Blog Archives
Valentine’s Day (2010)
Imagine every romantic comedy cliché and sappy platitude about love stirred together into one giant gelatinous conglomeration of hollow sentiment. That’s Valentine’s Day. Regardless of your thoughts on the holiday, this movie, which aims to celebrate our national day of love, might have the opposite effect. This movie makes He’s Just Not That Into You look like When Harry Met Sally. It?s a fairly large ensemble with plenty of mega-watt stars, but it’s too bad that nobody knows what to do. Jessica Alba’s character literally runs her course an hour into the film and yet she still makes meaningless appearances. This overstuffed Hallmark card has ridiculously safe, candy-coated storylines sanded so that there is no hint of edge or wit (Anne Hathaway is the most ludicrous PG-13 phone sex operator you will ever find). The resolutions of most of these storylines will be predictable to anybody who has ever read a greeting card. Jamie Foxx is supposed to be a bitter TV reporter popping up everywhere reporting about the ills of V-Day. Think he’ll have a change of heart by the film’s end? The cast does offer their small pleasures (there are SIX Oscar nominees/winners in this movie!), except for the kid who has a crush on his teacher (Jennifer Garner). He was insufferably annoying. So was his movie.
Nate’s Grade: D+
Georgia Rule (2007)
Without a doubt, the funniest movie you’ll see all year about incest! Someone slap that blurb on the DVD cover. This extremely awkward (comedy? drama? disaster?) spends far too much of its many minutes focusing on Lindsay Lohan’s character arguing that she was molested by her step-dad (Cary Elwes) and him denying the allegations. The women in this cross-generations flick are all damaged and stubborn and kind of stupid; Felicity Huffman, playing Lohan’s drunken mom, is oblivious to the point of defying reality. Lohan gives another dismal performance playing a party girl that’s been run out of town because of her loose ways (must have been a stretch for her to play). This Gary Marshall-helmed disaster doesn’t know what it wants to be, so the drama and comedy feel strained and stranded and neither fits well with the other. The icky incest storyline is given so much attention that the film practically goes off the rails to serves its purpose. This movie began as a mess with a studio exec issuing a public flogging of Lohan for her poor onset behavior, and now it arrives as a mess. Strong, quirky women; hard-earned life lessons; recovering emotional wounds; redemption by Act Three; small town color; sad, widowed men destined to be paired with wronged women. You’ve seen this stuff all before, except, hopefully, for the incest.
Nate’s Grade: C-




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