Love, Actually, a terrible film I endured fourteen years ago. Hugh Grant plays a bumbling Prime Minister, a bachelor, of course, spends more time thinking about dropping his pants with his secretary than he does about bombing Yugoslavia.
The Walking Dead cop, Rick, plays a romantic in love with somebody. The one good scene, a montage, has Rick in the gray London air on the street seeking his love, Dido's heartbreaking "Here With Me" on the audio track.
Liam Neeson, having lost his life to Darth Maul, plays a single dad in the cutest and most vomitous scenes in the film, as his little kid, who looks like a Dungeons and Dragons ginger goblin, practices his drums to impress a girl. A montage includes the boy doing this, a sign hung on his bedroom door about how he's practicing. Liam, wanting a gun in his hand and for his son to be "taken," so he can exit this maudlin anti-masterpiece, yearns to smash London instead of playing Cupid to his son's ploy at childhood romance.
An English bloke gets on a wrong flight and ends up in "Milwaukee." I put the name of the city in quotation marks due to director Richard Curtis's ill-informed idea of what Milwaukee is like. The gawky Englishman attracts a girlfriend of the fineness of Shannon Elizabeth who speaks not with an eastern Wisconsin accent.
Everybody converges at the airport in London, and, according to Prime Minister Grant on the narration, what is it all about, this life? "It's love, actually." The cast claps and feels a joy I couldn't feel after having masochistically inflicted this film upon my mind. My eyes enjoyed Shannon Elizabeth and the secretary character. That shallow pleasure condemned me to watch the film to the end. On vacation, I watched this movie among a pile of videotapes given to me by my cousin.
Refreshingly, for balance in quality, that same summer of 2005 I saw two good, funny, engaging Hal Hartley films, Henry Fool and Amateur.
I'd been told Love, Actually, is good. Chris Matthews, former MSNBC host fired due to his outrageous comments about Bernie Sanders, said his favorite film is Love, Actually. This proves to me that an inside the Beltway millionaire news host with no real problems in a world designed by neoliberals and neoconservatives, doesn't have a clue about how real people are and how they speak. Contrived dialogue and hokey situations more maudlin than anything I've ever seen identify Love, Actually as a stomach-churning affront to the performance arts. Richard Curtis should retire from making films.
Sir, you have abused cinema!!! The genre of the love story is ruined forever because of the implausibilities in your film. Hugh Grant is not a convincing Prime Minister of the U.K. Milwaukee is nothing like the way you depicted it in a kind of glib treatment, making a real place look cliched and false. I've been to Milwaukee many times, I know what I'm talking about, Richard Curtis.
Now, the reader I hope gets that I'm kidding, at least the line about Curtis retiring from filmmaking?
Favorite films of odious people:
Josef Stalin loved Each Dawn I Die, 1939 prison film starring James Cagney and George Raft. Raft gets walked into solitary for a few months, dark room except a shaft of light from the barred window of the cell door, dirt floor, chamberpot (I'm assuming), nothing to do except go crazy. He comes out, the makeup job Academy Award caliber, walks like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, stiff, dazed, broken, eyes dark circles, mouth hanging open; theater in the raw in terms of the situation and George Raft's acting in a classic prison riot and standoff movie. He's mesmerizing and over the top, he's the gangster in The Public Enemy who tosses a coin in the air and catches it, over and over again.
Adolf Hitler loved the dystopian science fiction film, Metropolis; he loved The Charge of the Light Brigade, I don't know why, but maybe he was turned on by British cavalry officers riding full tilt at Russian gun emplacements, firepower of muskets and cannon, taking them down, explosives flinging horse guts on the dusty ground, brains of English officers exposed to smoky sunlight, all turned into a Rudyard Kipling poem.
Howard Hughes repeatedly watched The Outlaw, his own film, and one he produced, Jet Pilot, as well as the Cold War thriller, Ice Station Zebra, watching the latter in his Vegas hotel room hundreds of times.
