Customer Reviews

Valentine's Day

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(34)
3 star:		(26)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(28)

 

 

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.

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!!!

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.

I thought this would be a fun light-hearted movie, but it was a mess of differenct stories and lack lustre performances. I was even disappointed in Jamie Foxx, and I think he is a top notch actor in other films. Taylor swift was extra ditsy in this, and I don't think it helped her aspiring movie career. I would recommend renting it from Redbox for $1 before you decide to purchase it.

I thought this movie was fairly good. It did have some laughable parts, however, for this many famous people...I thought it was definitely below par...unfortunately.

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.

This is not for those seeking "highbrow" entertainment, if you want that, look elsewhere. This is just pure fun and that is what some movies should be for... entertainment and escaping from the real world and it's problems. Sometimes you just want to watch something and not have to overexert the braincells! Life is short, hectic, and full of chaos. You need to let the brain relax and this movie lets you do it. It has a wonderful cast of characters, in a wide range of ages, sure to please everyone. Check it out, just for fun!

I love movies with large casts. This movie did not disappoint. I would recommend to anyone who likes romantic comedies.

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