Customer Reviews

Valentine's Day [Blu-ray]

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(25)

 

 

In honor of today actually being Valentine's Day, I wanted to see this movie. I actually liked it. It is very funny, and very romantic. All the characters are interesting and you care for them. There were a few twists that I didn't expect. This movie is filled with a lot of great actors.

On Valentine's Day, we see the lives of different couples and how they deal with love and friendship. Some hearts are broken, and some will find true love on this magical day.

Ashton Kutcher plays a florist named Reed Bennett who pops the question to his girlfriend. Jennifer Garner plays a teacher named Julia who falls in love with a doctor who is unfaithful. Anne Hathaway plays a receptionist named Liz who tries to hide the fact that she is a phone sex operator. A kid in Julia's class named Edison tries to send flowers to his Valentine. All this and much more happens on the day of love. I highly recommend VALENTINE'S DAY!!!

Garry Marshall takes a play from the Robert Altman handbook with "Valentine's Day", a romantic comedy about interconnecting people on the famed holiday in Los Angeles. It's a cheerful but shallow picture to say the least. While the film is packed with stars (23 in total) and a few good laughs, this modern day romance has nothing important to say, hell, it has nothing to say at all. The main lesson learned is that everyone needs to make their own definition of love... okay, thanks. Regardless, it's a really breezy film. It's bright, the stars plays to their strengths and it's just long enough to have all the stories resolved. It is what it is and "Valentine's Day" makes for a good film to accompany the holiday.

I saw this movie with three friends and we all enjoyed it thoroughly. We even laughed out loud at some parts of the movie. I really cannot see that this movie is any worse than the other dozen romantic comedies released each year. If nothing else, you get to see a lot a stars that you like in the same place.

Okay, if you take `Love, Actually' and dumb it down to the point where it becomes a preposterous hodgepodge of predictability that holds no merit whatsoever and tests the patients of any sane individual then you would have `Valentine's Day'. I'm tired of the idea Hollywood has that by simply placing a countless amount of `stars' in a film is going to produce a great movie. The backbone of any film is not the stars involved by the script they are given. When you hand a bunch of good actors a crappy script the BEST you can pray for is for one of them to handle the material in a way that makes THEM look good (in this film that person would be Anne Hathaway). There really isn't anything else you can expect. The movie is still going to be bad because the material is bad.

`Valentine's Day' is a BAD movie.

The love sick spoon fed clichés that are delivered here are vomit inducing, especially when they are handled with such sub-par conviction. I could spend the entirely of this review criticizing every `couple' presented here, but I don't really care to spend much time forming this review; the film doesn't deserve it. Let's just say that Ashton Kutcher's character is the most unrealistic depiction of naivety shown in film this year, and the films ridiculous form of character development is insulting. Everything is so formulaic and uninspired. I mean, the atrocious way in which Eric Dane's character is handled (especially his big announcement) is just cringe inducing. Queen Latifah is thankless here, as is Shirley MacLaine, which is sad since she is marvelous elsewhere. That whole subplot with MacLaine and Elizondo is so forced. I actually loved the repartee between Cooper and Roberts, but that is minor; and Hathaway is always delicious, as she is here (the films only comedic slam-dunk) but even her `story' is littered with predictable clichés.

This whole movie is just kind of gross.

Personally, this film is a preposterous rip-off of `Love, Actually', which is actually a lovely movie. I recommend seeing that film ten times over before subjecting yourself to this nonsense.

One major complaint that I feel the urge to expose is that this film never ends. The problem with introducing us to an onslaught of characters is that you have to bring all of their respective stories to a fulfilling conclusion. That draws out the films conclusion endless amounts here. It's not like any of the conclusions are really all that fulfilling, but you spend far too long finding out what happens to whom. I just wish that there had been more thought put in to actually building a smart film. This film is a throwaway and should prove to be an embarrassment for everyone involved.

Just plain awful.

This heavily packaged 2010 omnibus rom-com brings new meaning to the term - trivial pursuit. Never have so many Hollywood stars served a movie so bereft of any dramatic gravity or emotional resonance. Overlong at 122 minutes, this enterprise is directed with little nuance by Garry Marshall who seems to be throwing his film back to the broad shenanigans of his late-1970's sitcoms like Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy. However, even more than Marshall's superficial direction, the real culprit is Katharine Fugate's (Army Wives) cliché-ridden, laugh-free screenplay. The contrived storyline she concocts forces about twenty recognizable actors to play out the slings and arrows of romance over the course of Valentine's Day in present-day Los Angeles.

If you keep count of such things, there appears to be five interconnecting major stories. Character names are irrelevant in keeping track of them since we are meant to be awestruck by the star wattage of the cast, so I will just refer to the actors directly in my synopsis. Story #1: Julia Roberts is an uptight US Army captain on a one-day leave from Iraq and Bradley Cooper is her seatmate on the plane ride home to LA. Story #2: In the San Fernando Valley, Ashton Kutcher is a harried florist who has just proposed to his selfish, careerist girlfriend Jessica Alba, while his best friend Jennifer Garner has fallen in love with Patrick Dempsey, a deceptive doctor whom she doesn't know is married. Story #3: Emma Roberts (Julia's niece) turns 18 and methodically plans to lose her virginity with boyfriend Carter Jenkins that afternoon while her parents are presumptively away from the house. Story #4: Eric Dane is a closeted professional football player who struggles with inevitable retirement and complicates the livelihoods of both his romantically challenged publicist Jessica Biel and tough-minded über-agent Queen Latifah.

