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Monday is St George's Day, which is England's national day. So I thought for this week's movie pick we'd choose something English - and in recent decades, cinema-wise, the dominant school of English film-making was essentially the work of one man: Richard Curtis. Emma Freud was a comrade of mine on Ned Sherrin's "Loose Ends" for many years, and she was also Richard's sweetheart (as she still is). So he used to come meet her after the show on Saturday mornings. And my memory of post-show tipples in the ghastly BBC pub afterwards is that he strongly disliked musicals - although maybe he just disliked me boring on about them, as there were a lot of them about back then. But he had a fascination with big-time romantic comedies, and one morning I remember saying to him that romantic comedy is the only film genre that counts: if you can't do that, you haven't got a motion picture industry. Which isn't true now when it's just Sequel Man flying around battling Captain Franchise to save CGI Girl. But it was more or less true then, and Richard Curtis wound up inventing a British version of romantic comedy that, for a while, was every bit as boffo as Sleepless in Seattle and the other Hollywood stuff.
It wasn't formulaic at first, although it got so, fast. In 2003 my opening sentence ran thus:
Love Actually is crap actually.
I didn't think that was up there with Oscar Wilde, but I was giving a speech in Queensland a decade or so back and the introducer thereof quoted that line as evidence of my general wit and sagacity. Oh, well. Curtisland was brand new in 1994, and it's hard to recall now how big its debut was. I remember the American gals at the BBC New York office coming in swooning over Hugh Grant, and assuming it must be a totally different bloke from the Hugh Grant I'd met at some party the previous year and written off as just another London loser luvvie whose ship was never going to come in. Amazingly, it wasn't - and his soaraway success in America generated a level of pre-publicity back in his native land rarely seen before or since. Hugh Grant became Britain's most acclaimed actor on the basis of a long-running series of self-deprecating magazine profiles. His then girlfriend, Elizabeth Hurley, became a star just for dating him, and her dress became a big seller just by being worn by her to an awards ceremony, and even the distinctive flanking rows of safety pins that held it together saw a massive uptick in sales.
The hype was so stunningly spectacular it must have seemed a huge gamble to risk spoiling it by releasing the film. But nonetheless, in the fullness of time, after Four Weddings, a Funeral and a Massive Pre-Publicity Campaign came the long awaited sequel: Four Weddings and a Funeral: The Actual Movie. Eschewing the specialist shallows in which the then British film industry - the Kenneths Loach and Branagh and Merchant-Ivory - was content to paddle, Richard Curtis, screenwriter, and Mike Newell, director, waded out to join Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks and the Hollywood big boys.
Like Sleepless, Four Weddings starts with a standard. Unfortunately, it's from that well-known Gershwin interpreter, Elton John: "They're ratting sowngs uv luurv/But not for me." Well, maybe if you tried diction lessons, Elt. Sir Elton's ululations, an Englishman's misapprehension of American rock'n'roll vowel sounds, briefly raise the spectre of that saddest of British sub-genres: the Hollywood wannabee that doesn't quite get it right. But soon Hugh Grant's hairdo is tumbling out of bed, a best man late for a wedding in the country: "Oh, f**k! F**k!" runs the movie's first line. Then his flatmate, Charlotte Coleman, wakes up: "F**k!" goes the second line. Then his car won't start: "F**k!" "F**k it!" "F**k!" Then they try her car: "F**k f**ketty f**k!" Somewhere between the ".... it!" and the "f**ketty" the words "Written by Richard Curtis" appear on screen, and you wonder whether this picture really needs a writing credit. But Curtis is entitled to his little jest: Britain, critics used to say, makes filmed plays; Hollywood makes motion pictures. Yet, in Sleepless, almost every scene outstays its welcome because writer/director Nora Ephron is too attached to some smart line. By comparison, the first of the Four Weddings is an effortless eavesdrop in which five words from the receiving line or a stilted bop on the dance floor skewer with absolute precision the film's character and environment.
