Enduring Love, Actually
It occurred to me, watching the closing credits of Richard Curtis’s latest steaming turd of a movie on Saturday night, that it was rather ironic, actually, that a film whose central message was that, hey, love is all around, actually, guys, in fact filled me with a sense of bilious hatred the like of which I haven’t experienced in some time.
I’m not sure what it was I hated most about the film, actually. Was it the fact that it lacked anything resembling a plot or a character developed beyond the most trite cliche? Perhaps it was the way the sheer number of big name actors made it actually seem more like a series of cameos than anything resembling a story? Or was it the way everyone kept saying “actually”? (see, it’s annoying, isn’t it, actually?) Or perhaps it was the fact that most of the “storylines”, such as they were, were actually borrowed from other films or stories. I can’t have been the only person to notice, amongst others, the shameless lift of the climactic concert scene from Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, the general rehash of every other Curtis film, or the theft of the central metaphor–oh, doesn’t the arrivals hall at Heathrow show us how we’re all really the same after all–from Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love.
Not the worst movie I’ve ever seen, actually, but it’s got to be pretty close.