Love Actually - 4K Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Love Actually



Movie:
4K Video:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:



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Movie
I can feel it in my fingers...I can feel it in my toes....

Much like watching Die Hard with eggnog and hot cocoa, Christmas is not complete in my household without a good watching of the feel good Rom-Com Love Actually. I can still remember it becoming a part of our Christmas Vacation 19 years ago. My wife and I were barely married in mid 2004 and she brought over a DVD copy of Love Actually to watch and the rest is history. The film can best be described as blending elements of your typical Romantic Comedy with the “7 Ways from Kevin Bacon” elements of Crash, and a dash of My Big Fat Greek Wedding thrown in for good measure. I’ve personally loved the film ever since I watched it, but only came to realize that there was a long standing controversy about the “dated relationships between Men and Women” in the media for the better part of 15 years. I guess some people feel like it portrayed women in a bad light, and after Baby It’s Cold Outside got a thrashing by some vocal opponents, I was introduced to the controversy over one of my favorite movies. I’m not going to go into it and whether I not I find it valid. All I’m going to say is that nothing is going to ruin this Christmas and Richard Curtis’s directorial debut is STILL going to be a Christmas Tradition in my home for years to come.

Traipsing along the tangled tapestry that is Love Actually’s myriad of ensemble cast stories is a daunting one, but not that hard if you actually sit down and watch the movie. The film plays a bit like Crash wherein the film is made up of almost a dozen different stories, all interconnected somehow as people in each story knows SOMEONE from one of the others, and uniquely ties them all together. It’s nearing Christmas and the plot sort of is kicked off by aging Rock Star Billy Mack (Bill Nighy) making an unexpected come back after years of becoming irrelevant since his 1980s heydays. Add in a story of the Prime Minister of England (Hugh Grant) gaining a bit of a crush on his new caterer Natalie (Martine McCutcheon), the prime Minister’s wife Karen (Emma Thompson) finding out her husband Harry (Alan Rickman) is having an affair. Or a sweet love story of a jilted writer named Jamie (Colin Firth) finding love with a Portuguese maid who can’t speak a lick of English (and neither can he speak Portuguese).

Each of these individual stories (and a good few more as well) are all pure popcorn fluff feel good tales that aren’t meant to be anything more than emotional manipulation, and we don’t’ care. They’re all designed to suck you into enjoying the fun of a new romance, the reconciliation (or failure) of a long standing relationship, and simply exploring LOVE in the holiday season. Much like eating hotdogs, we know that the tales don’t rival anything nearing top grade cinema, but we don’t care one bit. Toss some dill relish and mustard on them and I’ll take 4 please.

Lets face it, while the stories themselves are cute, we’re here for one reason only. That is to watch Hugh Grant and Martine McCutcheon absolutely steal the entire movie with their adorable romance. Yes, I know there’s some other great vignettes (Colin Firth’s is a close second place) Hugh and Martine LITERALLY steal every single scene they’re in and are blatantly the highlight of the entire film. On the other hand, that is a couple of them that feel weird and out of place the older I get. Mainly the unrequited romance between Kiera Knightley and Rick Grimes...errr Andrew Lincoln’s Mark. The whole unrequited love was kind of interesting on the surface, but that finale where he opens up and tells her in full John Cusack style outside of her HUSBAND’s flat just feels tone deaf and unnecessarily. On the surface it seems cute enough, but if you look closer at it the reality of how that would have played out in the real world just feels awkward and forced.

Honestly, I love Love Actually. It’s the perfect blend of sweet and bitter with a self awareness about it’s own cheesy, emotionally manipulative nature that allows the audience to suspend disbelief enough to get sucked in. I really don’t’ know why, but I find the story sweet and kind, with a hint of silly fantasy (Colin’s adventure to the USA for example) thrown in just enough to make it enjoyable. I’ve revisited the movie almost 20 times over the last 2 decades (I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since this came out….ugggg, I’m getting old) and I’ll still continue to watch it for 20 more.




