The Holiday

Oh man was The Holiday ever awful. The Holiday, a Nancy Meyers movie (the woman that did Somethings Gotta Give), is about two women both coming off of hard relationships that do a home exchange and go on vacation. While on vacation they meet men and fall back in love and so on. Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet are the women and Jude Law and Jack Black are the men they meet respectively. I went into to this movie because Dina wanted me to go, and because I had hopes after seeing the cast and the person making the movie, that it could at least be as good as In Her Shoes or something like that.

I am gonna start with one of the most ridiculous sequence of events I have ever seen in movies that was in The Holiday. Cameron Diaz meets Jude Law, and they hook up. Law gets calls from two girls named Sophia and Olyvia on his cell phone and you think "Hmmm, so Jude Law is a ladies' man." And Cameron Diaz thinks the same thing. Eventually Diaz goes to Law's house, only to learn that Sophia and Olyvia are his 7 and 4 year old daughters. So I begin to think "aww that's nice." and then it hits me... Sophia and Olyvia, again SEVEN and FOUR years old, have their own phone numbers. No, just no. I laughed out loud when this realization struck me. Well moving on with the scene... take the sappiest, cheesiest, sugary sweetest things little British girls could say, multiply that by two, and squeeze it into a five minute scene. As Diaz meets these two little girls, they just keep saying the cutest things one right after the other. When this script was written, realism was absolutely abolished, and anything that could elicit an "awww" from the audience was thrown in. This scene was so painfully stupid I could barely bear it.

Finally, Diaz asks Law later why he never mentioned that he had two daughters. Instead of his reason being at all immoral or negative, it is a purely good-intentioned reason, and Law and Diaz fall further in love.

Which brings me to my big problem with the movie. Nothing happens. It is absolutely devoid of conflict, with the exception of the beginning which merely sets the movie in motion, and the end which has the typical conclusion. Winslet, Black, Diaz, and Law are all just the most amazing people, and there is never ANY doubt that the two couples will end up together. What makes it worse is that it is not funny at all. Diaz and Winslet are not taking their roles seriously either. In scenes were Winslet is supposed to be crying, it's more of a cartoony wailing noise that you know is not her actually acting-crying voice. Jack Black is so fake, that part was miscast.

While in LA, Winslet meets an old screenwriter that has become something of a recluse from Hollywood since he doesn't like the new Hollywood that only cares about commerce over art. On a couple of occasions in the movie, this screenwriter has small diatribes about how bad Hollywood is now. This is all good and well, and I agree, except that this movie is exactly what the screenwriter is complaining about. It's a plain, homogenized romantic comedy that is in no way edgy, different, or artsy. It doesn't do anything unique or new with the genre.