It’s Not Love, Actually: Watch me do an about-face on the world’s worst Christmas movie.

This is kind of an unusual article, which is why it’s going in the paid tier section. It’s Christmastime, and on these chilly nights many of us are swilling mulled wine, bundling under fleece blankets and watching ridiculous holiday-themed movies. Aside from the perennial debate, “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” (yes, it very much is), another annual Yuletide debate topic concerns a film called Love Actually, which I notice is in the top 10 most popular on several streaming services this month. The debate about whether Love Actually is a good film or a bad one has now stretched over decades—the film came out in 2003—and I have been involved in it. I’m about to launch another salvo in that debate, but I have to do so with some humility. I’m about to eat a very large crow here on my own blog.

I used to love Love Actually. In fact, on the very first iteration of this blog, I wrote an article that was spirited in its defense of the film. That article came out in mid-December 2013, now 12 years ago. I saw the film again a few days ago, and I was amazed to realize just how terribly wrong I was then. While Love Actually does retain some perverse and guilty entertainment value, as a Christmas film, and as a statement about the world in general, it is unusually fulsome, cynical and ludicrous. I said in my original article that a bad Christmas film tends to be much worse than a bad any-other-kind-of-film. Even in this regard Love Actually is an outlier: though probably a bad film when it first came out 22 years ago, the years have been so horrendously unkind to it that it stands as a unique bellwether of how things have changed in our society and culture, and how quickly something can go from mainstream to embarrassing-cringe.

So, in this admittedly lengthy dissertation—hey, I’m the guy who made a 2-hour YouTube video on the history of shit!—you will get to read, in its entirely, my original 2013 article lauding the film, and then my thoughts today, answering myself, so to speak. If you have nothing better to do this afternoon, settle in for a bumpy ride.