Love Actually
Love is...all around us, the best tonic ever, the real reason I get up in the morning.
I’m not a fan of Christmas for all of the usual humdrum reasons.
I don’t see or feel the need to join in the Black Friday, Super Saturday, Sacrilegious Sunday and Cyber Monday consumerism. Unlike George W. Bush, I don’t think it’s my patriotic duty to wantonly or profligately draw down my bank account just to keep the country solvent. I don’t desire to chop down a tree, rearrange the furniture, decorate said tree with objects for the cat (or small child) to destroy and have to worry about a parched interloping conifer catching fire when I’m out for a drink.
I keep my Christmas simple.
I listen to Christmas music compilations and watch any number of holiday movies but otherwise maintain my usual, year-round congenial self to anyone I meet. I don’t need a holiday to extend well wishes to my fellow traveler, or be cheerful, helpful or generous. I’ll do those things without being cajoled into merriment.
I love holiday music.
I gladly hum Christmas tunes throughout the year. I’ll listen to Christmas compositions during any season. My wife and I watched a Christmas movie the other night where one of the characters held a Carol-oke party on the 25th of December for those without families with which to gather. What a brilliant idea! Karaoke with Yuletide carols. After all, we can all muddle along singing a Christmas tune.
We might even recall a majority of the verses and words.
Speaking of singing, or caroling, here is ONE of my favorite scenes from my favorite Christmas movie:
Yep. I prefer Love, Actually over It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, Elf and Miracle on 34th Street (though I will confess to not having seen Miracle. I plan on rectifying that this holiday season as my wife and I plan on watching numerous movies with glad tidings and holiday cheer.)
So, this is now a column on a Christmas Grinch’s not-necessarily-favorite, but suggested Christmas celluloid tales.
There is a debate over whether Diehard qualifies as a Christmas movie. Enough of a debate to have spawned a delightful Christmas movie titled Love Hard. It’s about a couple who “meet cute” and the boy favors Love, Actually, while the girl favors Diehard.
It’s also a modern-day warning about online match-making.
If you were a watcher and fan of Zooey’s Extraordinary Playlist, you should love and appreciate Zooey’s Extraordinary Christmas. My wife — a fan of the television series — tells me the characters, as well as the actress who plays Zooey, actually sing the songs only Zooey can hear and imagine in her very imaginative brain. There’s a twist with her boyfriend, Max, in the Christmas movie and it all makes for a satisfying, heartfelt ending.
It’s not a musical but there’s gonna be some singing.
If you think Die Hard is an odd choice for a Christmas movie, I am equally nonplussed to learn Shazam! lands in IMDb’s top 100 Christmas movie list. I checked it out earlier this year knowing nothing about it’s holiday bonafides. I’d been meaning to see it since it came out (in 2019) and, when I stumbled across it while winnowing through more video content than a dozen Library of Congresses, I decided to pop some pop corn and settle into the couch.
It’s set during the Christmas holidays, one of the characters is a kid with crutches and the hero — ultimately — learns to fly (like Rudolph and the rest of the reindeer) and he wears a red costume. Makes it a Christmas movie, right?
Well, it should make it just as much of a Christmas movie as Die Hard. I haven’t seen Die Hard in some time, but I’ll bet Shazam! has more chuckles and displays solely comic book-like violence.
I’m not recommending this next movie unless you’re a resident of Leavenworth, you spend every holiday in the town the Chamber has rebranded as “ChristmasTown” or you have relatives who call it home and might have wound up cast in the movie. It’s cheesy, the dialogue is limp and the plot line is older than the hills. Or identical to ever other Hallmark or Lifetime movie you have ever seen. In fact, the Leavenworth Chamber of Commerce streamed it last Saturday night at the community Festhalle. It’s cleverly titled Cloudy With a Chance of Christmas. The female lead is a weather caster for a (Seattle) local television station. Now does the title make sense?
As a side note - and remember I did NOT recommend this movie - my neighbor who plays the alpenhorn (most mornings from the balcony of a local hotel) makes a brief cameo three quarters through the movie. He even wears lederhosen and can carry a tune.
Pieces of April — with Katie Holmes as April — is not a Christmas movie, but it is a holiday movie and comes with a stellar cast: Patricia Clarkson, Oliver Platt, Sean Hayes and a couple of other actors you will recognize. It’s sentimental and funny. Poignant and clever.
It’s about family and holidays. In my mind, the quintessential “Christmas” movie.
Just take my word for it. Don’t watch the trailer.
My most watched, most favorite Christmas film, Love Actually, celebrates its 20th anniversary. I am aware of this because I accidentally stumbled across Diane Sawyer’s hour special where she interviews the director, Richard Curtis, and many members of a very large cast. (It’s called The Laughter & Secrets of ‘Love, Actually’: 20 Years Later and can be found on Hulu.) The cast includes Hugh Grant, Laura Linney, Andrew Lincoln, Keira Knightley, Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson…and those are just the ones I can recall from memory.
I can’t dredge up whether I saw it when it first came out but I have made it a holiday movie staple every year since I first saw it. Love Actually is a collection of stories cleverly interwoven — some of them merging, some of them standing alone. Some of them incredibly uplifting, some of them hard to swallow. An aging rock star trying to make a comeback with a blatant ripoff of a holiday tune, while simultaneously trying to deny his own personal love story, lends a humorous backdrop to all of the other tales.
The movie ends with the usual credits and then with dozens of scenes from Heathrow Airport in England. The scenes are of actual travelers uniting with loved ones after absences of varying lengths. The scenes keep multiplying until the entire screen is filled with hundreds of tiny screenshots depicting just how much “love is all around us.”
Of course, these days, we aren’t allowed to greet loved ones as they enter the airport’s concourse. That has removed a very large ‘canvas’ from society where public displays of diverse happiness and affection are permissible.
In the grand scheme of things, I wouldn’t think that to be a ‘small thing’.
If you are looking for some calming background “Christmas” sounds, I highly recommend Love Actually’s musical score. Soothing. Evocative.
We can thank AAR, Nancy Enz Lill, for this delightfully well written article about ‘how dogs explore the world through smell’.
Science writers have tried many ways to put into context how this compares to our own ability for smell. Dog expert and author Alexandra Horowitz argues it is like us being able to detect a teaspoon of sugar in two Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Enjoy.
You've convinced me. I'm as much a curmudgeon as yourself but I will now watch, with open heart, some warm and fuzzy Christmas movies.