Expectations? Dashed. The idea this would turn into a coherent blog post makes my readers feel disappointment even as its author feels release from the practice of sticking to one subject, going on tangents for no apparent reason.
Odious means extremely unpleasant, repulsive, which means lacking sympathy.
Repulsive government representatives unable to express condemnation of Israeli military killings of Palestinian children. State Department spokesman Ned Price, Antony Blinken's mouth, was asked point blank if he's against the killing of Palestinian children. Dodging, the soulless dithering creep relied on the excuse of insufficient current knowledge, won't speculate about unconfirmed casualty reports.
Come on, Ned! Are you in favor of child murder or not? That was the journalist's question, the essence. Ned couldn't answer because it's affirmative. The United States will allow Israel's atrocities against Palestinians whenever it happens while continuing to give that chronic human rights violating nation three billion dollars per year, U.S. taxpayer-supplied, so they can buy our weapons and mutilate Palestinian flesh and steal their land and properties while the world looks on and does nothing.
Still, bottom line, Ned Price approves of child murder; so does Joe Biden and Antony Blinken.
What a drag it all is to think about. Watching from a distance as the Israeli government and military annihilate the Palestinians, committing an ironic genocide against a Semitic people; so really, crimes against Palestinians are acts of Anti-Semitism. Two brothers go their separate ways in some book of the Bible, one generates Judaism, the other Islam. Interestingly, they serve the same god, though a deity
hidden, as now, behind layers of deepening mystery.
Buck up, Earth! The human population may be on its way out. You can take millions of years to heal, parts of you will be irradiated until 10 Billion A.D., but new dominant species will rise and fall, a human remnant may survive, a new leaf.
Tannhauser, the German opera, beautiful Overture, the Crusader who returns home, goes on a bender sin-wise, spends years in the Venusberg, willing captive of the Love Goddess, fucking himself silly, finally leaving, becoming monkish, going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, dying, his pilgrim's staff sprouting a leaf, the music of that scene shivering my skin.
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Assignment: Dealey Plaza, a thirty-five minute film presenting the Praetorian Guard Theory, that John Kennedy was killed by the Secret Service, as Emperor Caligula's guardsmen killed him, inside job, Roman style.
Heather Locklear in a pink bikini, big hair boosted with chemical spray. Also in a cop uniform trading barbs with Adrian Zmed; black uniforms, shiny steel badges, William Shatner reduced from Captain of the Enterprise, coolest job in the Universe, to an L.A. street cop, a sergeant, going after punks, driving recklessly, and teaching drug users a lesson. He's got a heart of gold. He can't tolerate pimps or prostitutes even though his name is Hooker, T.J. Hooker. T.J. stands for Thomas Jefferson, stands for Total Jerk, Totalitarian Jackass, Tumescent Jock.
I remember that Heather Locklear went by the name Stacy in that show. Tommy Lee dated her before he was with Pam Anderson. Pam is my favorite name for a woman, I'm not kidding. Kidding is something people feel they have to explain. Tommy Lee had an interesting reality TV show. He joined the University of Nebraska marching band, played various drums and learned to march and perform. Easy pickings for the skilled L.A. Glam Metal drummer? Not so fast with your assumptions! Tommy Lee found marching and drumming difficult at first, like anyone would. The experience gave him a workout and challenged his drumming skills. Good show, better than most reality TV I've seen.
Ending this on a happy note, as if Rocker Tommy Lee lore isn't the highest note we can achieve, I'm fully vaccinated, until a third and fourth and so on are necessary.
Still, it's a feeling of relief for that Covid-19-obsessed part of my mind's activities to take a break from worrying about catching it, though I still wear a mask in public buildings. Side effect of wearing a mask this past year: for the first time in I don't know how long I didn't catch my usual winter cold, haven't had one since February 2020. So, anti-maskers, do you want to not catch colds? Wear a mask in public places.
Vic Neptune
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