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.

Batman Begins (2005)

Starring: Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Katie Holmes, Liam Neeson, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer
Director: Christopher Nolan
Genre: Action, Comic, Drama, Thriller
Rating: B-

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write this for a bit, but all that I can actually think of is “na na na na na na na... BATMAN!” which I suspect you are all now doing. I’ve always had a thing for Batman; he’s probably my favourite superhero and definitely the only DC Comics hero that I like. In celebration of the release of the third and final instalment in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy I’ve decided to re-watch the earlier instalments before catching The Dark Knight Rises. Having now dived into Batman Begins I’m almost questioning just why we love this series so much (almost – I know that the answer lies in The Dark Knight). While I’ve watched this movie a few times already it didn’t take me long to realize just how unmemorable Batman Begins was. Sure it’s dark and action packed, but there’s very little about it that’s awe inspiring and nothing really sticks out in your mind once you’ve watched it.

The movie tells the origins of Batman, from Bruce Wayne’s (Bale) initial encounter with bats and the death of his parents, to him making the decision to free Gotham from its criminal underworld, the training that he undertakes in order to be able to do so, and his return to Gotham and the creation of Batman.  While training, Bruce spends time in a Bhutanese prison, where he meets Ducard (Neeson) who offers to train him as a ninja with the League of Shadows, headed by Ra’s al Ghul.  That’s right, Batman is a ninja.  While he trains under Ra and Ducard, he disagrees with their methods and eventually burns their temple down and kills Ra, before returning to Gotham.  Once back at Gotham he enlists the help of long time family butler Alfred Pennyworth (Caine) and high ranking Wayne Enterprises employee Lucius Fox (Freeman), who has been delegated into a dead end job for opposing C.E.O. William Earle (Hauer) in the boardroom.  Bruce and Alfred build Batman’s lair underneath the Wayne mansion, while Fox provides Bruce with the technology needed to make Batman awesome, thus proving that any billionaire ninja can become a crime fighting unit if he has a secret lair.  Later, Batman’s allies are joined by Sergeant James Gordon (Oldman), Gotham’s only uncorrupt police officer.  Batman’s first target is the ruler of the underworld, gangster Carmine Falcone (Wilkinson), but what he doesn’t realize is that psychopharmatologist Dr. Jonathan Crane (Murphy) has an alter-identity as the Scarecrow, and has been dumping fear inducing toxins into Gotham’s water supply.  Oh, also there’s a girl: Rachel Dawes (Holmes), assistant district attorney and Bruce’s childhood friend adds some sexual tension, but really doesn’t become relevant in any way until the end.

There is nothing remarkable about Batman Begins.  It’s not that it’s not a good movie, but in terms of a Batman movie it doesn’t really stand out.  It’s not so horrible that it just sticks in your mind like a really bad dream – that would be Batman and Robin.  It’s not so ridiculous and over the top that you can’t help but love it – that would be the Adam West Batman.  Where Batman Begins is successful is not in the movie itself but in what it succeeds in doing for the Batman franchise and the superhero genre in general.  Previous superhero movies were prone to being campy and very light; look at the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, where you really do expect Spider-Man to say “Gee, golly” as he’s fighting crime.  Batman Begins takes this genre to a whole new level of grittiness.  Gotham is a dark and ugly world, completely free of camp that has haunted other films.  This film is the push that the genre needed in order to give us the far superior superhero movies of the last few years, from The Dark Knight to The Avengers.

Beyond that, the acting is stellar; Christian Bale is awesome, although the voice that he does for, well really both Bruce Wayne and Batman, is a bit ridiculous.  I almost wished that Bale would use his natural voice, although I somehow suspect that Batman with an English accent would have been a lot easier to identify.  He wasn’t the shining star in this movie though, although Bale did succeed in making Batman stand out far more than his adversaries (evidently, the trick to doing that is to make the villains not all that cool).  I think the real stars of this movie were Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, and Morgan Freeman.  Seriously, how can a movie go wrong with these three in it?  It’s kind of messed up when you care more about Alfred the butler than you do about Batman himself, but then that’s been a problem that’s long existed within this franchise.  I love how Caine developed his own backstory before portraying Alfred; it’s never determined in the film itself, but it gives him a deeper sense of who the man is and by extension creates a deeper character.  I got a similar feeling about Oldman and Freeman; they really knew the characters that they were portraying.  It’s also important to note that the accent that Oldman used in this movie, while not his natural one, was far better than the fake accent that Bale used. Come on everyone, say it with me “I’m Batman.”