The Longest Holiday

Rating: 1/10 (7 January 2007)

What can you say about a big-name, big-budget romantic comedy, when the most romantic, in-synch, compatible duo is a brother-and-sister pair? And what can you say when two of Hollywood's most beautiful women portray losers-in-love who escape their unhappy situations by crossing the Atlantic Ocean and the North American land mass to each fall in love with a nebbish? (And take my word for it, when one of the male leads has a personality transplant in the middle of the film, he suddenly turns from a dashing cad into a nebbish, while, curiously, Kate Winslet's Iris becomes a mensch.) A rather formulaic comedy, with pretty girls and boys, stunningly-beautiful Hollywood mansions and quaint, snow-dusted English cottages, "The Holiday" recounts the story of two unhappy career women whose love-lives are in the "loo," as we Americans believe the English might say, and therefore switch homes for two weeks, although the first 6 hours of the house swap seem to take days, and then time stands still for, oh, I don't know, about a month, not to give the four leads the opportunity for character development, but for the lovely Iris to adopt the grandfatherly walker-bound Eli Wallach, take a six-month crash course in physical therapy to cure him of his disability so he can throw away his walker (and his home-health-aide, whatever happened to her?) enabling him to walk to the stage at the tribute to his work -- and since he never responded to their repeated letters until Iris talked him into it, they must have taken about 9 more months to plan the tribute and fill the auditorium to SRO -- except, wait, save two seats down front for Iris and her new boo, Miles (Jack Black), a movie-trailer music editor.
Amanda (Cameron Diaz), a movie-trailer editor, falls madly in love with the lovely Jude Law  and by the way, they should forget about cloning sheep over there, and just clone Jude Law  while clearly, the man who haunts her dreams is not Law's dashing book editor (is everyone in this movie an editor? Doesn't anyone have a real job?), but Movie Trailer Announcer Guy, whose vocal appearances are Oscar-worthy vignettes, if indeed there was a category for "Best Vocal Appearances in Vignettes." After the longest holiday on record (16 months and 6 hours by my count) all ends happily ever after with a cheerfully creepy New Year's Eve party attended by all the interested parties (but no Rufus Sewell, or Ed Burns? Boo!) and two precious moppets who, although sisters, obviously do not belong to the same gene pool (although the older one looks suspiciously like Eli Wallach) and, as a famous writer once said, all's well that ends well.
I can't wait for the sequel, a bloody thriller called, "The Holiday Two: New Year's Day," where jilted lovers Rufus Sewell, Ed Burns, and that unemployed home health care aide, arrive to exact their revenge.