Speaking of horror, director Garry Marshall's latest atrocity, "Valentine's Day," might be described as a Repression-Era Special an econo-pak of Hollywood second- and third-stringers, a couple of genuine stars (Anne Hathaway, Julia Roberts), and a couple of annoying movie kids brought together by a poverty of ideas and a director whose only apparent instruction to his cast was "Act like the people in TV commercials."
With enough sticky sweetness to make your teeth ache, "Valentine's Day" deploys every rom-com cliché, minus the com—there's isn't a laugh in the movie, unless you count a fleeting sequence featuring comedian Larry Miller, who's also probably the least prominent member of the cast (which includes Bradley Cooper, Emma Roberts, Jessica Alba, Patrick Dempsey, Shirley MacLaine, Hector Elizondo, Queen Latifah and George Lopez).
If that lineup wasn't frightening enough, Ashton Kutcher and Jennifer Garner are the ostensible leads, she a schoolteacher blissfully unaware that her boyfriend (Mr. Dempsey) is married; he a flower-shop owner who has just proposed, bedside, to his girlfriend (Ms. Alba), who apparently has someone do her hair while she sleeps.
The foreshadowings are like billboards: When a movie woman looks thoughtful rather than delirious at the sight of an engagement ring, things don't bode well for the match. Neither does an affiancing that arrives so early in the story.
As each character negotiates his/her own rocky road to romance, each of the interlocking episodes inflicts its own particular kind of pain on the viewer, who will wonder how any of this happened. So might the performers, who will have a few questions for the gods, and their agents: Taylor Swift, the multiple-Grammy-winning singer, is nothing short of mortifying as a ditzy high-school student in love with another Taylor ("Twilight's" Mr. Lautner).
Jamie Foxx continues his post-"Ray" slide into self-parody. Topher Grace makes the world safe for innocuous ingénues. Director Marshall, grand poobah of the puerile and pandering, creates a shameless movie world for which no actor had to travel too far from home in Beverly Hills/Brentwood, no one seemed to have worked more than a day to complete his or her abbreviated role, and where Jessica Biel can't get a date. Right. Red, the hue that dominates this movie's palette, is the color associated with both Valentine's Day and the devil. And there's something vaguely satanic about "Valentine's Day."
0 comments:
Post a Comment