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.

Brave (2012)

Starring: Kelly Macdonald, Julie Walters, Billy Connolly, Emma Thompson, Kevin McKidd, Craig Ferguson, Robbie Coltrane, John Ratzenberger

Director: Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, Steve Purcell

Genre: Animation, Action, Adventure
Rating: B

The latest film from Pixar, Brave enters into the 10th Scottish highlands and follows Princess Merida (Macdonald) of Clan DunBroch.  The film opens with a bit of an introduction to the background of the story; we see a young Merida being given her first bow from her father, King Fegus (Connolly), who then defends his family from the bear Mor'du and loses his left leg.  Following this introduction the film rushes forward to when Queen Elinor (Thompson) announces that Merida is to be betrothed  to the eldest son of one of the other three clan leaders; Dingwall (Coltrane), Macintosh (Ferguson), or MacGuffin (McKidd).  Merida resists the betrotahl, however, causing her kingdom to be plunged into chaos when she (first) refuses to marry any of the eldest sons, resulting in the clans going to war against each other.  Then she runs off and meets a witch (Walters), who provides her with a spell to change her mother's nature - which then changes her mother into a bear. It's up to Merida to save both her kingdom and mother before it's too late.

There were a lot of elements of this film that I really enjoyed.  The basic plot is a bit tried and true, especially for a children's movie, but it is cute.  There are points where you know what's going to happen next and points when if you've been paying attention you can figure it out rather easily.  That actually might be my biggest problem with this film; the foreshadowing is very heavy handed, it's hard to miss the signs for what's about to come.  Despite that, however, the moments between Merida and her family are touching and alternatively cute, funny, and heartwarming - and at times a combination of the three.  The biggest saviour for the film in general is the fact that it's a bunch of people speaking with Scottish accents.  I cannot stress this enough: if it has Scottish accents, I will watch it, and I will probably enjoy it thoroughly.  My actual favourite part of the film in general was the music.  Composer Patrick Doyle really looked at traditional native Scottish music and mixed it rather nicely with a bit of a more contemporary sound.  The music itself is rather heart wrenching and moving.  Doyle went so far as to utilize Scottish reels, jigs, and strathspeys, to create a drinking song, and to record an unaccompanied Gaelic psalm. If you enjoyed some of the music in it, you should check out Scottish Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis, who sings on the soundtrack.

Beyond the music, however, I really liked the attention that the animators and creators paid to the details.  The highlands are elegantly crafted in this world, and as we see Merida travelling through it I felt as though I had a sense of just where she was and how she got there.  I loved the different ruins that they show and the standing stones that Merida discovers.  I even love how they paid such close attention that the different clans wore different tartans - the presence of tartan in itself is rather anachronistic as it didn't come into prominence in Scotland until the 16th century and clan tartans didn't exist until the 19th century, but I still love that they took something that is so clearly associated with Scottish culture and tried to do it right.  I even loved how one of the basic themes of the movie was the importance of learning your history, but I'm special that way.

Men in Black 3 (2012)

Stars: Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Jemaine Clement, Emma Thompson, Michael Stuhbarg
Director: Barry Sonnenfeld
Genre: Action, Comedy, Sci-Fi
Rating: B-

This was another one of those films that surprised me.  I went in with really low expectations – I didn’t even want to see it (I made a hard fight to see Dark Shadows instead, but we ended up arriving at the theatre after it had started).  Yet, despite the fact that I didn’t really want to see it and had very low expectations for it, I was pleasantly surprised by Men in Black 3, although perhaps this was in part the result of my low expectations.

At the start of the film Agents K (Jones) and L (Smith) have been working together for fourteen years (paying no attention to the fact that in the five year gap between MIB and MIB2 K was retired and had no memories of the MIB), although they still have secrets between them.  J continually nags at K to reveal more of his past to him, with K very much ignoring him in a manner that you would very much expect of Tommy Lee Jones.  That all changes when alien Boris the Animal (Clement) travels back in time and kills K on July 16, 1969.  It is up to J to travel back in time and work with a young K (Brolin) and alien Griffin (Stuhbarg), who sees all possible futures, in order to ensure that the future that happens is the one that J knows.

Let’s start with the easy stuff and work our way to the more complicated bits.  The comedy in MIB3 was great.  Jones and Brolin both make a good straight man to Smith’s funny man.  Thompson was hilarious, proving yet again that you cannot go wrong casting her in a movie (seriously, has she been in any bad movies? Any?).  I was a bit disappointed that some of the comic relief aliens from the earlier films played a much smaller role in this one, and that Frank the pug wasn’t shown at all.  The casting in general, though, was great.  As already mentioned, Emma Thompson was amazing.  Brolin really surprised me as well, the way in which he played a younger version of Jones was incredible.  They even sounded alike; at one point I wondered if Jones had done a voice over for Brolin’s part.  The character of Griffin was absolutely adorable and nicely done.

Now, on to the big stuff: The time travel aspect of the film was handled really well, although there were a few plot holes, especially in regards to just how J is recruited in the first place of K died in 1969.  I also really disliked how little reference they made to the fact that Smith is black and travelling to 1969.  There are a couple comments about it, but for the most part the problems that he’d face are ignored.  Likewise, Mike Colter is cast as a colonel working at NASA when there is no way in hell that would have happened in 1969.  It’s almost as if the film wanted to, pardon the expression, white wash American history while pretending to pay lip service to it.  The one really big problem with this film is just how much it ignores story established in MIB2.  While the second film in the series really wasn’t good, it almost seems like the directors and producers decided to ignore its existence (which is a bit ridiculous, given as it’s the same people who did the first two films).  Oh, on a concluding note, as awesome as Thompson was, I did have to question the decision to cast her as a romantic interest of sorts, and long time colleague of Jones.  Not only is there a bit of an age difference between the two (15 years), but he looks a fair bit older than he is and she looks a bit younger than she is, making it a bit weird.  The romantic interest of sorts is one thing, the long term colleague (Thompson's character, Agent O, is portrayed in 1969), another.