Love Actually
The Beatles insisted that love was all you really needed. Watching this movie, there may be such a thing as too much. Director Richard Curtis follows 9 couples around as love drives them crazy. At the focus of the movie is Hugh Grant, playing the Prime Minister. As a bachelor, he becomes smitten with the new coffee girl (Martine McCutcheon). You know where the relationship is going when the President of the United States (a cameo by Billy Bob Thornton) hits on her and Grant indirectly denounces him in front of the press. Also in the mix is Colin Firth who falls for a Portugese lady, the Prime Minister's sister (Emma Thompson) who questions the love of her husband (Alan Rickman), and Peter's (Chiwetel Ejiofor) best friend Mark admitting his love for Peter's wife, Juliet (Keira Knightley) through flash cards.

There are some genuine, well, lovely moments that occur in the movie. The little kid, Thomas Sangster, running after his American love in the airport can just melt a heart. Firth overcoming the spoken language barrier to convey the true universal language through marriage is nice too. Bill Nighy provides great comic relief throughout the movie as an aging rocker forced to change a lyric to his popular song. Other than that, what the movie considers to be love creeps into places where you least expect it. It seems the world we see in "Love Actually" becomes a little too perfect that it becomes very hard to believe. The fact that there are 9 love stories and many more people involved contributes to this disbelief in the sense that it cuts off the courting process when focusing on 4 or 5 couples would have made an equally great movie. 2 stars