Love Actually

Full of clichés, overlong, predictable (I knew the curtain would rise to reveal Hugh Grant kissing his sweetie in front of an audience) … and yet we sort of liked it. The best part is Bill Nighy as a has-been rocker who records a truly awful Xmas song, and manages to accidentally turn it into a huge hit by going on radio and TV speaking about what an awful turd of a song it is. A ... Read more »

Love Actually (Second Review)

Films don’t come much more feel-good than this one. It’s fairly long for a romantic comedy, and even so doesn’t have time to fully develop all the many characters. But enough time is given to each that I was able to have a rooting interest in them.

The best of the stories (all of them centered around Christmas in London) is about Bill Nighy—the first time I actually noticed this ... Read more »

Love and Mercy

I inherently mistrust biopics, and musical ones are often the worst. But a cursory examination of the Wiki entry on Brian Wilson seems to support most of what we see here, except for some time compression that doesn’t bother me much. This is an exceptionally good example of a questionable genre.

First, I liked how they started somewhere quite a bit after the beginning, the formation ... Read more »

Love and Other Catastrophes

Young Aussies in college trying to deal with their problems. On another night I might have enjoyed this, but they just all seemed so trivial. Again, the problem might be with me rather than them. As I get older it’s hard to see the problems of twenty-year-olds as something to get really excited about, but of course I did, just like them. I know I shouldn’t let being an old fart interfere ... Read more »

Love and Other Drugs

The main attraction here seemed to be that Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway got naked a lot. He’s a drug rep—one of the lowest life-forms on the planet—and she’s a patient suffering from early-onset (very early) Parkinson’s Disease. The best thing here is the exposure of the totally corrupt, totally disgusting, illegal and immoral practices of Big Pharma [PigPharma]. I liked it that they ... Read more »

Love Is All You Need

Though the film is in Danish, a lot of English is spoken. I have to say, the Danish title makes a lot more sense than what it was released as over here—she was a hairdresser, and she was bald, from chemotherapy—but I guess that title might be hard to market. The story concerns the son of Pierce Brosnan getting married to the daughter of the hairdresser, Trine Dyrholm, at a nice old house ... Read more »

Love Liza

Philip Seymour Hoffman is a fine actor and he works real hard here, but it was just too depressing and pointless.

Love Potion No. 9

Sandra Bullock was not the big star she is today. Speed was still two years in her future. Here, Tate Donovan goes to a gypsy (Anne Bancroft, having fun) and gets Love Potion No. 8, which messes with your vocal cords to the point that anyone of the opposite sex (homosexuality is not discussed) who hears you talk will fall madly, hopelessly in love with you. It’s ... Read more »

A Love Song for Bobby Long

Two ex-college professors are drinking themselves to death in a rundown house in New Orleans, quoting literature at each other. The woman who owns the house dies, and her estranged daughter shows up. They don’t tell her the house belongs to her. Fairly predictable complications ensue.

The Big Easy settings are great, and that’s a plus. John Travolta tries to do a southern accent, ... Read more »