Skip to main content

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
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FOOLING WITH SCHOOLING

One of the commonest figures to be found within TEFL is the aspiring administrator. This is a teacher who, often drained by years of repetitive, poorly remunerated clowning around in the classroom, seeks a position managing other teachers, such as Director of Studies (aptly and attractively known as "Doss"), from which they can sit in an imaginary TEFL director’s chair smoking a cigar, bellowing, “CUT!” and enjoying not having to pull a linguistic rabbit out of a hat twelve times a day, five days a week. I include myself within this TEFL subgenre, although my past experiences of administration have left me with an odd yearning to get back into the classroom and be king of my own modest sandcastle. In 2005, whilst I was working in HR at a local factory, my Brazilian friend Bert and I decided to start our own school. I had recently managed to wriggle out of a honey trap I’d set for myself, when I offered to give a free English course to my colleagues in the factory’s Training a...
19 comments
Read more

TEFL ANTHEMS VOL. I

An interesting debate over at ELT World in answer to the question, Are your students learning anything? has got me all reflective. Many rock songs are claimed by religious maniacs to include subliminal messages when played backwards or by missing every sixth word or summat, but others are more easily deciphered. As TEFL anthems go, perhaps one of the most memorably haunting has to be Dave Gilmour/Roger Waters' bitterly ironic collaboration reflecting on TEFL one-to-one classes being taught abroad , Wish You Were Here : How I wish, how I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here. As TEFL mongers we often feel like we're in a fish bowl, year after year , not least because the majority of our students exhibit the retention capacities of the goldfish. After painstakingly explaining that we use the preposition to after various verbs, the ...
14 comments
Read more

NO MORE A-CUSSIN'

In an effort to rid himself of the habit of using foul language at the slightest provocation , a Facebook chum recently asked for suggestions for harmless expressions he could use in front of his Gran and her bingo clique during moments of high stress, astonishment and/or extreme disappointment. I weighed in with, " Crikey! " and, " Great Scott! " Please feel free to add your suggestions, and help to make the world a tiny bit less like a trucker's stopover in Eindhoven .
12 comments
Read more