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It’s tough
to tell what Nancy Meyers is more inept at doing: Writing or
directing. When you combine those two “talents,” she’s non-stop
tour de force of cinematic donkey piss and is guilty of
at least two of the Seven Deadly Sins (Gluttony and Sloth). The
creator of such bloated, unfunny holiday hits as Something’s
Gotta Give and What Women Want who once stretched a
simple Disney remake into a two-plus-hour groan-fest, is back
again with The Holiday, which boasts Meyers’ longest
running time yet at 138 minutes. There should be some sort of
International Tribunal where people can be tried and sentenced
for making skimpily-plotted romantic comedies that take almost
as long to unspool as epics like Ben-Hur and Around
the World in 80 Days.
Speaking of Disney remakes,
The Holiday is Meyers’ chick flick version of Freaky Friday, with
its two female leads quite literally swapping lives, though without the use of
any pixie dust or magical incantations. High-maintenance (and fabulous!) Amanda
(Cameron Diaz) lives in a Los Angeles mansion, owns a company that produces
trailers and teasers for major motion pictures, and hasn’t cried since she was a
teenager. Frumpy crybaby Iris (Kate Winslet) is a newspaper writer with a
quaint bungalow in Surrey. When both women are wronged by the men in their
lives (Ed Burns and Rufus Sewell, respectively), they hop online and use a
website that allows people to swap homes without ever meeting each other, making
any kind of deposit, completing any type of background check, or ferreting out
important information like pet allergies or potentially dangerous and racist
relatives who live nearby (the KKK comedy skit is to die for).
From the casting alone, I’m
sure you have a pretty good idea of which chickie is going to end up with which
meatstick (hint: Jude Law is Iris’s brother, and Jack Black is in the film biz
with Amanda). Which brings us back to the idea of a movie that’s longer than
three episodes of Veronica Mars (when you TiVo past the commercials),
despite functioning on a level of predictability low enough that even a
semi-domesticated gorilla would roll its eyes at the last act after checking its
watch several dozen times. So who, exactly, is the audience for a film like
this? Is it politically correct to specifically target a demographic of people
who can barely muster the brainpower to tie their own shoes? I’m thinking that,
if you go to a theatre showing The Holiday, you’ll see that most of the
people there have Velcro instead of shoelaces. And if you ring a bell, they’ll
probably start to drool, as well.
I have no problem with
women filmmakers, or issues with pictures that focus on female leads (in fact, I
watched Something’s Gotta Give with two members of the fairer sex who
were even more irritated by it than me, and a third answered “their money back”
to the rhetorical question What Women Want). What I do have a
problem with is someone who is obviously a fixture of the Hollywood System
poking fun at the Hollywood System with a shitty, formulaic romantic comedy that
scolds its peers for being shitty and formulaic and then has the
unmitigated audacity to remind viewers of just how shitty and formulaic it is by
bringing up things like Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. It’s the equivalent of
eating a Spam and ketchup sandwich while watching a Food Network special about
the greatest chefs who ever donned an apron.
2:18 –
for sexual content and some strong language |
