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I MUST BE ILL

I prepared a lesson featuring the scene below from Love Actually. In the middle of watching the scene I was ambushed by an overpowering urge to weep.

I don't know if it was a homesickness-driven longing for the side streets of London, the tacky Christmas carol recording, the sheer sentimental romance of it all, or the result of a build up of female hormones. I've never really trusted the milk here.

I draw crumbs of comfort from the fact that Hugh Grant wasn't in the scene.

Comments

Gadjo Dilo said…
Ooh, you've really got a dose of the homesickness blues! Trouble is, for every pretty street like that in London there's a thousand ugly ones littered with crisp packets - same with Inspector Morse's Oxford. However, I do remember Bill Nighy being quite good in this film (which, I hasten to add, I was forced into seeing by a ladyfriend).
12 April 2008 at 02:47
M C Ward said…
Brazil in general is pretty plain where humans have had any say in things - even the influx of Italian immigrants hasn't improve the aesthetics any.

I agree, Curtis has been grating ever since he left behind Blackadder and the then funny Not the Nine O'Clock News, started Bean and made pap about an imaginary Britain for Americans. That's why I'm so worried - if he can make me cry, anybody can - then it'll be open season.
12 April 2008 at 20:21
No Good Boyo said…
Noël Coward spoke of the extraordinary potency of cheap music, and Curtis has hit on the same formula with films. I am still awed by Blackadder, and you are spot on about his descent into chocolatebox Amélie-type nonsense. At least he managed to fit a black person into this one.

When I'm abroad there's a lot I miss about England - my friends, the beer, the humour, the honesty of the law, and the driving.

The cost, shabbiness, weather and lumpen misery of much of the population always bring me down.

Flat taxes, national service, Italian-style fashion police and some more of that global warming ought to sort that out though.
13 April 2008 at 06:24
Gadjo Dilo said…
Yes, absolutely right! One the few attempts (all of which were feeble) that I've made in my life at a political stance was to boycott Curtis's Notting Hill for it's failure to include any of the Johnny Immigrants who live(d) there and made it an interesting area in the first place.

Curtis's treatment of anybody below middle-middle-class is a throwback to 1940/50s films, which often included a working-class character (e.g. Stanley Holloway) who always just has a missus rather than any shot at actually falling in love actually.
13 April 2008 at 07:00
No Good Boyo said…
Mrs Boyo and I were discussing Four Funerals etc last night in the context of women who women think men find attractive vs women who men (meaning I) actually find attractive.

I gave Andie MacDowell as an example of the insipid former, and the sultry Anna Chancellor as the acme of the latter.

I may be wrong, but this is my truth.
13 April 2008 at 11:18
M C Ward said…
You're both right about Curtis - he's an Oxbridge type, I suspect unversed in the multiculturalism that surrounds those little oases.

I couldn't agree more on the Andie MacDowell front - she leaves me cold, whereas Sophie Raworth, BBC newsreader, leaves me in a cold sweat.

Actually, I found Keira Knightley especially insipid in this film, but when doing exercises with the sound off, she suddenly became subtly bewitching. There's a lesson in that that more women should learn.
13 April 2008 at 12:19
Gadjo Dilo said…
Yes, Andie MacDowell was far too L'Oreal for me too; Charlotte Coleman’s role in that film maybe supports my Curtis theory. I tend to prefer a real womanly woman: e.g. Sofia Loren and Pam Grier :-)
14 April 2008 at 14:36
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