Valentine's Day

_*½

Valentine's Day in Los Angeles as told through a series of intertwining vignettes featuring a star-studded cast far beyond the director's ability to handle. The viewer will witness a series of break-ups and make-ups involving a slew of characters that, due to their sheer volume, will never get any sort of meaningful development.

I didn't love this movie, but I also didn't hate it. With lesser actors, I don't think that this film would have worked at all. Actually, that's not totally true: I found Taylor Swift's performance as Felicia hilarious -- not "so-bad-it's-funny" hilarious, but genuinely, charmingly, "so-goofy-it's-endearing" hilarious. The writers clearly had a lot of ideas, and I worry that they stuck them all on the wall, and then ran with every single one of them. There are just so many things happening that none of them really get the full attention that they deserve, and I just left this film wondering if I was really meant to care for any of the characters. I think that the script might have been an amalgamation of seven short-film scripts expanded for money-driven purposes.

Valentine's Day is a fun, light-hearted film that doesn't take itself too seriously. It's not so sappy that it's nauseating to watch, and it's not so depressing that you feel like killing yourself as soon as it's over, but it's also not a life-changing film; you're not still going to be thinking about it hours later, but it's a fine way to spend a few hours.

The acting was great for the material due to the phenomenal fleet of actors that were wrangled for the project. While no one is able to hog the spotlight enough to really have a shining moment, I did find the encounter between Alex (Carter Jenkins) and his girlfriend's mother to be mildly amusing.

The film suffers from a lack of direction; there are so many subplots happening throughout the movie, interconnecting at random, that the viewer never gets a true sense of any of the characters. The characters are introduced over the first twenty-five minutes, but they are legion and, in the beginning, unrelated, so it's much like watching the multiple endings of Return of the King. I found myself relating to many of the events that the characters were going through, but I found it quite jarring every time it would cut away to one of the different storylines. Had the cast been parred down, it might have seemed more cohesive (and, personally, I think the Anti-Valentine's Day Party as thrown by Jessica Biel's Kara would have made a far more interesting focus for a movie).

In what world is it deemed appropriate to give more screen time to Taylor Swift than to both Kathy Bates and Queen Latifah combined? Queen Latifah's role could have been excised entirely without making a difference to the film, and her one shining moment of hilarity lasts for thirty seconds and comes just before the credits roll (which could actually be the description for a teen sex-comedy). Kathy Bates is so underused that, between her first and second/last appearance, I forgot that she was even in the film. Also, Kristen Schaal gets only one scene, which is extremely disappointing.

I didn't really come to care for any of the characters, but I felt like I really wanted to, most likely because I have a soft spot for many of the cast members and just wanted to support them in their endeavors. While some revelations made me feel as though I should root for the characters, like Eric Dane's Sean coming out of the closet, I couldn't help but be distracted by smaller things, like why only white people seem to celebrate Valentine's Day in Los Angeles.

In my opinion, VD might have run on a little too long and could stand from cutting one or two plot lines from the film. Guys, if you really love your girlfriend, it won't kill you to watch this with her, either she'll love it and reward you with sex, or she'll hate it and use sex as an apology. Girls, if you really love your boyfriend, you'll rent Terminator 2 instead.