= two stars

Starring Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz, Jack Black
Directed by Nancy Meyers

Amazon Link

If you can’t say anything nice it’s better not to say anything at all. But, I’ll still blog. Let me preface this largely annoyed review by saying this movie wasn’t for me.

I’m not above romantic comedies; I enjoyed: Thirteen Going On Thirty, Music and Lyrics, and the British varieties of Notting Hill, About A Boy, and Love Actually. I’d even recommend Sweet Home Alabama or that other Reese Whitherspoon flick where she was a ghost in Mark Ruffalo’s North Beach apartment (although contrived, it at least had me wondering what would happen next).

Career-successful Amanda (Cameron Diaz) lives in Los Angeles while Iris (Kate Winslet) lives in London. They swap houses over the holiday, mostly to get away from men. One in each other’s abodes, the obvious happens: they meet men. They resist at first, and whatever you may imagine happens next is the rest of the movie.

Add to the predictability some awkward pacing. There’s a scene where Amanda runs toward a house in the snow. She pauses. She runs. She smiles. She runs. At each pause, I think the director is hoping to add some suspense, but I had no reason to believe she’d stop running. So the scene ends up entirely too long.

Amanda’s glamorous profession is cutting movie trailers, and she sometimes imagines that she’s starring a movie trailer herself. I am generally not entertained by movie trailers. This joke is amusing the first time, but every time it happened again I was like, oh, no, not another trailer.

Kate Winslet fares much better but still looks like she’s grasping for material. The men are molded from silly putty, especially Jack Black, who I prefer to see unleashed, unruly, and disheveled as in School of Rock. Here, he’s a movie score composer, but instead of shredding harsh tunage he plays piano, smiles a lot, and wears spotless clothes from an upscale mall.

So I don’t know, If you’re in a certain mood (on an airplane, home sick blitzed out on cough syrup) or of a certain disposition (you daydream about living in a McMansion, love bubble baths, and entertained by movie trailers and People Magazine) The Holiday might work out fine. But I’d recommend checking out the other two offerings by the same director: Something’s Gotta Give and What Women Want, which at least had some truly bizarre premises that kept them interesting amid the cheese. The Holiday is a dairy product for sure.

IMDB: The Holiday
Wikipedia: The Holiday
Rotten Tomatoes: The Holiday 46%

Read more movie reviews at Webomatica: Movies!

 Please subscribe to the Webomatica RSS Feed!

Categories: 2 Star Movies, Movies :: Tags: :: Trackback URL
Previous Post: iPhone Insanity Update #4: San Francisco, Burlingame, The End
Next Post: The iNevitable iPhone iLetdown
Related Posts: Link Sharing 11/21/07 :: Movie Notes: A Christmas Story :: The IT Crowd: Men Without Women :: Interesting: Human Tetris ::