The Holiday - 3

This was a confusing film. It started out as quite an intriguing film about the discovery of what love really is (a little reminiscent of Love Actually and Bridget Jones's Diary), but it soon morphed into a long (more than 2 hours) drawn out saga about the complications of finding and keeping love. Two women, Iris (Kate Winslet) from Surrey, England and Amanda (Cameron Diaz) from LA switch houses for the holiday to escape their deteriorating love lives. Iris is trying to get over unrequited love, and Amanda- a breakup. Amanda meets Iris brother (Jude Law) and...I don't want to spoil it but it all works out despite the massive complication. Iris slowly gets some gumption by hanging out with the geriatric next door and falls for Miles (Jack Black). I like the actors in this film, usually, but here they are all slightly miscast and it shows. And the film goes over the top with the music and nostalgia that they are trying to incite in the viewer (as this came out Christmas 2006). It is so manipulative as to be boring, and as I was making up really bad dialogue for them to say next and they then went ahead and said it, I knew that the film was officially an escape mechanism for those feeling that love is a failed project. The film ultimately gives the audience cheap hope and nostalgia for a past they cannot attain.