People, sometimes a movie is so not aimed at you, all you can do is accept that fact, sit back, and just try to figure it out from an anthropological context.
I'm not going to try to claim
Love Actually (2003) is a bad movie, but I will say that it is a movie that I didn't understand. Credit where it's due - 14 years on, it's a bonafide modern holiday favorite with a fanbase large enough that for a decade after the film's release, studios kept trying to replicate what worked here for New Years, Valentine's Day, and maybe Mother's Day (I don't know. I wasn't paying attention.). And my good pal, SimonUK, talks about this movie quite a bit. He frikkin' loves this movie. He is, of course, English, and I think the cultural cues I was missing make much more sense to him. Apparently the race to see who has the #1 Christmas song in England every year is a real thing (which, I know... weird).
Even I knew that this was a movie about a lot of people falling in love, facing the challenges of love, and defining love as something other than romantic or sexual. What this means is that over the course of what I think was a 90-minute movie, about ten different stories played out as loosely tied vignettes. Some of them better than others. Some of them sweet and simple and some making me raise my hand and waiting to be called upon as I had so many questions.
Of the movie's run-time, I enjoyed the back 1/3rd of the movie, but found the first third grating and the middle third baffling and sometimes tedious. I will say, the movie really did stick the landing in a way that nothing prior had suggested was coming. I went from not-cracking-a-smile and checking my phone to actively engaged and actual laughing out loud. I'm not sure I've ever had this experience before with a movie, where nothing changed about how I felt about what I was seeing previously by what I was now seeing - but I felt the quality of the movie quadrupled in just a scene or two and roughly maintained that level through to the end.
