The huge cast alone was enough to draw me into the movie house and force me to overcome my dislike for valentine's day - the holiday, not the movie . Valentine's Day, a movie about different people's experience of love stars Julia Roberts, Eric Dane, Jennifer Garner, Ashton Kutcher, Patrick Dempsey, Emma Roberts, Taylor Swift, Taylor Lautner, George Lopez and Jessica Biel. The fun is in spotting the stars. Oh look there's the cute country singer with the buff wolf in that vampire movie. Oooohhh Pretty Woman. But that's where the fun ends for me.
Valentine's Day reminds me of Love Actually, actually. Both movies show how people experience holidays in different ways and how our lives are interconnected. In Valentine's Day the central figure that frames and holds this movie together is a flower shop. Here we see the staff with their own love stories to tell and how they are inevitably involved in the lives of their customers. We get to see love in varying degrees - romantic, maternal, homosexual, puppy, teenage. And of course there are the bitter stories of love, those that speak of being alone on the day of hearts, those that end in, well, endings. But somehow everything turns out all right for most of the characters.
My problem with this movie though, besides the cliched montage of stories and characters, is the lack of oomph, of pizzaz, of thrill. Sure the movie tries to surprise us with several ooohh-I-didn't-see-that-coming endings, but there's really nothing original about the stories or the characters. They're mostly caricatures of valentine stereotypes. And because we know them so well already, we know where their stories end. The difference between Love Actually and Valentines Day is that I still remember the former, years after and I'm sure to forget the latter like some dust-covered valentine gift that's not even good enough to be recycled.
As for performances, Anne Hathaway shines best here for me.
I give Valentines Day a C+
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