the carpet-colored ordinariness of the everyday

"My first thought was, "Can I make a film about breakfast, lunch and dinner with people you like?" But I couldn't. So I then made this huge machine." (x)

Here's the thing to remember about Richard Curtis movies: they are there to be watched on a grey Sunday night in bed with wool socks on. They don't exist to be intellectualized, but rather to revel in the charming failures that are the characters. Criticising his movies is, as Peter Bradshaw put it in The Guardian, "like vivisecting a Labrador puppy."

With About Time Curtis wanted to show that there's happiness in the carpet-colored ordinariness that is our life. And what better way to bring the point home, than with someone who can travel in time - pick any day of his life to revisit over and over again - and then have that person decide "that a perfect day would just be an ordinary day." 

I enjoyed the London tube montage in particular, because living in a city as I do I can't imagine anything more unromantic & day-to-day than the tube. Richard Curtis' London is, of course, "a sanitised, poshified and sucrose-enhanced romcom-parody of the actual city". The tube, however, is about the same amount of horrendous for everyone involved. Yet it is also where I have done about half my life's reading, forged friendships with classmates taking the same route home & ate my weight in kebaps after a night out.

The movie is far from a masterpiece (& Notting Hill will stay forever my favorite), but it is a good Sunday evening watch. Hope everyone's being as lazy as they naturally should on a Sunday!

'People never tell you to have a pleasant journey in the underground, just as people will say 'enjoy your meal', but never 'enjoy your cigarette' if you're a smoker.'

A Northern Line Minute, by William Leith

'Trains show you a particular version of the urban landscape, the unpolished and undressed rear of buildings. I've always liked that about the view from the train, that you're seeing a town or city as it looks in private, before it's dolled itself up to go out.'

What We Talk About When We Talk About The Tube, by John Lanchester