Movie Monday: Love Actually

One of my favorite movies dates back to 2003. The romantic Christmas movie “Love Actually” was released and used the now popular (but at the time quite novel) interwoven storyline plot of eight couples dealing with their love lives in London at Christmastime.

It’s a great movie (and I’m not usually one to like sappy Christmas movies) but I think for me it was the whole theater experience as well as the movie itself. I remember being a junior in college and my mom came to visit that weekend. On a whim, we decided to go to a huge movie theater in Columbus, Ohio that had midnight showings. We had no movie in mind but thought it would be fun to just venture out at midnight and see what there was to see. And that night, it was Love Actually.

We still laugh about going that late and now that the years have gone by, we now both tend to lean toward more matinee timeslots. But back then we loved it – actually.

Despite so many people loving the movie now, all these years later, it wasn’t an instant hit in theaters back then. Keira Knightley was 17 at the time of filming and said she doesn’t really even remember it that well.

“Most of my films I have either never seen or I have only seen once. So It’s nothing against ‘Love Actually.’ It’s lovely because it didn’t do as well as everyone thought it was going to when it came out. Suddenly, like three or four years later, it sort of took on a life of its own,” Keira told the Los Angeles Times. 

Now in 2024, it’s ranking on so many Greatest Christmas Movie lists (mine included). But for Keira, she said her favorite Christmas movie is actually Die Hard. So let the debate begin again……

Is Die Hard actually a Christmas movie?

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