To be honest, I've always found English weddings with their peculiarly dull rituals a bit indistinguishable, memorable only for their mishaps. Making a virtue of conveyor belt homogeneity, Curtis and Newell refocus for each wedding — the first has a missing ring routine, the second a neophyte vicar gamely slogging through a minefield of malaproprisms. To American moviegoers, it's all a hoot. To the British, it will have an awful documentary authenticity from the mandatory dirty jokes of those grim speeches to the oddly disheveled look of the occasion, an inevitable consequence of those inherited morning suits to which Englishmen are so attached. Teetering as they do on the brink of self-parody anyway, today's upper-middle classes are probably, in international motion picture terms, Britain's most marketable socio-economic group. I saw both Maurice and Remains of the Day in New York and the audiences roared their heads off at the hilarious social conventions; by turning it into contemporary comedy, Curtis and Newell have merely reduced Merchant-Ivory to its essence.
They can afford their loving, lingering details because the film is simply but ingeniously structured: boy-meets-girl in five scenes — three weddings, a funeral, a fourth wedding. The funeral, in a bleak chapel set among the terraces and smokestacks far from the Scottish reels and marquees on the lawn, is the sort of scene Scott Fitzgerald could have done with in The Great Gatsby. Throughout the film the supporting characters - Kristin Scott Thomas, Simon Callow, John Hannah, James Fleet - move and speak as if they are autonomous personalities, not merely there to provide some functional "support" to the principals. Callow and Hannah, as the gay couple, are the most romantically rooted, which is a tedious convention now but still novel a quarter-century back.
In fact, my only two reservations about the picture are the leading man and leading lady. Gangly goofy Hugh Grant has a nice line in engaging bumbling, projected mostly by blinking his eyes under the weight of his dangling coiffure, but Andie MacDowell is an insipid cipher: if you see the love of your life in her eyes, chances are it's your own reflection. Theirs is a non-relationship, further weakened by the plot's only act of cowardice: it relegates the inevitable casualties of their love to bit-player status. I assume she was the starriest American Newell and Curtis could afford. For the sequel, Notting Hill, Curtis had Hugh Grant upgraded to the unlikely swain of Julia Roberts. And briefly we had a new genre: Brit meets girl.
As I said, it got formulaic pretty quickly, particularly once Curtis started directing his own scripts. Love Actually, less than a decade after Four Weddings, played like (to put in Curtis terms) a K-Tel greatest-hits compilation album. It had one wedding, one funeral; one office party, one school concert; the usual glamorized London landscape, lit like Manhattan and traffic free; Hugh Grant running the gamut from self-deprecatingly charming to charmingly self-deprecating, Colin Firth with his brilliantly sure-footed tentativeness; naff pop songs – Donny Osmond for the wedding, the Bay City Rollers for the funeral; a disquisition by Firth on "Silence Is Golden" by the Tremeloes to match Grant's evocation of "I Think I Love You" by the Partridge Family in Four Weddings...
But for a few years everyone loved the codes and conventions of Curtisland: the slightly snobbish classlessness, the compression of London into one hip village – a telegenic multiculti cast on a Merchant-Ivory set. No one worked harder to sell a new England to the world. Still, my favorite character in Four Weddings is very much a more time-honored type - Fiona, a chum of Hugh Grant's Charlie played by Kristin Scott Thomas with cut-glass bone-china brittleness: as the film faded from my mind during the Nineties and Oughts, the memory of her glacial facial expression during the "unrequited love" scene blazed ever more vividly. The moment when she finally confesses her feelings for Charlie seems more and more the truest moment in the picture, and perhaps the realest in the entire Curtisland oeuvre - or at any rate a zillion times better than any of Grant's scenes with Andie MacDowell. Brit meets girl? He should have stayed closer to home.
~Mark will be back at 10pm Eastern on The Greg Gutfeld Show.
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21 Member Comments
Speaking of Kristin Scott Thomas I would love to see you review "The English Patient" - I was somewhat obsessed about the movie when it came out and still have the soundtrack on my playlists. I even tried to learn to play the Goldberg Variations Aria on the piano, which is harder than it looks. I thought Kristin Scott Thomas was awesome, but Juliette Binoche, like Andie MacDowell, never did it for me. I was not sure if you "took requests" for films to review.
