Guys Not Doing Work: Valentine's Day

What do you get for 3.99 (or whatever it costs) when you buy People: glossy candids of baseball-capped and flannelled celebrities arm-in-arm. Hardly any variance in theme. What keeps people coming back aren't really the latest Brangelina snaps, but the ones of more mutable pairings. Permutations. John Mayer, two months ago with Aniston, one week ago with Taylor Swift. Swift, two weeks ago with Mayer, last week with someone named Lautner.

Valentine's Day, which topped the box office this long weekend with ticket sales of over 60 million bucks, is the filmic equivalent of said magazine, with a bunch of actors playing themselves, down to nuance and custom-order iPhone. E.g. Ashton Kutcher is a dopey hearthrob who runs his family's successful flower shop. Topher Grace is a naive mid-westerner trying to navigate L.A. Jaime Foxx is a sports newscaster with a hip hop edge. Bradley Cooper is a tall white guy. George Lopez is Latin.

On the female side, Jennifer Garner plays a teacher, gratingly cutesy (her surgeon boyfriend is played by *surprise* Patrick Dempsey; Dempsey as a doctor is a sort-of patronizing fuck you to the audience: "Let's not even have Dempsey play something different than what everyone knows him for. People like him as a doctor, let's just make him a doctor.") Anne Hathaway does that girl-next-door with some underlying depravity thing: secretary by day, sex-talk worker by afternoon (oh, and I was wondering who of the females would win the hotness award and it's Anne by far. I could get all romantical about it and talk about those wide-eyes or I could just point out that she's stacked). Queen Latifah is black.
 
Plot? A bunch of strands where these beautiful people are rich and have good lives and they love each other. Or they stop loving each other and start loving another beautiful person. It's like real life, but fake.

I blame the people behind Love, Actually for this star-infested, holiday themed genre. Actually, Love, Actually is not really that bad a movie partly because its stars are beautiful in an interesting way. I was reading this David Foster Wallace story called Expressionless Animals where this girl tells her loved-one that she has a beautiful face in-motion, less at-rest. On the other hand, Jessica Biel in Valentine's Day is like a beautiful sculpture, a beautiful, boring sculpture. Plus, these Brits, for the most part could act and had the room to do so. Lastly, the film strived for some pathos and succeeded (i.e. the devastating Alan Rickman / Emma Thompson marriage falling apart because of his infidelity).

Valentine's Day does infidelity, too, but here, it's just a sketch. Shirley Maclaine tells Hector Elizondo about an affair she'd had decades prior. Exposition, no effort for actual drama. "Remember," she says, crying, "when you went away? You were gone so long." Actually, no, I don't remember, probably because this is the first the audience even heard that you cuckolded the guy. They reconcile later that evening, no harm, no foul.

My mom was howling during the movie as were the majority of women in the theatre so I don't want to be too harsh a hater. It's just not my thing and I watched it differently than they did. For instance, I'm not sure if anyone else noticed the incongruity of Julia Roberts playing an on-leave army captain, fatigues and all, on her way home to visit her kid. I'm not sure if anyone smirked at how bad Jessica Alba is at acting. Peep the scene where she tells Ashton she can't marry him. Cut away from her pained, albeit dry face to Ashton then cut back to her newly tear-soaked cheeks. She can't cry and now that she's maturing away from that girlish beauty that her career depended on, she's pretty much done, IMO. Oh, and did anyone else feel weird when Ashton and Garner kissed at the end? They're more brother-sister looking than even Keanu and Carrie Anne Moss.

Any guy who tries to profit off the Valentine's holiday is a violator which makes Garry Marshall Judas, except much, much worse. Already he's forced millions of males into watching Runaway Bride and Pretty Woman. Now this. I understand that there's money to be made in escapist fare, and that he's just grinding. Personally, I don't want to escape to this movie's world where everyone owns a Mini and is happily comfortable in the upper-middle class. I don't want to escape there because that's where I already live. (I acknowledge the dichotomy of absolute comfort and existential trial that is my life.) If anything, I need movies that send me away from this not further in. I need movies with guys like this:

BTW, the initials of Valentine's Day = VD. Protect your fucking neck!