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I selected movies that fit at least one of three categories: 1) cultural phenomena that took over the Earth, 2) movies I was personally obsessed with, or 3) movies I picked because it seemed like someone should talk about them. Lots of things are missing. Don’t think about it too hard.
And Shit, Actually is that! But what I began working on as a silly book for release into a darkness I understood—the demoralizing grind of public life under Donald Trump—is now to be a silly book for release into a darkness I don’t.
Meanwhile, Trump and his party (whom, in a previous book, in a previous life, I might have described as morally bankrupt but now feel comfortable calling FULLY FUCKING DEMONIC)
Which, to be fair, and I know this is tacky because she’s a corpse, but Helen could not have done a worse job here. Like, watch ONE Dateline, Helen! You have to say, “A large, upsetting Greek man with a perm, a large, upsetting Greek man with a perm, HE’S trying to kill me! Not Richard, who is nice!”
Kimble boards the prisoner bus, which features all four types of prisoners: spooky white guy, great big Black guy, Latino guy, and Richard Kimble.
Would a guy who killed his wife do something nice like that??? (Yes, absolutely, humanity is infinitely complex!)
Here’s a fun Tommy Lee Jones trivia game you can play with your friends: it’s called “Is Tommy Lee Jones 20 or 100 in This Movie?”
Tommy Lee Jones is the hero and the villain! This is the gorgeous umami flavor of The Fugitive!
Richard toots over there. Crashing a pharmaceutical gala when you are a fugitive positively drenched in blood? This movie is from 1993, but that’s a 2020 mood.
but then the one-armed man accidentally killed Helen instead, which turned into a whole thing.
The Fugitive is the best movie because it has the best lines and is never scary, only interesting and exciting. All other movies should quit. Case closed. GAVEL.
If that’s not the epitome of unexamined privilege—declaring that the airport is your favorite place—then I don’t know what is. Welcome to Love Actually.
Turns out, she isn’t sick with the flu—she’s sick with ColinFirth’sBrother’sDongitis!
The lady is named Aurelia, and she only speaks Portuguese, and so does her entire family, apparently, even though all of them live in France. It’s irritating.
None of the women in this movie fucking talk! All of the men in this movie “win” a woman at the end! This goddamn movie.
Emma Thompson is Love Actually’s top female-personality-haver, which means that she’s totally nice and bland 95 percent of the time and then every once in a while she’ll say something horribly caustic and inappropriate and out of character. You know, like normal regular human woman who is not robot!
Colin decides to go to America in order to locate skanks. This is his entire plotline.
This is a movie made for women by a man.
Liam Neeson laughs in his face. Then they come up with nine hundred different strategies to “make” Joanna fall in love with him. Weirdly, none of the strategies are “Say hi to her.” Also not considered: “You’re eleven. Calm down, baby boy.”
he “falls in love with her” even though they cannot communicate and the only thing he knows about her is that he’s really, really into her butt. But it’s “love”! So he just “has” her now! She’s “his”! Colin Firth decided they should be together without ever saying a single word to each other, and so that’s what happens.
This entire movie is just straight white men acting upon women that they think they “deserve.”
second of all, once again, IT NEVER FUCKING MATTERS WHAT WOMEN SAY. THE WRITERS LITERALLY JUST TOOK A LINE AWAY FROM A WOMAN AND REPLACED IT WITH A NONSENSE SYLLABLE. SHE COULD HAVE ACTUALLY SAID SOMETHING, AND INSTEAD SHE JUST GOES “MEEP MEEP” AND BILLY BOB THORNTON POPS A BONER.
HE’S TALKING ABOUT HIS PENIS, YOU GUYS. It might be a small penis, but it wrote Harry Potter.
NOTHING IS HOW ANYTHING WORKS.
Turns out, the wedding video he took is 100 percent close-ups of her face because the dude is a fucking psychopath.
Thanks, Love Actually. Thank you for telling a generation of men that their intrusiveness and obsessions are “romantic,” and that women are secretly flattered no matter what their body language (or mouth!) says.