Americans are regularly portrayed as boors or saps in Richard Curtis' films. His films, he can do what he likes with them. And I will own up to the stereotype that Yanks are pretty parochial. I didn't mind the "evangelist from Minnesota" bemusing the Scotsman at wedding #3 in this film. Neither did I mind Simon Callow telling his American dance partner that he could secure Oscar Wilde's fax number. However, saving the romantic leads (Andie MacDowell in "Four Weddings and a Funeral," Julia Roberts in "Notting Hill," Laura Linney in "Love Actually," and the young songstress in the same), there's not many Americans on screen that Americans can view without insult. "Love Actually" was the worst of the oeuvre in this vein. Billy Bob Thornton plays a Clintonian creep, visiting the UK in the capacity of head of state (but, let's be honest, minus the sexual aggression, he's meant to be a George W. Bush effigy). The goofy Englishmen winds up in Wisconsin, to discover that his downscale accent is incredibly affecting to a trio of bubbleheaded bimbos at the bar. Laura Linney's brother plays a violent mental patient and so on. The opening scene of "Love Actually" mentions 9/11, but I believe the movie put forth an anti-Iraq War rejoinder two years on from the terror attack that "changed everything." In the film, PM Hugh Grant gives a gung-ho speech about Britain's pride and independence. Clearly directed at the American president, it was what Curtis and the cognoscenti wanted Tony Blair (Bush's poodle) to say. Would that a real PM or a fictional film directed such bombast at the EU.
Four Weddings...the best flic ever made and you rip it too shreds.. I like Kristen S.T.
The Fiona character in "Four Weddings" was also my favorite. Kristin Scott Thomas is often my favorite in her movies. I almost walked out of "Mission Impossible" (1996) when her character met an early demise, and it's really the only thing I remember about that movie.
Mark replies:
I'm with you on Mission: Impossible, Elisa. What a waste.
Exactly!
Happy 60th birthday to Carolina girl Andie MacDowell. Looking forward to the new film, "Love After Love". The reviews have been great... and not only about her first nude scene. I'm not a fan of those Hugh Grant movies but I'd happily watch the Andie scenes of 4WAAF over again. And again.
Just watched you on gg show.
The dating segment time lapse brought to mind; when I was a kid, to say someone was all thumbs was an insult, clumsy.
Today if you tell a teenager he is all thumbs, he still can't throw a ball but will think you've complemented him.
Thanks . I can type a 100 words a minute with my thumbs
The segment about dating was hilarous. It brought back almost no memories for me because it seemed there were a couple very lengthy dating droughts for me. The first date was witty a school chum to a school dance that kicked off the new academic year. That was in Kindergarten. The next date was freshmen summer high school and we saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid walking the two miles there and directly back home. The next was freshman year college when we were supposed to be going to a movie but instead the guy drove me straight to the end of a dark road in Fairmont Park. in all fairness to him, he took me directly home when I realized there wasn't going to be a movie:( I could relate readily to all the takes on dating despite my limited dating experiences.
Love Love Actually with the pop star being outrageous all the time: "Don't buy drugs kiddies: be a rock star and get them for free!" Sorry missed the reunion of cast for some Brit charity which showed the characters ten years later. Almost Billy Bob Thorton as a bullying American president with Clinton-like tendency to go after anything in skirts. And Emma Thompson as the betrayed wife pulling herself together to hide her tears from her kids.
The scene that Mark describes as the truest in the picture can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAufqxmyCQA
We feel for Fiona in this scene because it reminds us of similar unrequited feelings that we ourselves have felt at some point during our lives. Or most of us have.
I must confess that 4WaaF was the beginning of my crush on Kristin Scott Thomas. I could never understand how Charlie could have passed her up for Andie McDowell.
Maybe it was a true moment, but I could never understand why Charlie never knew Fiona felt that way for all those years.
