Hazoo for The Holiday

Despite the fact that I am a red-blooded, facial-hair wearing, sport-loving kind of bloke, I don't mind a good romantic comedy. To be honest, I prefer the quirkier ones - Love Actually, Four Weddings and Funeral, Bridget Jones, So I Married an Axe-Murderer, to name a few. They have some good lines and some humorous characters which make up for the inevitable soppiness of the romantic bits. Not bad movies in my opinion.

Judging by the trailers, I was hoping for The Holiday to be in a similar vein. The cast includes the rather humorous Jack Black and, well, it just looked good. Argh, how disappointed I was.

The plot revolves around two complete strangers, one in L.A., USA and the other in Surrey, England. When both of them suffer a romantic crisis of sorts, they opt to swap houses for two weeks, and, lo and behold, both of them find new romantic pursuits while abroad. Naturally, the two leading ladies (Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz) find two fantastic leading men (Jack Black and Jude Law, respectively), plus a bunch of other characters. Having four leading characters seems to be where the problems begin for this film. Judging by the length of the film (about 2 and a 1/2 hours) the director and writer, Nancy Myers, just couldn't bring herself to reduce the screen time for any of the stars. This would have been acceptable if there were only two of them, but when all 4 need equal face time, it all starts to get a bit long-winded. Compared to the excellent Love Actually, which also features quite a few "stars," the balance was just all wrong. Scenes that should have taken just a few seconds took a minute. Plot lines which should have been only mentioned in passing conversation were shown in full, and characters who really weren't material to the romantic plot line were given unnecessarily and confusingly long treatment.

There were other issues, such as the oddity of sharing house, car, everything with someone with whom you have only shared a few IMs across the internet; the moral issues related to sleeping with people expressly because you'll never see them again; the unreal perfectness of everything in the film; the self-aggrandising commentary on why people in Hollywood spend so long patting each other on the back and giving each other awards; and the blatant level of product placement, to name just a few. It is not all bad - there are some funny lines, mostly from Jack Black, and lots of things to laugh at if not with, but really, this is one for DVD after it is no longer a new release and when you have a few hours to spend.

Looking on IMDB, I've just noticed that Richard Curtis was the writer or director for quite a few of my favourite romantic comedies, Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones, as well as one of my favourite comedies, Blackadder. He seems to be able to make a good romantic comedy which isn't too long-winded or soppy. I don't have much more to say about that other than hazar for Richard Curtis, and hazoo for The Holiday.

Happy new year to both of the people who are likely to read this post.

.e
[Category: random_stuff]