someone please help this movie

Rating: 3/10 (11 December 2006)

The Holiday should be a better movie. It spends the first useless hour setting up what viewers already know is going to happen -- bla bla Kate and Cameron switch houses and learn wonderful life lessons by changing their environments etc etc--but the set up to get to the payoff is completely boring and almost intolerable at times--I found myself wondering how someone could have actually let all this slip in the editing process--the 15 minutes of Cameron Diaz arguing with Edward Burns about his infidelity was complete agony; all your standard dialog about the woman wronged and the "cute" little fits she throws...ENOUGH! The scenes with Cameron and Jude Law were great. He was charming and they made a good pair. If the movie had been completely about them it would have been twice as interesting, since they had good chemistry and I cared about seeing them end up together. However, the movie goes off in 20 different directions, including profiling aging Hollywood screenwriters, trying to include every metaphor possible about the Santa Ana winds, women and their endless hang-ups, the magic of the catharsis, conversations increasingly more awkward, yadda yadda yadda. This was grueling to sit through. And I really wanted it to be great. I kind of felt like all those awesome actors should have known better...it was hokey and surface scraping everywhere.