Rating:

Rated R for sexuality, nudity and language




4K Video: Video:

Love Actually comes to 4K UHD with a rather middling upgrade in the video department sadly. On the surface it looks kind of nice, but if you look closer the film’s new transfer is lacking a bit. The film has always had a weird aesthetic to it, with blown out highlights resulting in pale faces and background, as as some murky black levels. The 4K UHD disc seems to fix a bit of that, giving us a dimmer and less washed out image (which was intentional by Richard Curtis I might add) with better black levels, but there are also several major quirks that leave you scratching your head too. There has been some definite grain management going on and not in the good way. It’s not full on waxy or smeary like Face/Off or The Jerk, but it has a distinctly smoothed look that takes out some of that heavy grain that we were used to in the Blu-ray. However, the 4K UHD looks definitely sharper and there is more noticeable details in the picture.

The HDR application probably plays the biggest part in upgrading this from the 2013 Blu-ray (and the 2009 disc) as it it tames those massively over blown highlights from the 1080p version AND adds much more punch and a well saturated richness to the primary colors. Billy Mack’s red pants really pop off the screen, as do the dark blues and rich mahogany’s of the Prime Minister’s home. Blacks are much darker and deeper “true black”, leaving that murkiness and washed out milkiness in the dust from the Blu-ray. It’s an overall DECENT transfer that definitely is an upgrade over the old Blu-ray, but not a huge one by any stretch of the imagination.








Audio:

Ummm, I’m not really sure why an Atmos track was necessary for a 20 year old rom com that wasn’t exactly BRIMMING with explosive audio capabilities, but I’ll take it. The Atmos track is a slight upgrade over the 5.1 DTS-HD MA Blu-ray mix, but not amazingly so. The simple audio design is sort of baked into the original stems that the audio was taken from, and there’s not a whole lot you can do with it. The dialog is the main heavy hitter in the film and that’s still located cleanly up front. However, the film’s catchy pop music score is what gets the most upgrade from the Atmos capabilities, adding in a few more surround and overhead channels to make things just a bit more immersive during the songs. Otherwise, this is a comfortable rom-com track that is very similar to the 5.1 mix, just with a few minor tweaks.













Extras:

• NEW Making LOVE ACTUALLY - Join Writer/Director Richard Curtis along the with cast and crew as they reflect on the making of the film and its legacy 20 years later.
• Deleted Scenes with Introductions by Richard Curtis
• The Music of LOVE ACTUALLY with Introductions by Richard Curtis
• The Storytellers - A featurette exploring the film's main storylines, featuring interviews with the cast discussing their characters and the major elements within each on-screen relationship.
• Kelly Clarkson "The Trouble with Love is" Music Video
• Billy Mack "Christmas is All Around" Music Video
• Feature Commentary with Director Richard Curtis and Actors Hugh Grant, Bill Nighy and Thomas Sangsters

Final Score: ​

Love Actually is cotton candy silly fun, but well done cotton candy silly fun. The movie hits just the right emotional notes to put a smile on your face, and the entire ensemble cast is having a ball with the film. The 4K UHD is a bit more controversial though. Yes, it has some minor upgrades over the decent remastered Blu-ray (which is almost identical to the 2009 UK cut original release Blu-ray we had), but they are very slight in comparison to what could have been. I hesitate to recommend an upgrade over the Blu-ray unless this is a $10 or less title just for the video quality alone (the audio upgrade is nice, but not really a big deal as this film doesn’t really stretch Atmos capabilities very much). Absolute blast of a movie, but a frustrating 4K disc for this holiday season.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Martin Short, Kiera Knightley, Laura Linney, Bill Nighy, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Andrew Lincoln
Directed by: Richard Curtis
Written by: Richard Curtis
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 HEVC
Audio: English: Dolby Atmos (Dolby TrueHD 7.1 Core), Spanish DTS 5.1
Sugtitles: English SDH, Spanish
Studio: Universal
Rated: R
Runtime: 135 minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: November 28th, 2023

Recommendation: Fun Watch

 

[Todd Anderson]

I've watched this a number of times. It feels like a film that almost gets to that classic level, but there's something about it that is just a bit off (at least for me). I have a friend who swears this is one of the greatest holiday movies of all time, so I know lots of people must think it's a bit better than I give it credit for! A shame that the video quality is lackluster. You'd think that would have been priority number one in a rom-com!