My brother mentioned he watched Love, Actually tonight -- reminding me how much I love the writer (and sometimes director) Richard Curtis.I first-lurved him as a co-writer of Blackadder, which was hilarious from one season to the next. Then I saw 4 Weddings and a Funeral, knowing nothing about it, and SUPER loved it. And then I saw Love, Actually and was once again amazed at his ability to write completely over the top farce, and then be sappy in the next scene, and it works. And finally I discovered his TV series The Vicar of Dibley, where he wrote everything from sex-with-sheep-jokes, to a sweet friendship that grows up between the vicar and her most pig-headed parishioner, to a fantastic romance story for the final season.
I mean... what WHAT could be funnier than Bill Nighy as the washed up pop star trying to make a comeback with a tacky remake song he knows is shite? And what could be more moving than the Prime Minister's introduction about Heathrow airport, and the fact that if you really look love is, actually, all around us? How can one man manage to fit both this storyline, and this theme, into the same movie?? The man even made me like the song "Love is All Around" and introduced me to "God Only Knows" from the Beach Boys. Genius I say.
Or what about 4 Weddings, where one of the first lines of dialogue is:
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuuuck! Fuck! Fuck iiiit!
And the next-funniest scene is:
Bugger! Bugger! Bugger!
And yet there's also that incredible scene where John Hannah reads WH Auden's "Funeral Blues" at his boyfriend's funeral. Soooo sad. "I thought that love would last forever. I was wrong." Waaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!
