The Holiday

Holt and I went to see The Holiday yesterday and the verdict is: disappointing. I had such high hopes for this movie.

[Spoilers ahead.]

First of all, Cameron Diaz is not the world's greatest actress. And it makes her character very unsympathetic and just weird for the first half hour or so.

More importantly, everything is just taken a little too far. Like it's not enough that Cameron Diaz's character is a successful, ambitious woman, with intimacy issues. She's also physically incapable of crying. But guess how she figures out that she loves Jude Law's character? She cries as she's driving away! I never saw that coming. It's like Chekhov's lack of tears.

And it's not enough that Jude Law is a single parent. His wife died!

And it's not enough that Kate Winslet is a doormat who has been strung along for three years by a guy who announces his engagement in the first scene. (At the office Christmas party, natch.) She then agrees to edit pages from his book while she's on vacation, even after she explicitly asked him not to contact her.

And it's not enough that the four main characters end up together on New Year's Eve. It's the type of intimate New Year's Eve get-together where people spontaneously start dancing.