Red Love Is All Around Rarest

LONDON — “Look!” squealed a cyclist, almost crashing into a dense crowd behind a roped-off area along the Thames walkway. “It’s, you know, the cute boy who was in love with the American girl!” Her cycling partner came to an annoyed halt, then grasped the enormity of the situation. “OMG!” she exclaimed. “What are they doing?” All notions of a bicycle ride were abandoned as the crowd filled them in.

Mar 25, 2017  — Red Nose Day (@rednoseday) March 24, 2017. It’s not Christmas, but Love Actually made us feel like it was the most special time of year all over again for this year’s Comic Relief. May 26, 2017  Today's Red Nose Day and people are giving cash to people they will never meet, but whose pain and fear they feel and want to fight. So, it's not just romantic love that is all around. Most people still, every day, everywhere have enough love in their hearts to help human beings in trouble. Good is going to win.

“They’re grown up now.”

RED 〜Love is all around〜 （2005年） BLUE 〜Tears from the sky〜 （2008年）. FIND YOU 音色 1. Move So Fast 3. Summer time cruisin’ 4. Special love 6. What about us 7. Close To You(Winter ver.).

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“Look, the father is there, too.”

“It looks like they are together.”

The communal bonding seemed appropriate, since the crowd was watching the filming of a short sequel to the feel-good, love-conquers-all 2003 Richard Curtis film, “Love Actually,” the multinarrative box-office smash that has established a firm place on December television schedules and in the hearts and minds of fans around the world. (Caveat: The film was not, and is not, loved by all.)

The much-anticipated 15-minute sequel, written by Mr. Curtis and directed by Mat Whitecross, was broadcast in Britain on March 24 as part of Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day, and arrives — with a special addition — in the United States on NBC on Thursday, May 25, as part of a longer fund-raising telethon.

Red Love Is All Around Rarest

Although Mr. Curtis had done Red Nose Day specials of some of his television shows — including “Mr. Bean” and “Blackadder” — he had never thought about drawing on his film oeuvre, which includes the scripts for “Four Weddings and a Funeral” (1994) and “Notting Hill” (1999).

Long ago, “I was asked to write a sequel to ‘Love Actually,’ which I never wanted to do,” he said. “The edit of the film was unbelievably hard, moving all those stories toward a conclusion. It was like playing 3-D chess, and I wouldn’t want to hope for lightning to strike twice.”

The idea of a customized short film for Red Nose Day cropped up after he and his partner, Emma Freud (the script editor on the movie), decided it would be fun to attend a midnight screening of the original film in Manhattan, where the couple lived for a year.

“It was very depressing,” Mr. Curtis said dryly. “It was us, and two people sleeping and two people kissing. But I did think it could be entertaining to see what some of the characters were up to now.” He added: “It also seemed like a good moment in the current climate in the U.S. and the U.K. to think again about whether love — not necessarily romantic love, but for fellow human beings — prevails. Which I think it does.”

He started to sketch some ideas. “I tried to think about what was the most memorable thing in each story,” he said. “I was sure that Bill Nighy’s Billy Mack would still be punting dodgy records in outrageous interviews; I most remembered Colin Firth and Lucia Moniz in the car, neither able to speak the other’s language; Hugh Grant as the prime minister doing a dodgy dance and giving a speech; Rowan Atkinson wrapping something. The one thing I couldn’t crack was why Andrew Lincoln would be outside Keira Knightley’s door, holding cards, again. So I made it a rather meta beginning. That took a while.”

Without Alan Rickman, who died in January 2016, it was complicated, Mr. Curtis said, to create a scene for Emma Thompson, who had played his betrayed wife in the movie. “I’m not sure I could have done it in a two-minute slot,” he said in a telephone interview. “But I couldn’t do everyone anyway, or it would have been too long; Martin Freeman and Joanna Page, and Kris Marshall, aren’t there either, so I didn’t feel it was too glaring an omission.”

Mr. Curtis spent several months working on the script before approaching the actors. “I’m a believer in writing things properly before being tempted by how gorgeous the actors will be,” he said. Ms. Freud “made me work harder, so that the idea of Red Nose Day was really integrated and that it wasn’t just a random sequel.”

When he approached the actors, everyone immediately agreed. “My first thought was, what a really good idea,” Mr. Nighy said in a telephone interview. “The two great elements of Richard’s life are making movies and trying to stop children, or anyone, dying in the modern world, and this dovetails so sweetly. You also think, blimey, can I still get into those trousers?” (He could.)

Mr. Nighy echoed some of the other actors when he added that the film had given him an unexpected fame. “It changed everything for me,” he said.

