Psycho-Sexual Santa Claus (pt. II)

Love Actually

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Greetings and good tidings to you, dear reader. It’s that cheerful and tiring time of year where we gather with loved ones and celebrate the holidays—sometimes celebrating for so long that by the time Christmas day rolls around, we’re wiped out. And while I thoroughly enjoyed the Holiday Romances I watched last year, I was eager to explore the darker, stranger side of holiday movies with another round of deceptively-joyful movies that belong to a category that I call Psycho-Sexual Santa Claus. As I said the last time I explored this subgenre, there is an odd trend among Christmas films, where filmmakers find pleasure in juxtaposing the wholesomeness of Christmas against something shocking and depraved. This time of the year is certainly a time for love and a time for cheer, but it is also, apparently, a time for scintillating mysteries and stories about the complexities of the human condition. I was worried that tonight’s first film wouldn’t quite fit my as-usual hyperspecific parameters, but within the first few minutes I could feel the psycho-sexual nature of this film arise, not through the lens of a thriller or noir, but of a male fantasy masquerading as a romcom for everyone. Let me preface my review with this: I know a lot of people who like this movie. Scratch that, I know a lot of men who like this movie. I’m not meaning to refer to a whole gender as sub-human, that’s for Richard Curtis to do in his 2003 Christmas romcom classic, Love Actually. The fact that Love Actually begins with a half-hearted Hugh Grant narration where the central thesis of his prologue is “people aren’t all bad because love, actually, is all around”, and using an airport arrival gate as proof of this didn’t excite me, but it did feel reminiscent of a high school English paper that was written the night before it was due. But listen, I’m a fierce rom-com defender, I can live with some weak narratives as long as there’s love and fun to be had. Well. In a cast that was overwhelmingly-stacked with A-listers and iconic character actors, Love Actually tries to somehow squeeze in about nine different storylines for its impressive ensemble. Bill Nighy, one of the only likable (but still callous) characters in this film, is a washed up popstar who is recording a cheap, easy Christmas version of one of his hits, as a title card reveals that it’s five weeks until Christmas. (Because songs are always recorded just a month before they’re released…) Bill is aware that what he’s doing is lame but he decides to stumble through it anyway, as all of the characters in this film proceed to do. Meanwhile, Hugh Grant is elected as the new Prime Minister who is charmingly-stressed but instantly connects with his “tea girl” (I guess) Natalie, even though, as she immediately explains to him, she’s just been dumped for being too fat. Now, why would this be an important thing to say, to your boss the Prime Minister, as he makes googly eyes through his floppy bangs and obsesses over the fact that he’s attracted to you even though you’re a disgusting size 6 (if even that.) This isn’t the first fat joke in Love Actually, it’s the first of about eight—although I may have miscounted as I kept having to pick my jaw up off the floor. Seriously, if you wanna black out on Christmas, pop on this movie and take a drink every time someone’s weight is brought up. Hugh Grant is just one of those rare angels who would totally sleep with his employee even though she looks like a brunette Kim Catrall with hips. What a hero! Meanwhile, Colin Firth’s wife is cheating on him with his brother! A scandal we have absolutely no time to digest or be effected by because we’re never afforded any character development for these two peripheral “characters” before Colin escapes to his writing cottage in France, where an old lady immediately gifts him a human woman as a housekeeper. She only speaks Portuguese but miraculously, she’s just there and ready to be his maid and potential life-partner and definitely not a victim of trafficking. And she really comes in handy, when Colin Firth is writing on a typewriter, outside, by the lake, with loose pieces of paper barely weighted down, and you’ll never guess what happens. The papers fly everywhere and land in the lake, leaving his mysterious and mute mistress to finally take off her clothes to reveal a perfect body that is willing to dive into icy waters to retrieve what can only be the mopiest of prose. It’s a very romantic scene, in the way that it’s also romantic when your pet brings you a dead animal as a gift. (Allegedly there was a 45-minute long meeting to decide what color her underwear would be btw.) I was worried she wasn’t gonna take her clothes off, that the one thing of value that this woman has wouldn’t be put on full, dripping wet display, I really