goes to shit as his wife, Lori (Beckinsale), reveals that she isn't really his wife but rather a cop who's been assigned to watch him.  Quaid must flee from her, and by extension the entire paramilitary police force of both the United Federation of Britain (UFB) and the Colony (otherwise known as Australia), the only two habitual land masses on the planet.  Oh, and in it all, the girl from his dreams, Melina (Biel), appears.

The plot and characters in Total Recall are somewhat weak.  There isn't really the emotional connection between them and the viewer that the original film had.  I will give the film a lot of credit, however, in that it doesn't just totally rip off the original movie; while it follows the same basic plot and much of the general storyline, it also goes on a number of different directions.  This Total Recall is a lot more political than its predecessor, although never in a really original way.  It's very much anti-militaristic totalitarian and rather pro-workers, which is pretty much what you expect of a movie like this.  There's a lot of development towards this aspect of the plot, just not the characters themselves - I actually don't think I would have known the name of Biel's character if not for Wikipedia (and the fact that it's the same name as used in the 1990 version).

That being said, though, the movie's fun.  The special effects are cool, the chase scenes are hot. Every action movie is pretty much required to have a chase scene at one point or another, and in Total Recall it does so with hover cars.  Hover car chase scenes are the best.  The science is a bit wonky, but who cares - they go through the center of the earth.  Going through the center of the earth is always awesome.  The thing with the original Total Recall is that, while it's got a good plot and is emotionally charged the futuristic elements are rather lame and dated.  It's something that's a bit characteristic of older science fiction movies, which makes them a bit annoying to watch in the present day.  In this Total Recall, however, everything is slick and smooth and very much along the lines of what the future would look like if current trends continue.  I'm sure in another twenty years I'll be saying that the futuristic technology used in this Total Recall is rather old, dated, and lame when they remake the movie again, but for now it looked damn awesome.

I think, though, that my favourite part of this movie was the way that it differed from the original film while also paying tribute to it.  There's no Mars, but they mention it.  There's no huge brothel, but there's still a three breasted prostitute (no midget prostitute, however, sorry).  There's a fat woman who's travelling to the UFB for two weeks.  There are more moments like this, and to be honest every time they happened I smiled.  I enjoyed them.  Total Recall knew it was a remake of an older classic and assumes that you've seen the original.  It doesn't try to be some grand, fantastic movie.  It's a mindless action flick, and it does mindless action damn well.