Valentines Day - Hallmark Card  
| Can someone tell me why romantic ensembles seem to think that love only happens to white straight people? Like Love, Actually and He's Just Not that Into You, Valentine's Day feels like a film for gated suburban set. More sophisticated audiences will have to look elsewhere.
I know that George Lopez and Jamie Foxx are in this film but they are just tokens. Clearly the film isn't interested in their stories. There is even a scene where the beautiful white guy takes the spot light from the intended ethnic guy in a television interview. How appropriate? This is about a bunch of impossibly beautiful white people, living the dream, doing what we are all expected to do. Finding love and living happily ever after. The modern fairytale... without any fairies (except the token mention) to be seen.
And this is what really sucks about films like this. This is one of the ways our corporate culture tries to profit off us. It sells us the dream, then when we can't live up to it, it sells us all sorts of products to help us get there, but we never do so we just keep buying. If we don't somehow achieve what's in this film, we beat ourselves up as if there is something missing in our lives.
How many in the audiences lining up on their date nights see themselves reflected in this film? I doubt most people leave feeling like their story is being told. It's the story they think they are supposed to live. Maybe they feel good being sold the bill of goods. Hoping it will happen to them.
I guess this is appropriate that the film is named after a holiday which is made to create the same thing. It is just as hollow and meaningless as the valentines people will send out to each other this year.
Shall I list the things that suck about this film? The lame writing as exemplified by the sequence with Julia Roberts and Bradley Cooper where she evaluates him Sherlock Holmes style which ends up being so completely random and mindless that it is painfully bad. The terrible performances by the effeminate Taylor Latner and the hammy Taylor Swift. The blatant and excessive shirtless shots of overly buff men that serve no purpose but titillate. The lame phone-sex subplot which is stretched on far too long and was done so much better in Short Cuts. The whole film is a vanilla and bland as a candy heart. I don't think there was one relationship in the film that felt real.
And we still can't have same sex love in a romantic comedy? The gay character doesn't get a kiss despite all the kissing that is going on all around? And the film doesn't let us forget just how straight it is (not that there is anything wrong with that!) by having Jamie Foxx crack a vulgar homophobic joke soon after the closest thing to a tender gay moment in the film. How progressive!
Take a chance on finding true romance. There are a lot of actually romantic films to see so don't bother with Valentine's Day.
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