was. Especially when every other woman in this movie is doing it. Most of the women in this film show their tits or reveal themselves in other potentially-demeaning ways, with several more fat jokes and slut shaming to endure along the way. Did you know this is considered a chick flick? A film made for women? Meanwhile, Laura Linney is also in this? And she works for Severus Snape aka Alan Rickman, who is mad at Laura Linney for not pursuing her work crush, a tall, dark, tan, and handsome man named… Karl. With a K. Alan Rickman is too busy being a wingman/HR-case-creator to do his job, to parent his children, or to be kind to his devoted wife, Emma Thompson—one of the only women in this movie with a crumb of a semblance of a personality, but still, very little agency. I say very little, because even after finding out her slithering husband potentially cheated on her (another ambiguous aka undercooked subplot) with his secretary, she just cries to the Joni Mitchell CD he gave her and then gets over it, quite expeditiously. He gets her this CD, btw, after finding out she’s a big Joni Mitchell fan, as if he’s found the ONE Joni Mitchell album she doesn’t have? Everyone led me to believe that the scene where Mr. Bean gift-wraps a gold necklace for Rickman’s mistress would be hilarious, but no one mentioned that it would also be quite devastating to view in context. Good thing that Emma Thompson, like all other women in this movie, only lives for the men in her life, because otherwise Snape would be spending Christmas alone. (Richard Curtis also made her wear a fat suit, which didn’t even make her frumpy, but he had to insert his obsession with weight into her storyline somehow.) Emma Thompson is also just friends with Liam Neeson, I guess—I have to guess because this is another relationship that is never explained—and she tells him to stop crying about his recently-dead wife and the kid she left behind because, “People hate sissies, no one’s gonna shag you if you cry all the time.” Which sounds even more cold and cruel, knowing that Neeson’s real-life wife Natasha Richardson would die just a few years after this film came out. A lot of this movie is hard to watch, but the scene at his wife’s funeral, where he’s trying to crack awkward jokes before carrying out the casket, was especially painful to experience. And it was just bizarre for Liam Neeson’s character to grieve this way, and to then question why on earth his stepson would be sad after his mother’s funeral. Out of all of the awful jokes in this movie, this one didn’t feel like intentional humor, it felt like the kind of question that children who haven’t yet learned empathy would ask. But then, we find out that Liam Neeson’s stepson is not just grieving his dead mom, he’s also sad because he has a crush on the most popular girl in school, who has the same name as his dead mom. Weird. Emma Thompson is also Hugh Grant/the Prime Minister’s sister by the way, and she also tells him to get his shit together, as the only sentient female in this movie. Meanwhile, 17-year old Keira Knightly (who’s just four years older than the baby-faced actor playing Liam Neeson’s stepson) is marrying a grown-ass Chiwetel Ejiofor while his bestie Andrew Lincoln films it all. The only problem is, Andrew Lincoln is a total bitch to 17-year old Keira Knightly, because at first it seems he hates her, but SPOILER ALERT, it’s actually because he loves her. His best mate’s wife who is 17 and unbothered by the fact that her wedding video is just close-up shots of her, filmed by this stalker of a best-friend-in-law. Not only are we not given any peek into these friends and their relationship, we’re not shown literally any period of courtship or warming up between 17-year old Keira Knightly and her stalker (as Lincoln himself referred to his character) before he shows up at her door, giant cards in hand, with texts that read, “To me, you are perfect”—a gesture that seemed far more romantic when I saw gifs of it on tumblr, completely out of the context of this batshit movie. Seeing it all together, just made me feel insane. (Also, there was a version of these romantic cards in the original trailer that said, ‘Merry Christmas, fatso’ to 17-year old uber-thin Keira Knightly. The fat jokes truly never end!) Meanwhile, Martin Freeman is a stand-in for actors on a film set, where he meets his love interest, a female stand-in, whom he encounters while doing naked stand-in work for what is not explicitly explained to be a porno but really seems like it might be. Their courtship is ironically the most innocent and tame, because they mostly just talk about traffic. I lost track of how many plotlines we’ve had so far but there is yet another if you can believe it, that revolves around a disgusting slack-jawed caterer/sandwich seller/walking sexual harassment case named Colin, who is so fed up with uptight British girls not giving