 | | |
| Wimbledon/Love Actually | 
 enlarge | Directors: Richard Loncraine, Richard Curtis
Actors: Kirsten Dunst, Alan Rickman, Keira Knightley, Martine Mccutcheon, Paul Bettany
Studio: Universal Pictures UK
Category: DVD
List Price: £12.99
Buy New: £3.45
You Save: £9.54 (73%)
Buy New/Used from £3.45
Avg. Customer Rating:  (1 reviews)
Sales Rank: 30719
Format: Anamorphic, Pal
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
Media: DVD
Running Time: 237 minutes
Number Of Items: 2
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 5050582472554
ASIN: B000M06GYC
Release Date: January 29, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.co.uk Review
Wimbledon Professional tennis makes an unlikely but surprisingly effective backdrop for a lively romantic comedy in Wimbledon. Peter Cort (Paul Bettany, Master and Commander), once ranked 11th in the world, has slipped to 119th and is heading into his last Wimbledon tournament when he runs into Lizzie Bradbury (Kirsten Dunst, The Virgin Suicides, Spider-Man), a rising star. The two strike up a whirlwind romance that gives his game new life--but she insists it's going to be nothing but a passing fling. Their affair heats up and Cort finds himself steadily rising through the competition while Lizzie stumbles... Of course, the ending is never really in doubt--but Bettany is a unique cinematic presence, pale and lithe, doubtful of life but also hungry for it. Thanks to him and the ever-engaging Dunst, Wimbledon is funnier, more suspenseful, and more touching that anyone might expect, turning a conventional flick into a genuine charmer. --Bret Fetzer Love Actually With no fewer than eight couples vying for our attention, Love Actually is like the London Marathon of romantic comedies, and everybody wins. Having mastered the genre as the writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones's Diary, it appears that first-time director Richard Curtis is just like his screenplays: he just wants to be loved, and he'll go to absurdly appealing lengths to win our affection. With Love Actually, Curtis orchestrates a minor miracle of romantic choreography, guiding a brilliant cast of stars and newcomers as they careen toward love and holiday cheer in London, among them the Prime Minister (Hugh Grant) who's smitten with his caterer (Martine McCutcheon); a widower (Liam Neeson) whose young son nurses the ultimate schoolboy crush; a writer (Colin Firth) who falls for his Portuguese housekeeper; a devoted wife and mother (Emma Thompson) coping with her potentially unfaithful husband (Alan Rickman); and a lovelorn American (Laura Linney) who's desperately attracted to a colleague. There's more--too much more--as Curtis wraps his Christmas gift with enough happy endings to sweeten a dozen other movies. That he pulls it off so entertainingly is undeniably impressive; that he does it so shamelessly suggests that his writing fares better with other, less ingratiating directors. --Jeff Shannon
|
| Customer Reviews:
One rather too sweet holiday movie, one total dud January 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
'Love Actually', Richard Curtis' first feature film as a director as well as writer, is among other things a strong argument that writers shouldn't always be allowed to direct their own stuff. It consists of about seven love stories (of sorts), all told in parallel and none of them having much to do with each other. A less indulgent director would have been more free with the knife.
The most fun are not necessarily the most plausible. Hugh Grant's dashing bachelor Prime Minister falling for Downing Street teagirl Martine McCutcheon is great, especially when Grant dances around the seat of British government to the Pointer Sisters and cancels a major UK-US policiy initiative after he finds sleazebag American President Billy Bob Thornton trying it on with McCutcheon.
Some of the best stories, though, are among the darkest. Bill Nighy is fabulous as a cynical fading rock star who scores an unlikely hit with a terrible Christmas song; his long-suffering manager Gregor Fisher does a beautiful job of underplaying. Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson play a married couple whose marriage has got really rather boring indeed; Rickman's character starts being flirty with his thong-wearing ueber-slut secretary Heike Makatsch, and Thompson is devastated when she finds out. There's no payoff, no happy ending, just that very English muffled sadness.
I liked the story of Colin Firth as a writer who falls for his sexy Portuguese housekeeper (Lucia Moniz), although it's kind of a rerun of the earlier fun Curtis had with subtitles in the Hugh-Grant-wedding sequence of 'Four Weddings'. And Martin Freeman and Joanna Page, as two bashful movie stand-ins who are forced by the filmmaking process to get more and more naked with each other and as a result are less and less able to talk about their mutual attraction, are a treat. Then there's Kris Marshall as a goofy, bug-eyed dweeb who goes to America in search of totty and scores spectacularly.
However, there are other stories that in my opinion either don't work or work rather too slickly. Andrew Lincoln is Chiwetel Ejiofor's best mate, and everybody thinks he hates Ejiofor's lovely new bride Keira Knightley, but actually he loves her, as she finds out when she sees his wedding video and realises that it's all close-ups of her. Instead of finding this creepy in the extreme like any sane person would, she is still quite capable of looking him in the eye and smiling fondly, even when he turns up at their house, confesses his love by means of flashcards and then walks away saying to himself stoically 'Enough now' - I mean, what??? Then there's Liam Neeson, the widowed stepdad of Thomas Sangster, who forgets his own grief a tad too quickly so that he can help Sangster learn the drums with implausible speed so that he can impress the fragrant most-beautiful-girl-in-school, Joanna (who has a bad case of that modern R&B tendency to sing anything other than the tune of the song she's supposed to be performing). With stories like these, the need to charm has overridden the need to convince us of truth. The Laura Linney story is about a young woman who, even when in bed with the man of her dreams, will always throw him over to look after her mentally ill brother - but that's not a story, it's the predicament that might give rise to a story. This is a far sadder movie trying to get out of a fluffy romantic comedy, and the sort of thing that tries to emotionally blackmail the audience into thinking that the film is deeper than it really is.
Love Actually is a chocolate box movie - see it too often and it will make you sick, but at times it can be just the ticket.
Wimbledon, on the other hand, despite the presence of the brilliant Paul Bettany and the reliable Kirsten Dunst, sucks from first frame to last. Somebody was asleep when this turkey got greenlit.
|
|
|
| | |
