love, actually

the first few lines of the film were actually enough to put me off; when hugh grant in his clipped accent as the prime minister of britain talks about love being so much more all pervasive than hate- after all, after the 9/11 blasts weren’t there more phone calls made in love than hatred. and the film has so many more gems of this kind of sickly sweet homilies that it can make you slightly ill. the humor though manages to salvage some of the stories from complete disaster, but even there sometimes it is seeped in such schmaltz it can get nauseating. the other thing that kept me from giving up after the first few minutes of the film was the star cast- most of whom tried their best to rise above the mawkish script to give their characters a semblance of reality- but failed. my already still rumbling stomach took somersaults in protest.