Valentine's Day

In Feast of Love, another anthology of love stories much like Valentine’s Day, a character played by Morgan Freeman talks about two people falling in love, stating that nobody even noticed as it happened. This year’s saccharine love anthology, Valentine’s Day suffers from a similar problem – characters continually fall in love, with nobody in the movie noticing until moments of great revelation where they finally identify their feelings. Unfortunately, the audience is ahead of the characters for most of the movie, almost always spotting the would-be romances long before the characters identify them. Unfortunately, this is just one of many problems that plague the movie, which serves as mindless entertainment that doesn’t hold up against much analysis.

It’s nearly impossible to sum up the storylines of Valentine's Day, which crams as many romance stories into the movie as possible. New love, old love, jaded love, and the end of love are all included in the story, which takes place on the one day of the year we’re supposed to stop and think about the emotion of the heart (which also provides a built-in release date for the film). In fact, there are far too many storylines involved here. Several of the stories become redundant, and most of them don’t get enough time to truly develop, becoming forgettable shortly after the credits roll. Valentines Day successfully intertwines the characters and stories, but other movies (Feast of Love, Love Actually) have managed the same success of interwoven characters, while keeping the storylines developed enough to be memorable.

Much like the storylines, the movie is jam packed full of cast of varied fame and talent. It’s really hard to compare the skill level here, when you have senior actors like Hector Elizondo and Shirley MacLaine ruling over their scenes while actors like Jamie Foxx and Eric Dane are just sort of “in the moment” of their scenes. Younger actors like Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, and Ashton Kutcher all do well, all showing why I’ve enjoyed them as performers in the past (Hathaway, in particular, gets a more diverse role than it initially appears). There’s no forgiving some of the bad acting here. A young child actor, who we will do the courtesy of not naming here, is tolerable as a smitten student, but even his poor talent looks exceptional when compared to Taylor Swift, who sucks all of the talent out of every scene she’s in (fortunately, she’s mainly paired with Taylor Lautner, so it’s not like there’s much talent for her to drag down with her horrid performance).

As a “date movie,” I enjoyed Valentine's Day well enough. It kept me entertained for a couple of hours and even provoked some laughter and applause from me and my date. After the movie was over, however, I found my wife and I spent more time tearing apart the movie’s shortcomings, rather then relishing in the spirit of love one would expect. Instead of remembering our own romance, we focused on how painfully predictable some of the storylines are, how extraneous other parts are, the general unbelievability of some characters fitting so much into one day, and how some characters really didn’t need to exist, nor some actors be involved (I’m guessing Kathy Bates had nothing better to do one Saturday and was convinced by director Garry Marshall to come be in two scenes). In the end, my wife wasn’t even that entertained by the movie, so maybe it’s not the fantastic date movie I thought it was.

-Rafe Telsch