subject: Movie review – Valentine's Day (2010) [print this page] For more reviews and watch free : CLICK HERE
HERE we have Love, Actually, LA style. It's a Valentine's Day ensemble comedy directed by Pretty Woman's Garry Marshall, whose years as a rom-com veteran have netted him a cast of Hollywood stars, old and new.
Some of them glitter, some merely glimmer and a few may have signed up only because everybody else had. All ages are represented. There's a precociously lovelorn 10-year-old and at the other end of the generational spectrum is his grandmother, played by a skittish Shirley MacLaine.
In the most unlikely bit of casting, Ashton Kutcher runs the florist shop at the centre of the plot and Julia Roberts makes a modest appearance as a US Army captain snatching 24 hours' leave. She spends much of the picture in uniform, slumped sleepily in an economy aircraft seat and there's hardly a trace of the celebrated smile. I'm not sure what this signals. Twenty years on, has Pretty Woman morphed into Weary Woman? Or maybe she just wanted to act a reasonable desire, I guess, in a film where everyone else seems to have been instructed to act up.
Once again, the aim is to talk about love in its various manifestations but you won't be buoyed by the air of happenstance which enlivens the work of Love, Actually's creator, Richard Curtis, when he's at his most inspired. The script is very much "a vehicle", with the lumbering sense of deliberation that comes from having to accommodate so many names and all their contractual entitlements.
One of the heartiest laughs comes up at the start. It's a visual gag a background shot of a tap-dancing weather girl in the TV studio where Jamie Foxx, as a gung-ho sports reporter, is reluctantly preparing for his next assignment. He's been ordered to leave the sports desk to go out and find a heart-warming Valentine's Day story.
This assignment inevitably takes him to the shop owned by Kutcher who makes his first appearance in bed, logically enough. He's proposing marriage to Jessica Alba at the time and when she accepts he's overjoyed but astonished as well he might be since she's playing the kind of workaholic who goes to sleep clutching her mobile phone.
The omens are even less propitious for Jennifer Garner as Kutcher's best friend. She's fallen for Patrick Dempsey from Grey's Anatomy, who's been cast to type as a womanising heart surgeon. Things go seriously wrong for him when he, too, goes to Kutcher's florist shop to order Valentine's Day flowers for both Garner and his wife.