Liam Neeson, reprising his role as stepfather to Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s Sam (still in love with Olivia Olson’s Joanna), said, between takes, that he had “a tear in my eye” when he read his portion of the new script. “It’s totally romantic of course,” he said. “I said yes right away.”

Only Laura Linney, who was appearing in “Little Foxes” on Broadway in New York, was unable to fit into the schedule timed for the British release. So Mr. Curtis decided to add a new section for the American broadcast. “I think American audiences will particularly enjoy this bit,” he said.

“What was so sweet was that people’s fundamental characters haven’t changed much over 15 years,” Mr. Curtis said. “Keira was cast for the youthfulness and cheerfulness of her spirit, and she is still like that; Bill is everlastingly young and irresponsible; Liam terribly paternal. Hugh Grant behaved well for one week of the original shoot, very badly for the rest, and did exactly the same thing over one day now. It’s rather reassuring.”

Mr. Curtis and the comedian Lenny Henry founded Comic Relief in 1985, the result of a trip the filmmaker had taken the year before. (The American charity Comic Relief, associated with Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg, was not connected to the British organization.) The Ethiopian famine crisis had dominated the news, and he decided to accompany a friend, who ran a charity, to that country. “When I came back, shocked by what I’d seen, I did what everyone in my generation did, which was a late-night stage show to raise money,” he said. “Then I realized, it’s crazy, everyone on this stage works in TV.”

He went to the BBC and asked for a spot, promising high-quality entertainment. (Since he was writing the hit series “Blackadder” for the broadcaster at the time, he presumably had some credibility.) “They said, O.K., give us an event, and you need a symbol,” Mr. Curtis recounted.

Someone, he said, came up with the idea of the red nose (“they make people laugh, kids love them, and you can sell them”), and they began with one hour of comedy. Twenty-one years later, Comic Relief gets around 80 hours of programming annually across the BBC and has developed into a large-scale organization that has raised more than $1.3 billion for children’s and humanitarian causes, distributed all over the world.

The “Love Actually” sequel received mixed reviews in Britain, but Mr. Curtis said that he was very glad to have done it. “It’s a very unusual thing, to make a 15-minute version of a sequel — obviously it was in the back of my mind that it would be a weird bunch of ingredients that don’t add up,” he said. “But I think they do.”

Asked if he now felt tempted to do a longer “Love Actually” sequel, he laughed. “No,” he said. “But I loved the opportunity to have the next glimpse. I’m hoping we get 15-minute sequels to lots of films.”

If you’re a fan of a particular romantic comedy, you’ve probably wondered what happened to its characters after the end credits rolled. Did they stay as blissful as they were during that final close-up kiss? Or did they spend their days arguing over whose turn it was to clean the bathroom?

Fans of Richard Curtis’s ensemble rom-com, Love Actually, are about to find out. For this year’s charity fundraiser, Red Nose Day, on 24 March, the writer-director has made a short sequel to his 2003 Christmas film, so we will soon see whether its various happy couples are still happy today. But there is another, trickier question that the new film is less likely to answer. How many of those couples were genuinely happy in the first place?

Love Actually was Curtis’s directorial debut, but he was already Britain’s romantic-comedy king thanks to his screenplays for The Tall Guy, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. He even had his own theme song: The Troggs’ Love is All Around, as covered by Wet Wet Wet, topped the UK singles chart for 15 weeks when it was used in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and it reappeared as Christmas is All Around in Love Actually. But is love really all around in Curtis’s groovy, fairy light-festooned London? I’m not so sure. The most peculiar aspect of Love Actually is how little love, actually, there is in it.

Lust Actually might have been a more appropriate title

There is some, of course. There is a woman’s devotion to her unstable brother, a widower’s sympathy for his stepson, and a drug-addled rock star’s blokey appreciation of his long-suffering manager. But there is no romantic love as anyone over the age of 12 would understand it. Nobody gets to know and appreciate somebody else’s unique qualities. Nobody discovers that they can talk to that somebody for hours on end, or realises that he or she complements them in unexpected and life-enhancing ways. Instead, most of the film’s main characters are smitten by someone they have barely spoken to. You can see why Curtis went for the title he did, but Lust Actually might have been more appropriate.

Harry and Sarah (Alan Rickman and Laura Linney) both fancy delectably exotic colleagues (Heike Makatsch and Rodrigo Santoro respectively). David (Hugh Grant) fancies his tea lady, Natalie (Martine McCutcheon). Jamie (Colin Firth) fancies his maid, Aurelia (Lucia Moniz). Sam (Thomas Sangster) fancies his schoolmate, Joanna (Olivia Olson). Colin (Kris Marshall) fancies the first American woman he lays eyes on. And Mark (Andrew Lincoln) fancies his best friend’s wife, Juliet (Keira Knightley), a hankering he spells out on cue cards on her doorstep, while her new husband, Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is sitting a few feet away. (What would Mark have done if Peter had answered the door? Maybe the Red Nose Day sequel will reveal all.)

