feeling listless

FFilm If you thought my recent review of Love Actually was mean spirited you should read what the Taipei Times thought of it:

"It is disturbing to see Thompson's range and subtlety so shamelessly trashed, and to see Laura Linney's intelligence similarly abused as a lonely, frustrated do-gooder. The fate of their characters suggests that women who are not young, pert secretaries or household workers have no real hope of sexual fulfillment and can find only a compromised, damaged form of love. Perhaps (Richard) Curtis wishes to offer this as an insight into contemporary social arrangements; if so, his indifference to the cruelty of those arrangements is truly breathtaking."

In the short piece in the DVD section of this month's Empire magazine the interviewer hammers Curtis a lot about the scenes that were cut out (remember that I said that if everthing had been left in it would have been a much better film). It seems there was supposed to be an interlude set in Africa as well as the bit with Anne Reid. He says: "I was very sorry to lose them. I wish I could have made a longer film." Which suggests the studio, having contracted him to a length refused to be flexible when the film came in overlong. Which is a shame because the piece which should have been the icing on the top of the project which began with Four Weddings ... is instead just OK. But I'll still be buying the DVD so they must be doing something right.