"As I said, it got formulaic pretty quickly..."
This is a great paragraph. It evokes a visual of someone sitting in a pub and jotting out a 'must contain' list for his next film. Perhaps you should have a go at pitching a movie Mr. Steyn. It seems that you'd be quite efficient at coming up with a working outline and premise so you could do all the work required (besides the actual pitching of the idea) in about an hour and let the screen writers take care of the rest. The 'One-Man Global Content Provider' goes to Hollowood!
As to the list of "must contains" in a romantic comedy, there always seems to be a "zany" bit that, in my opinion, just ruins what would have been lovely fun. There are two movies I can't decide if I love or hate, because of the zany bit.
One, "IQ" with Meg Ryan as Albert Einstein's genius niece, is sweet and funny, beautiful to watch because of the lovely cinematography. Walter Matthau and three other codgers play Einstein and his "chenius" homeys, who are concerned because Ryan is engaged to a toff British psych professor, and feel she is missing out on being loved. The four scientists stroll around Princeton in spring, weaving talk of physics and love into their musings in a delightful way. Then, zaniness is let out of the cage, when Ryan and Tim Robbins (garage mechanic who fell in love with Ryan) wind up rolling around in the grass while President Eisenhower's motorcade waits. Huh? Picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue?
Another is "Ghost Town", with Ricky Gervais as a misanthropic dentist, Greg Kinnear as a philandering husband killed at the beginning of the picture, and his widow, Tea Leoni, who learns of his infidelity after his death. Gervais' heart stops during a colonoscopy, he is revived, but now can see ghosts, and they come after him to help them with their unfinished business. Gervais' character slowly starts to thaw, and Leoni's begins to confront her betrayal by her dead husband (whose ghost is there to see the pain he brought her). And now, zaniness in the form of a massive dog and similarly-sized dog poo seems to be all the movie needs!
I watch them now and then, and fast forward through the irksome bits. Maybe I'll do a "disgruntled cut" of these someday, so I can watch them without the stupid parts.
A truly awful, cloying and contrived Cool Britannia movie, not unlike "Sliding Doors" (same irritating Scotsman in the straight, starring role).
Though never a Hugh fan, I'm a recent convert after seeing his aging-has-been self-caricature in "Paddington 2"; absolutely brilliant, right up to the stage-musical scene at the end. There are also two really beautiful scenes in which Paddington's imagination vividly springs to life. Fantastic movie— Ben Whishaw (voice) and Hugh Bonneville also superb— and highly recommended (the first film, not so much), despite the extremely unrealistic representation of present-day London.... not a big beard nor burka in sight!
I though Grant did a pretty decent job as the self-absorbed trust funder in About a Boy... always like Toni Collette too.
Hugh Grant was wonderful in "Sense and Sensibility". I thought "Love Actually" stank on roller skates, so I'm glad that our host agrees with me.
Agree- he was perfect in that role, and also his "Bridget Jones"character; he's very good at playing the obnoxious cad. I have newfound respect!
I'd forgotten about "Sense".... you're right! And yes, "Love Actually" was truly ghastly.
Hi Mark, my theory ( or is it correctly a hypothesis) is that all pop music is postpunk/new wave derivative, but more importantly all humour is Post Python, dissected in any way you like non-sequitur etc. Python is up there with Shakespeare and Chaucer etc,. not because of their classical merit, but due to their profound effect on society. I assess you could do a great job on exploring this.
I have to confess that I have never been able to stick a Curtis film (or a film by a Curtis imitator) for more than thirty minutes. I watched "Notting Hill" for about that length of time and I kept saying to myself, "When does the charm start?" It didn't. Hugh Grant's best role continues to be that of the young nobleman in Ken Russell's mesmerizingly wacky, "Lair of the White Worm." Amanda Donahue as a combination high-priestess, semi-vampire and thousand year old snake monster - Top that Julia Roberts!
I think I saw "Love Actually." I'm not sure. I am certain about "Four Weddings and a Funeral." No.