Why isn't there a '0-10' button on this thing?

Rating: 1/10 (22 December 2006)

Since seeing this dreadful heap of muck last night as a favour to a young relative I have racked my brains for a reason this garbage was made. Thanks to IMDb I now know why: there are clearly enough utterly and completely stupid people in the world to make it some money. But: shame on all of you IMDb users who have boosted The Holiday right here: shame on you for being lame brained, feckless and dim. This movie is less intelligent than a Lassie movie, and I tell you this: far less entertaining.
The word 'money' has also been revolving around my brain, as in this sentence: 'Why did these stars do it? They don't need the money, surely?' What in the name of all that is an actress with the talent of Kate Winslet (who I last saw in Extras, for goodness sake)doing in this dog-muck? And Jude Law also? Their careers deserve a couple of years of freefall after this. And Jack Black? The magnificent tyro of School of Rock? Your cred is in the shredder, baby (Mind you, he did, come to think of it, at times look embarrassed, so perhaps there is hope for him after all). Did someone threaten to kill their parents or children if they didn't do it? It must be that or something like that: there is no other rational explanation.
I was in physical pain whilst watching it in Chesterfield last evening. If the extraordinary cynicism of its religious adherence to every immoral and unethical strand of formula-Hollywood drek in here isn't bad enough: if the fact that the script that could have been written by a 12 year old dewy-eyed girl weaned and educated on every piece of schlock Disney every produced, or some kind of parodist with nothing better to do, but was apparently written by an adult isn't bad enough; if the torrent of clichés isn't bad enough - including the intensely vomit-inducing, utterly laughable inclusion of olde-tyme Golden Age of Hollywood writer winning a lifetime achievement award scene - AND CAN I TELL ANY American READING THIS THAT IT HASN'T SNOWED IN THE COUNTY OF SURREY BEFORE AND AROUND Christmas FOR ABOUT 40 YEARS?; if the complete lack of verisimilitude to real life, like the fact that women of thirty-odd don't make love in bra-tops, isn't bad enough; if the fact that Jude Law's character begins as a woman-a-night beer-slugging rogue then by half way becomes a winsomely sincere widowed single Dad who adores his two girls (and one is called 'Miffy' in real life: for God's sake, what next?!)isn't bad enough; if the fact that Cameron Diaz's 'performance' was the most embarrassing I've ever seen isn't bad enough; if the woolly mammoth-esquire touch of the miserable, shoddy direction isn't bad enough; if the fact that the studio thinks this pathetic nonsense is so good they let it stretch on for over two hours isn't bad enough, then the fact that these film-makers actually gave this evil monster of a movie pretensions to intelligence and relationship-profundity most certainly is.
I was going to say that The Holiday is an insult to anyone who ever went to school and earned a single GCSE pass or a 25-metre swimming certificate, until I logged on here and found that people presumably over the age of 12 actually liked it. Tell me again: you actually liked this film?
And to pass off Cary Grant as coming from Surrey - "I know!" pipes Kate, ecstatically when the old geezer tells her this - is mind-numbing is what is tells us about the attitude of studio producers (and for good measure, this director and screenplay writer)to all of us: factual accuracy in movies: "Forget it, it doesn't matter, because you numbskulls, chuckleheads, mimbos and bimbos chewing popcorn and sucking down Coke won't notice and don't matter." For the record, just in case no-one else has mentioned it in this review section - and do forgive me for not reading every single one because to me, suicide is immoral - Cary Grant was brought up (or 'raised' for you USA'ers) in Bristol, which is a port in Gloucestershire, which is in the west of England and therefore, nowhere near bloody Surrey.
So The Holiday takes its place in my pantheon of the absolute and utter crap where it joins Orlando, The Piano and Cronenberg's Crash. It makes for a very strange bedfellow. I suppose this proves that if there's one thing worse than a supposedly intelligent art-house movie that stinks the place out from sheer badness and pretentiousness, it's a movie which by all that is sacred should be presented as being as dumb as it looks and which doesn't so much insult the intelligence and good nature of the audience as trample up and down on it with hobnail boots with sharp nails sticking out of the sole, pointy end down.
I came home, switched on the TV and watched an hour of House. All, thankfully, is not lost. Yet.
PS Since more and more people have logged on to the website to sing the praises - supposedly - of this film, I have become completely convinced that all of them, especially the one's saying, 'Phew, thank Heaven for romance', are kidding. No one intelligent enough to press the 'On' button on a computer can possibly like this movie: it is, simply, the worst movie ever made.