Right, let’s do a little survey. Hands up who saw The Boat That Rocked. You know the film I’m talking about, it was Richard Curtis’ second feature as director. You can put your hands down. Okay. Now hands up who enjoyed it. Keep your hands raised. And finally, put those mitts to good use by giving yourself a hard slap in the face. Survey over.
From the godawful first series of Blackadder to his latest cinematic aberration, Richard Curtis has dribbled a slimy, offensively inoffensive stream of chummy tedium all down the bib of British cinema, aided and abetted by a gang of talented performers that really should have known better.
Just think about it; In Four Weddings and Notting Hill, he hangs the British public out to dry as a rabble of fey, self-consciously quirky tosspots, the kind you’d expect to see on a Dorito’s advert. Seeing the mess he’s made, he parachutes in a glam American clothespeg for the tosspot with the floppiest hair to moon over before finally settling down with her and spawning the next generation of fey, self-consciously quirky tosspots.
I’m not a fan.
Still, Curtis’ first two successes as a writer seemed like masterpieces when he vomited out his directorial debut Love Actually. If we overlook the standard romantic dirge, and the fact that the title is a shortened version of ‘Love Actually Is All Around’ (a sentence mawkish enough to make even the starry-eyed romantics grind their teeth into powder with fury), we’re left with a collection of characters so utterly reprehensible you’d have to stick a few prisons together to get their real-world equivalent. There’s Alan Rickman languidly pondering an affair while Emma Thompson crumbles around him; Keira Knightley and Andrew Lincoln snooping around behind Chiwetel Ejiofor’s back and, of course, a floppy-haired tosspot, who, like a Mr Ben rip-off, has become Prime Minister. Finally we get an interesting American parachuted in, but Billy Bob Thornton’s president is quickly dismissed, lest anything controversial should emerge, so that tosspot can go and rut with his cockernee cleaning lady. In front of a nativity play audience. The nation heaves a collective heave as stomach contents from Oxford to Orkney splatter over living room carpets.
Floppy-haired tosspot and cockernee cleaning lady bring me handily to my next source of Curtis-rage: his social conscience. Yes, it’s Comic Relief. Comic Relief. Comic Relief. Say it out loud. The more you say it, it starts to sound like a euphemism for losing control of your bowels in a public place. Doesn’t it? Tell your friends. If you have an attention span as bad as mine, the fun-at-gunpoint ‘antics’ (and anything which can be described with the word ‘antics’ should have been euthanised at birth) and true-life horror stories of abuse, famine and genocide can start to blend into one, to the point where you’ve no idea what you’re meant to be laughing about. ‘Ooh, look it’s Vernon Kay in a hilarious meat-slicer sketch, hee-hee’ one minute, quickly lapsing into ‘…and so Emma will never be seen again.’ By the end, supposing you make it that far, you’ll be guffawing at the emaciated children in Africa, as flies land on their faces to drink the tears trickling down their sunken cheeks. And it’s all thanks to you-know-who.
Now I’m probably coming across as a mean-spirited, misanthropic puddle of human venom (which I am), so I’ll attempt to add some balance and add in a quote of Curtis trying to defend his work. Asked (I assume) as to why his films are rubbish, sentimental and unrealistic, he said:
“If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it’s called searingly realistic, even though it’s never happened in the history of mankind. Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you’re accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental.”
And, to be fair, he does have a point. Millions of people fall in love a million times a day all over the world. Same goes for people falling out of love. People killing each other. People finding out they have irritable bowel syndrome. And a soldier has never gone AWOL, kidnapped a pregnant woman and finally shot her in the head? This coming from the man who set up Comic Relief, attempting to cure the ills of Africa and help countries there recover from years of war and genocide? I mean, is he actually sending the money there, or just floppy-hair wigs and tea?
So Richard Curtis makes us look like wimpy idiots in front of the Yanks (it’s fair to assume that ‘the special relationship’ was based on Bush watching Notting Hill), made a film whose title was short for ‘Love Actually Is All Around’ and makes us laugh at the misfortune of Africans during Comic Relief. AND The Boat That Rocked has made over $17 million before it’s released in America. Those of you out there whose faces are smarting from that well-deserved slap, when the DVD comes out, resist the urge. Don’t you dare buy it; barricade yourself inside, smash your computers and wait until the urge passes. I’m warning you.
