Views from Medina Road

Saw "Love Actually" last night with Yeong; it's exactly the kind of movie he most enjoys; such a romantic. I liked bits and pieces. There are too many pieces, perhaps; by comparison, I think "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (by the same writer/director) is something of a classic, the romantic sweetness tamed by the funeral, by the Auden poem (He was my North, my South...). In "Love Always" most of the pieces, that is of the many intertwined subplots, are obviously predictable--you know they will unite in the end, despite all odds. I appreciated that a couple of the subplots were knowing parodies of the romantic protocol: the hotshot who finds babes in Wisconsin; the 10-year-old who's so serious about his passion. But I was frustrated that the one story I was most interested in--perhaps because Laura Linney has been one of my favorite actresses ever since the TV version of "Tales of the City"--was unsatisfactorily resolved. Not because it didn't work out happily, but because it didn't explore what would have actually happened to those characters in their common setting; would she really not have tried again, tried to explain about her brother? The same practical consequences were not explored in several other subplots. But maybe that's not what movies are about. The audience ate it up. I just think too much about these things, perhaps.