him the time of day, even though he calls complete strangers his “future wife” and hits on any object with tits, so his plan is to go to America to find some easier sluts. That’s truly his entire storyline. I think one reason why I find Bill Nighy’s character to be slightly likable, is because he is the only one who is semi-aware of his sleaziness. He confidently says on live tv, “Hiya, kids, here’s an important message from your Uncle Bill: don’t buy drugs. Become a popstar and they give you them for free.” This was maybe the only joke I could laugh at in good conscience, but there’s a lot of groans to get through before and after this moment. I was exhausted by this movie. I was tested by this movie. I heard the call of the jingly keys that are Hugh Grant and Colin Firth, I braved the early-2000s hate-filled-cringe-humor of it all, and I actually felt quite depleted by the end. Films like Valentine’s Day were inspired by this behemoth of a holiday romance movie, so I’d assumed that Love Actually would only be better than its many spawns, but I was quite incorrect. I’d typically say that if a woman had had any part of writing this, that these many courtships would be thought-out, better paced, and rooted in more than just the most stereotypical hetero-male fantasies. But there are romcoms written by men that are far superior, especially compared to Love Actually. And there are British rom-coms that contain far more depth and diversity, but I was told that this film was the gold standard. This is a romcom made by men, for men, as it would turn out. The horndog character named Colin meets four sexy skanks while visiting the first bar in America he finds and gets exactly what he wanted and then some, with no sacrifice, no lessons learned, nothing at stake, no #MeToo movement in his way to slow him down. Tits and forgiveness are offered freely, time passes deliriously, and Hugh Grant calls a portrait of Margaret Thatcher a “saucy minx.” Alan Rickman gets the mistress and the matronly wife, Liam Neeson jokes about fucking Claudia Schiffer in every bedroom of his house TO his young stepson and then meets actual Claudia Schiffer, Hugh Grant gets the gorgeous fatgirl even though she’s so fatteningly fat it’s almost too fat to bear after telling off the Bill Clinton-esque American president character (Billy Bob Thornton) that harasses his fat girlfriend, and Andrew Lincoln gets a kiss from 17-year old Keira Knightly even though she’s not leaving her husband and the three all seemingly remain friends in some sort of You, Me, and Dupree-type nightmare scenario. In Love Actually, the patriarchy wins. Capitalism wins. Traditional family values win. Even Colin Firth and his real-life Mr. Darcy, Hugh Grant, couldn’t save this. And people love this movie. People have loved this movie for over 20 years. There’s even a large contingency of people who talk shit about this movie, but still love it. Recently, writer-director Richard Curtis acknowledged how problematic this movie is towards women, after his activist daughter Scarlett called him out in a public forum, going on further to speak about the “noticeable lack of people of color in (his film) Notting Hill, which was quite literally one of the birthplaces of the British black civil rights movement.” Curtis took semi-ownership, saying, “I think I was behind the curve, and those jokes aren’t any longer funny, so I don’t feel I was malicious at the time, but I think I was unobservant and not as clever as I should have been.” And while I appreciate the attempt at accountability, I would argue that, these jokes were never funny! I would even say that these lines about “tree-trunk thighs” and “Miss Dunkin Donut 2003” were firmly implanted into the minds of impressionable little girls all over the world, who might’ve then lived their lives a certain way, forever in fear that they will be too fat to be desirable. And that this desirability can still go away, even when you fit this impossible beauty standard! Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder who crafted this offensively-saccharine sack of Christmas coal hates fat people even more than he hates his fellow British people, because the British stereotypes in this film were just as immense. Love Actually weirdly made me proud to be an American, and unafraid to stand by some of my own problematic romcom faves of this era, because I swear to god, this movie makes some of the most crass and cruel American brands of blunt humor seem downright sweet and kind. Thankfully, I’m not alone in my hatred of this movie. After enough time passed, others have come forward to express their disappointment and confusion surrounding this movie, that I could gladly spend all day quoting, but I’ll reserve my one shoutout for icon Lindy West’s beautiful takedown of this film, which felt genuinely cathartic to read after gritting my teeth through this madness:

