By the time the holidays roll around, most of us look forward to the yearly ritual of abandoning our better judgments to recklessly romanticize the season. This usually leads to you binge drinking gløgg to the point where you can’t leave the couch, but hey, that’s what Christmas is all about. It’s a season of day-drunk bliss and the guilty pleasures that come with it—the most classic of which are horrible holiday films.
Presumably, everyone has a cringe-worthy holiday film they cherish somewhere in a secret, tinsel-wrapped box in a corner of their heart. These films are vital additions to the holiday experience precisely because of the critical role they play in drowning out insignificant details like, oh, I don’t know, real life, so we can effectively immerse ourselves in holiday lala-land.
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So when a holiday cheesefest actually does the opposite and disturbs your mental vacation, it’s pretty upsetting. And that’s exactly what makes Love Actually the worst of all Christmas rom-coms.
Hugh Grant as Hugh Grant. Via.
In case you’ve managed to avoid the 90 minutes worth of pathetic drivel they call a film, here’s the gist of it. A bunch of the film industry’s darling Brits have their lives intersect as they deal with unfortunately-timed problems during the holidays. It features Hugh Grant in classic form, watering down his character to little more than a ‘cute’ English accent and an I’m-so-charmingly-awkward raised eyebrow. Also there’s Laura Linney who is in love with the hot and brooding computer guy at work. Colin Firth is dealing with the recently-discovered infidelity of his girlfriend by typewriting a novel in a sickeningly quaint country house. Some dude can’t get laid at home so he tries to do that in America instead; and so on.
Now, this may sound like your average holiday rom-com, but it’s so much more than that. Love Actually is an offensive imposter in the canon of nauseating Christmas classics: half the plot is composed of unbelievable miracles that will never ever happen to you, and the other half is composed of shitty situations that will most definitely happen to you. The film excels at reminding you that no matter how hard you try, miracles won’t happen to you at Christmas—but the shitty things in life you’re temporarily drowning in copious amounts of eggnog will most definitely live long past the holiday season.
To show you what I mean, here is four of Love Actually’s most demeaning lies and most depressing truths.
The fabled Christmas succubus. Via.
Truth: You’ll always lose against the hot chick in a black turtleneck.
Alan Rickman is comfortably married to Emma Thompson. Despite sporting an unfortunate mom haircut, she’s a pretty solid catch for a wife—witty and sarcastic in that endearing British way, and whipping out kids’ paper mache lobster costumes to boot. And yet, a pretty young thing comes along and steals Emma’s thunder. Although this chick doesn’t demonstrate any of Emma Thompson’s wit or human decency, she does successfully wear multiple turtlenecks and not-so-subtly hint at wanting Alan Rickman to do unspeakable things to her.
This is the sad truth, my friend. You may be clever, cool, gorgeous, fantastic, whatever, but really none of your glowing qualities matter—sometimes, all it takes to win your special someone’s affection is a walking blowjob in a sexy turtleneck. Sigh.
Smell my finger, brah. Via.
Lie: Running after your true love at the airport is an effective courting mechanism.
First, Colin Firth hustles to the airport on Christmas to hop on a plane to Portugal, aiming to marry his housekeeper who doesn’t speak English but he’s somehow fallen for anyways. It’s the sort of post-order marriage only a British accent can make romantic. Then, Liam Neeson’s stepson performs the near-Herculean feat of darting through every form of airport security to bid adieu to his crush before she leaves for holiday to America.
In reality, you wouldn’t stand a chance of making a last minute plane to Portugal on Christmas—at least not without some insane layover and some cheap airline charging you €40 for forgetting to print out a boarding pass ( Wizz Air, I’m looking at you). And if you even hinted at abrupt movement at the airport, you’d be instantly tackled by a flight attendant, security guards and some nosy citizen way before you’ve reached the boarding gate. Hell, this is post-9/11 people—it’s a proper Christmas miracle that kid didn’t take a 9mm to the face.
Image via.
Lie: You’ll get your gift wrapped by someone as cool as Rowan Atkinson.
When you finally gather your strength and join the chaotic zoo of Christmas shoppers roaming wild through the stores, you won’t get a bossy bitch like Rowan Atkinson as your cashier. The best you can hope for is unhostile eye contact, but considering they’re all forced to wear santa hats and/or hideous Christmas sweaters, you should probably just be grateful they don’t straight up murder you when you ask for a different color wrapping paper.
Consumerism at its finest doesn’t turn cashiers into Mr. Bean—it just exhausts them, makes them crabby and torpedoes you deeper into the black hole of things that totally suck about the holidays.
Image via.
Lie: You’re actually a sex God, despite what your fellow countrymen and -women may think.
Some dude in the film can’t get laid in London. Fair enough, but instead of ordering a pizza and upping his subscription to Brazzers, he has a genius idea: he’ll go to AMERICA, because that’s where chicks will fall for his English accent. So he hops on a plane to some random shit state, walks into a shit bar, and is immediately embraced by three women who embody the primary elements of 2003’s criteria for female beauty (chrome lipgloss, anyone?).
I’m stoked for this guy, but not for the unfortunate souls actually watching the film. In real life, if you’re not getting laid at home, there’s probably a good reason for it and that won’t magically disappear on a different continent. If you do succeed in convincing someone to sleep with you on a different continent, your novelty will wear off fast—and soon enough, you’ll end up back in the arms of your trusty pizza delivery boy.
So if you find yourself coaxed into watching Love Actually this holiday season, at least know what you’re getting yourself into. The movie isn’t just an innocent companion to your scheduled program of drinking buckets of Bailey’s in bed: it’s a sinister combination of everything we don’t want to see during the holidays—miracles we’ll never experience, and harsh realities we most definitely will.
