I have watched Love, Actually exactly 35.5 times. Yes .5 is significant too… will get to that later.
All those who know me, even remotely, know that I am an Anglophile. I lived a tiny part of my life in the UK and that was quite sufficient to make me fall in love with the culture, habits, tradition, people, food (yes I love Brit food) Christmas time and everything else English. And Love, Actually is the true epitome of everything British for me. Made by the Karan Johar of Britain (Richard Curtis) and starring the SRK of British cinema Hugh Grant (my childhood love), it is the perfect capsule of my love for England.
So Love, Actually released in 2003, but it wasn’t until much later that I actually had to chance to view it.. maybe around 2005 and since then I have watched it over and over again. Yes I am that annoying person who repeats all the dialogues over the actual score of the film. And then when I got married I introduced my husband to it, who watched it reluctantly at first, calling it a chick flick, but soon loved it and together we watched it at least 4 to 5 times in a year. We even had an annual Christmas ritual – Love, Actually with expensive red wine, roast chicken lunch and a party with friends in the evening.
So imagine our excitement when we were told we were having a baby and he was due around Christmas time. (babyT of course eventually arrived much earlier.) It was Love, Actually after all.
🙂
But… a big BUT. For all our obsession with Love, Actually try as much as we did, we could not watch it even once during the entire duration of my pregnancy. We made one feeble attempt, but I could only manage watching it half way through (the .5 viewer score I mentioned earlier.) before I was extremely exhausted and fell asleep on the couch. So all through the 9 months of pregnancy we did not watch our favorite movie. I watched every other show on this planet – Modern Family, GOT, LOTR series, HP series, Downton Abbey. It wasn’t like I did not have the time or inclination. But somehow Love, Actually just never happened. So when the time came for us to go to hospital to have our baby the next morning, I was actually a bit sad for having missed out on this important item from my list of things to do when babyT was inside me.
But the husband had a surprise up his sleeve and he had somehow saved a copy of the movie onto his mobile phone. Sometimes, I tell you, this man sweeps me off my feet. <3
So late at night before babyT came into our lives, we shared a small hospital bed, phone in hand and one ear of the earphone between the two of us, held each other and watched our favorite movie Love, Actually. My pregnancy was now perfect and I could have my baby in peace. He arrived the next morning, first thing and from there on began our own personal journey of Love, Actually.
Is there a special movie in your lives? I would love to have some reccos.