-Colin Firth falls in “love” with Aurelia at first sight, establishing Love Actually’s central moral lesson: The less a woman talks, the more lovable she is. None of the women in this movie fucking talk. All of the men in this movie “win” a woman at the end.

-(Liam Neeson’s) storyline is uncomfortable because just six years after he filmed these scenes Liam Neeson’s real-life wife actually tragically died. I kind of feel like having to watch Liam Neeson goof his way through this vacant, sentimental pap is insulting to the memory of Natasha Richardson. I also kind of feel like Love Actually did that on purpose, somehow, using time travel and/or necromancy. I’m against it.

-Hugh Grant falls instantly in love with Natalie, which is understandable, because she hasn’t yet exceeded her Love Actually attractiveness word quota. (Twenty-seven. The quota is 27 words before you become Emma Thompson and must be destroyed.)

-In a painfully fitting finale, Colin returns from America with the woman he got. He literally brings her back to England with him like a fucking airport souvenir. But don’t worry, Tony (his best friend), HE IMPORTED AN OBJECT WITH NO AGENCY FOR YOU TOO. HERE, PUT YOUR MOUTH ON IT. That’s love, kids. Oh, wait. Actually, it’s shit.

UGH but enough about this unenjoyable early-2000s misogynistic romp, let’s talk about an enjoyable early-2000s misogynistic romp, Shane Black’s 2005 film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. This is a film I’ve been intrigued by since I saw its poster hanging in the office at Austin Film Fest during my time as an intern, and it did not disappoint. Actually, nothing could disappoint me more than Love Actually did, so it was only up from here. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was Shane Black’s directorial debut, and is based on the 1941 novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them by Brett Halliday, and begins with a colorful, James Bond-esque credits sequence that I loved. This film also presents us with a narrator, this time a self-aware yet sarcastic one named Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) who says “It was just last Christmas that me and Harmony changed the world”, before taking us on a flashback journey of actors, assassins, acrimony. As he explains, out of order, Harry was once just a petty thief, robbing a toy store to find a gift for his niece for Christmas, until he’s escaping from the police and finds himself running into an audition room in New York City. The casting directors don’t know who he is and do not have time to care, they just hand him the script and he starts screen testing, which goes so well that they fly him out to LA to see if he’s really right for the part. Moments later, he’s at a swanky Christmas party in Hollywood, where girls are in bikinis and men wear sunglasses at night, and every stereotype and archetype of Los Angeles is put on full, cartoonish display. It’s here that he meets Gay Perry (Val Kilmer) a PI who, after Harry inquires about his sexuality, says “No I like eating pussy, I just liked the name so much I kept it.” Here he also reunites with Harmony (Michelle Monaghan) an old friend of his from back home, the girl that got away in fact, and while she is not the typical noir damsel in distress or femme fatale, she’s certainly still in danger. Things happen very quickly in this film, dead bodies start to pile up, and our anti-hero Harry will have to use his crime savvy and acting skills to get out of this Hollywood horror show. Because I already spent the majority of this post shitting on Love Actually, I won’t get too into the good, the bad, or the ugly of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It is far from perfect, but it still gave me more holly jolly good vibes than the actual holiday romance I watched this week. Due to the era in which this film was made, the male-centric plot, and the reliance upon slapsticky and crude humor, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is not the most feminist movie. There are moments of covert and overt misogyny and other instances of just straight-up femme-hating slut-shaming, but it still didn’t offend me as much as Love Actually. Because while Michelle Monaghan and every other woman in this film is sexualized to the nth degree, they’re still given more depth, personality, and agency than Love Actually could muster. Shallow characterizations and close-ups of cleavage aside, the writing in this film was just leaps and bounds ahead of whatever was mumbled in that last film, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang does not tout itself as a heartwarming Christmas classic. It’s sexist, homophobic, and highly outdated, and yet it still feels more progressive in comparison to Curtis’ film. If Love Actually is a properly British movie, then Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a properly American one, and as a once-rabid anglophile, I can confidently say that this time, I prefer the American flavor of misogyny. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a Christmas-set, sleazy, easy, hoedown bro-down Los Angelean neo noir, that made proper use of its ensemble cast and managed to be sweeter and funnier, despite its insanely-cynical point of view. Its meta mode of storytelling made the premise even more compelling and hilarious, particularly, when at the start of the end credits, Val says “If you’re wondering who the best boy is, it’s someone’s nephew.” RDJ and Val could teach a masterclass in on-screen chemistry, their constant bickering was far more romantic than anything else I viewed this evening, but the one mystery that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang leaves unsolved is whether or not Val’s character is actually gay. C’est la vie. I didn’t intend to watch two misogynistic Christmas movies this week, but by the end of it I did feel pretty psycho, so I’d say they both ultimately fit my niche theme. Well thank you, dear reader, for letting me rant and rave and roast this week, it felt cathartic and Christmassy and chaotic as ever. I hope the rest of your December is jolly and that the romantic comedies you seek out are actually romantic and comedic. Ha ha humbug. 🙄