Can we not refer to a woman who worked her way up to a job in the prime minister’s office as “the chubby girl”? Also, can we fire the entire government for sexual harassment?
Love Actually puts a lot of stock in the idea that people are either good or bad.
That best man guy shows up at Keira Knightley’s house and spawns a decade of nice-guy emotional manipulation reframed as “romance.” And Keira Knightley fucking kisses him for it.
Thanks for nothing, cock-blocktopus!
Hey, prime minister, we all like making out with fat chicks, but WHY DON’T YOU EVER GO TO WORK? DON’T YOU HAVE AN ENGLAND TO RUN?
Colin Firth goes all the way home to London, but as soon as he gets there, he realizes he forgot his Portuguese sex maid on the baggage carousel or something.
Once the truth gets sorted out, fat daughter says, “Father is about to sell Aurelia as a slave to this Englishman.” FIRST SENSIBLE LINE ANYONE’S SAID FOR THIS ENTIRE MOVIE.
That’s love, kids. Oh, wait. Actually, it’s shit.
What passions did she shove aside to be the caregiver for this gibbering little turkey boy?
I’m sure they fought once in a while. I’m sure she’d lose her temper: WHY DO WE EVEN NEED A SHRINK RAY, WAYNE? Seriously, literally, what need does this fill? You’re sick, Wayne! Sick! EVERYTHING IS ALREADY THE RIGHT SIZE!
WELL, GUESS WHAT, WAYNE? IT HAS NOT BEEN WORTH IT. YOU SHRUNK THE KIDS. YOU SHRUNK ’EM. And now, I’m sorry, you want me to what? Climb into this harness so you can dangle me over our lawn with a magnifying glass in hopes of saving our only two living children—whom I fed with my blood and pushed out of my body and WHOM YOU SHRUNK—from being killed by a scorpion?? Why do we even have scorpions in our lawn, Wayne?
Then the lady tells Gump that her feet hurt and she JUST WANTS TO GO HOME, so, naturally, he launches into his entire life story.
Maybe he’s just an average dude who’s spent his whole life being lied to by freaks about the definitions of basic words.
Literally the only thing Bubba does is list different shrimp preparations, which Forrest interprets as “best friendship.”
(Again, I kind of feel like Forrest’s problem isn’t that he’s stupid, it’s that literally everyone he ever meets is a fucking weirdo who makes no sense.)
One day, Jennay sends back all the letters Gump wrote her from Vietnam in one huge bundle. Like, Jennay, you didn’t need to SEND THEM BACK. You could have just thrown them in the garbage. You literally went to extra effort just to be a dickhead. Jennay sucks.
Gump: In the land of China, people hardly got nothing at all. Lennon: No possessions? Gump: And in China, they never go to church. Lennon: No religion too? Cavett: Wow, hard to imagine. Lennon: Well, it’s easy if you try, Dick. This is the most terrible scene ever to appear in any film.
Much like Love Actually, this is a movie made for women by a man.
(Speaking of white people, BTW, this movie would be a lot less sympathetic if they made the characters as racist as those people would have been IRL. Kudos on totally whitewashing this region and time period while scoring it mostly with music by Black artists! Do you know how hard it is to give a shit about Ryan Gosling’s teenage crush while listening to Billie Holiday?)
“YOU GOTTA PUT IT AWAY, MAN! HER PARENTS CALLED THE SEX COPS!!!”
Mother McAdams is squirreling all of his letters away in her secret hex box lined with poor-people skin!
Gosling comes home from the war and—being the king of healthy impulses—decides to buy that pile of rotten boards where he almost put it in McAdams all those years earlier and fix it up. PRETTY sure that guy’s a teardown, but okay, buddy.
(Note to my partner: if I ever get dementia, and you show up to read to me from your diary every fucking day, feel free to leave out the part where you bang the war widow.)
I live in your mom. I’ll never forget the first time I “lived” in your mom. Here’s a fucking four-hour movie about it.