Story #5: Anne Hathaway is Latifah's receptionist moonlighting as a phone sex operator as she begins to date mail clerk Topher Grace. The various plots intertwine with each other, and even more actors are thrown in for good measure like Jamie Foxx as a roving TV reporter and Shirley MacLaine and Hector Elizondo as grandparents hitting a rough spot. Does anybody shine above the others? You know you're in trouble when Kutcher is the one who gives the most dimensional performance in the film. Garner somehow survives with her appeal intact even in the silly revenge scene in the restaurant and the Alias-inspired throttling of the heart-shaped piñata that follows. Biel and Hathaway both work a bit too strenuously in their predictable parts, though both manage amusing moments. Alba continues to be a vacuous screen beauty, and the same could be said of Dempsey. It's not too surprising that both play characters who end up with the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

Julia Roberts is wasted in her constricted role, but her niece Emma acquits herself even as singer Taylor Swift plays her gangly, airheaded best friend with surprising élan. Dane is wooden as if he doesn't know how to play a conflicted character, but Cooper manages to register in his equally ambivalent part. Foxx, Latifah and Grace play their accustomed roles with little surprise or impact. 76-year-old MacLaine gets the benefit of playing a romantic scene with Elizondo in front of a movie screen showing her 24-year-old self in 1958's Hot Spell. Before you can say Love Actually, it all ends rather neatly with nary a trace. Poof! The 2010 DVD has a predictable set of extras - a bland commentary track from Marshall that matches the bland tone of the movie, a six-minute featurette that allows some of stars to share their Valentine's Day stories, a five-minute cast tribute to Marshall, a disposable music video from Jewel, a few deleted scenes, and a three-minute sneak preview of "Sex and the City 2", appropriate since that movie caters to the same demographic audience.

Garry Marshall takes a play from the Robert Altman handbook with "Valentine's Day", a romantic comedy about interconnecting people on the famed holiday in Los Angeles. It's a cheerful but shallow picture to say the least. While the film is packed with stars (23 in total) and a few good laughs, this modern day romance has nothing important to say, hell, it has nothing to say at all. The main lesson learned is that everyone needs to make their own definition of love... okay, thanks. Regardless, it's a really breezy film. It's bright, the stars plays to their strengths and it's just long enough to have all the stories resolved. It is what it is and "Valentine's Day" makes for a good film to accompany the holiday.

Although some writers can get away with this patched together pastiches of quick movie star turns, the combined committee writing of Katherine Fugate, Abby Korn, and Mark Silverstein can't, and even under the policing of good old reliable Garry Marshall this movie is merely a showcase of some top movie star names to have a bit of fun before they dash off to a serious film. If that doesn't bother the viewer then this movie will serve up a holiday treat.

''More than a dozen Angelenos navigate Valentine's Day from early morning until midnight. Three couples awake together, but each relationship will sputter; are any worth saving? A grade-school boy wants flowers for his first true love; two high school seniors plan first-time sex at noon; a TV sports reporter gets the assignment to find romance in LA; a star quarterback contemplates his future; two strangers meet on a plane; grandparents, together for years, face a crisis; and, an "I Hate Valentine's Day" dinner beckons the lonely and the lied to. Can Cupid finish his work by midnight?' That's the way the PR runs. Not sufficient interest to merit watching? The add the likes of Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Kara Monahan, Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah, Taylor Lautner, George Lopez, Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, and Julia Roberts - among many other more minor actors and voila! A taste of what everyone is looking like these days! It is bound to delight as many people as it is destined to bore others. Depends on your mood... Grady Harp, November 11

"There you have it, folks. Young love. Full of promise, full of hope, ignorant of reality."

It's been awhile since I saw this film. I know it was a very busy movie filled with a bunch of different popular actors and actresses. The movie starts off on a Valentine morning with several couples together. As the day goes along some have fights and are struggling to make it through the day. This movie is 100% a chick flick. I really didn't like the story because it was like three or four different stories that the writer tried to combine but it can out all over the place. If you like cheezy comedy romances this is your movie. I'm going to give it 2 stars out of 5 because it wasn't bad enough to get a one but I wouldn't recommend it to a friend. For the parents, the movie doesn't have any nudity except for a high schoolers butt. The sexual innuendo in the movie is not overwhelming for a normal romance comedy.

I am a fan of Gary Marshall, the director, which is why I bought this movie. I had not seen it in the theater and was going entirely on reviews and previous Gary Marshal films. Big mistake. The film rambles. It is hard to identify with the characters. There are too many poorly defined characters. My wife and I couldn't finish it. I think maybe we got a third of the way through before we had had enought. Don't buy it before watching it first on netflix or some other sevice. You will spend a lot less money for something you may not like at all.

Many good twists and turns in this movie. I love that "punked" Ashton Kutcher plays a florist. The cast is jam packed and there are many famous people who intertwine to make this a memorable movie. Not such a "chick flick" that you couldn't convince the guy to watch it also. One of the funnier parts is Taylor Swifts dance moves. Brings back memories of Elaine dancing on Seinfield.