Defending Christmas Against the Hordes
My last stand for culture.
Everyone has a different lockdown story. Lockdown was, it must be stated, the same and yet completely individual. It was the ultimate human experience in that way. A microcosm of just what life is. The same but different.
I don’t know how long this book took in the making, but I had been banging on about how terrible the movie Love Actually is pretty much since it was released over twenty years ago. What lockdown did was gave me the opportunity to write down just how much I hated that movie.
This book, kind of like The Golden Orphans, came about from a conversation with my publisher. I was keen to write it, he fancied having a Christmas book to put out. I went away from this conversation with a mild mission: to see if there could be a book-length treatise on the film. I figured if Geoff Dyer could do it about the movie he feels is the greatest artistic statement of the twentieth century (in his book Zone, about Tarkovsky’s Stalker), then I could do it about the opposite.
How Love Actually Ruined Christmas (or Colourful Narcotics) is a read-along commentary, a scene-by-scene response to “everyone’s” favourite Christmas movie.
The book had a super-quick turnaround, and suffered a bit from more lockdowns and so had no real public events to promote it etc. But it’s a lot of fun, and, so I’ve been told, has been beloved by both those who love and hate the film. (So a perfect gift for pretty much anyone in your family).
Here’s the blurb…
RARELY HAS THE POWER OF CINEMA BEEN FELT BY SO MANY, IN SUCH OPPOSING WAYS…
‘Love Actually dulls the critical senses, making those susceptible to its hallucinogenic powers think they’ve seen a funny, warm-hearted, romantic film about the many complex manifestations of love. Colourful Narcotics. A perfect description of a bafflingly
popular film.’By any reasonable measurement, Love Actually is a bad movie. There are plenty of bad movies out there, but what gets under Gary Raymond’s skin here is that it seems to have tricked so many people into thinking it’s a good movie.
In this hilarious, scene-by-scene analysis of the Christmas monolith that is Love Actually, Gary Raymond takes us through a suffocating quagmire of badly drawn characters, nonsensical plotlines, and open bigotry, to a climax of ill-conceived schmaltz. How Love Actually Ruined Christmas (or Colourful Narcotics) is the definitive case against a terrible movie.
And in some breaking news…
As I’ve always felt quite sad that this book didn’t get the airing it deserved, and so this Christmas I’ll be giving a reading from it at The Griffin in Monmouth, at 4pm on Sunday 15th of December. Hopefully see you there!
And, as always, you can purchase the book from the publisher’s website.