“To me, you are perfect,” says one of the cue cards. What it doesn’t say is why Mark thinks she’s perfect. What’s so special about her? Obviously, Juliet is played by Keira Knightley, so she has an aesthetic advantage over most of us, but what else would prompt Mark’s misguided semi-public display of affection? Is she funny? Brave? Kind to animals? Does she share his interest in stamp collecting or Civil War battle re-enactments? We will never know, just as we’ll never know what David sees in Natalie or what Jamie sees in Aurelia, because they don’t have any dialogue that reveals anything about any of them.

‘Steady stream of bile’

Love Is All Around Me

And that’s what’s so perverse about Love Actually. Curtis is a famously verbal screenwriter, and yet he ignores the idea that attraction can depend on what people say as well as on how they look. Nor does he include any of the flirtatious banter that distinguishes It Happened One Night, Pillow Talk, The Apartment, When Harry Met Sally, and any other classic rom-com you care to name. The strand in which the English Jamie and the Portuguese Aurelia can’t speak a word of each other’s language is just the most extreme example.

It would be unfair to say that the characters in Love Actually don’t talk at all, though. They do; it’s just that their talk consists almost entirely of insults, with a particular emphasis on body-shaming. The film features two different fathers with weight-related pet names for their daughters (“Plumpy” and “Miss Dunkin’ Donuts 2003”), as well as an ageing rocker (Bill Nighy) who goes on and on about how “chubby” his manager (Gregor Fisher) is. If you didn’t know it was a romantic comedy, you could easily mistake it for a science-fiction fable set on a parallel Earth beset by a Tourette’s Syndrome pandemic. In this dystopian reality, somebody consoles their forlorn best buddy by labelling him “a lonely ugly arsehole”; a rock star swears repeatedly on children’s television and local radio without being interrupted; and the UK’s prime minister is introduced to a Downing Street staffer named Terrence, and immediately remarks, “Had an uncle called Terrence. Hated him. He was a pervert.”

It’s a rare treat to see people in Love Actually who seem to get on with each other

Admittedly, this kind of non sequitur from a high-level politician no longer seems quite so far-fetched now that Boris Johnson is the UK’s foreign secretary, but the film’s steady stream of bile does leave a nasty taste in the mouth. Within a single four-minute stretch, one character has been named “the worst DJ in the world”, another “the ugliest man in the world”, and a Christmas single has been described as “the worst record” ever made. As the Black-Eyed Peas and Justin Timberlake put it a few months before the film was released, where is the love?

Love Is All Around Youtube

All

The only strand in which two characters are vaguely civilised to each other is the one which has two body doubles (Martin Freeman and Joanna Page) exchanging pleasantries while they’re naked and acting out sex scenes on a film set. It’s a rare treat to see people in Love Actually who seem to get on with each other, but even they don’t discuss anything more meaningful than the traffic on the way to work, so you wouldn’t put money on their having a future together.

Love Is All Around Us

And when one character does attempt to open up and say something personal, the response is bizarre. At the start of the film, the recently widowed Daniel (Liam Neeson) phones his friend Karen (Emma Thompson), but she immediately cuts him off. “Doesn’t mean that I’m not terribly concerned that your wife just died,” she adds, laying on the irony so thickly that you might assume that Daniel’s wife had suffered nothing worse than a mild headache. This cruel and unusual punishment gets even more brutal when he breaks down in tears. Karen’s reaction: “Get a grip. People hate sissies. No one’s ever going to shag you if you cry all the time.” Wow. With friends like her, who needs internet trolls?

On the other hand, maybe Karen has a point. By the end of the film, Daniel has hooked up with a Claudia Schiffer lookalike (played by Claudia Schiffer), so apparently the grieving process needn’t last more than a few weeks. Similarly, Jamie proposes to Aurelia a mere month after he caught his previous girlfriend in bed with his own brother, so heartbreak isn’t a big deal, either, as far as Curtis is concerned.

Love Is All Around Video

So what is love, actually? According to the film, it’s an instant infatuation, it has nothing to do with being able to communicate, and it vanishes in no time. As fun as the Rose Nose Day reunion is bound to be, then, it’s hard to care whether any of the film’s couples are still together. If they’d broken up, they would all have moved on within weeks, anyway.

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