How Love Actually Ruined Christmas
By Gary Raymond
Blurb
RARELY HAS THE POWER OF CINEMA BEEN FELT BY SO MANY, IN SUCH OPPOSING WAYS…
‘Love Actually dulls the critical senses, making those susceptible to its hallucinogenic powers think they’ve seen a funny, warm-hearted, romantic film about the many complex manifestations of love. Colourful Narcotics. A perfect description of a bafflingly popular film.’
By any reasonable measurement, Love Actually is a bad movie. There are plenty of bad movies out there, but what gets under Gary Raymond’s skin here is that it seems to have tricked so many people into thinking it’s a good movie.
In this hilarious, scene-by-scene analysis of the Christmas monolith that is Love Actually, Gary Raymond takes us through a suffocating quagmire of badly drawn characters, nonsensical plotlines, and open bigotry, to a climax of ill-conceived schmaltz. How Love Actually Ruined Christmas (or Colourful Narcotics) is the definitive case against a terrible movie.
Our Review
How Love Actually Ruined Christmas felt like it was written for me and echoes sentiments I wholeheartedly feel.
Love Actually isn’t a Christmas film. It is totally against everything Christmas should stand for. The author, like me, grew up in the 80s and tells the reader what Christmas means to him.
“Of course not, it’s not what it was. I grew up in the eighties, a decade that had enough problems of its own, but one that seemed to do Christmas the way I liked it. Toys were precious, and you know mum and dad had to work hard and save hard to buy them, but they weren’t unattainable, they weren’t driving anybody into debt, and they weren’t encouraging brawls in the supermarket. Christmas was special because it didn’t start in October but waited respectfully until the school broke up before the sound of carols or Phil Spector echoed in shops or the sparkle of street decorations lined the main drag through town…Christmas is about putting a soft focus on the past and creating a fireplace in front of which we can curl up and reminisce. Your memories of childhood Christmas don’t need to be historically accurate. They just serve to inform the tapestry of the good things growing up.”
Love Actually is cruel, misogynistic and poorly plotted. It is mean spirited and totally against what Christmas should stand for.
“Love Actually has nothing to do with Christmas. It just attaches itself to Christmas like a parasite and feeds off its sentimentality whilst pumping the host full of schmaltz.”
This book made me laugh out loud more than once but one of my favourite lines came when discussing the worse line of the movie.
“I think that anyone who finds warmth in the line ‘Lets go and have the shit kicked out of us by love’ probably deserve to have the shit kicked out of them by hobnail boots.”
As the author argues,
“It has a cold heart, it doesn’t understand anything about Christmas, and it falls well short of being a classic kind of anything.”
The appeal of Love Actually is lost on me but the appeal of this book certainly isn’t.
Our Final Rating...
Read & Shared 79 Times.
I hope you enjoyed this book review, please consider sharing it with others.
Get In Touch
Please feel free to leave a comment to this book review below. Or even leave your own review if you like.
If you run a blog and/or have posted a review to this book, a Q & A or general author interview online you can always add a trackback to it here and following moderation we'll add a link to it below.