Flowers, Phone Sex, and Disappointment

For starters, Valentine's Day was not as bad as I expected. Anne Hathaway was hilarious, Jessica Biel was smoking hot, and Topher Grace, as always, was absolutely adorable.

That being said, I understand reviewers who said that it was an utter waste of two hours. And with movie prices going up, I think I'd rather have kept the $14 I spent on Fandango than sit through this collection of vaguely intertwined celebrity cameos.

From the opening credits alone, it was clear that producers were trying to create something a la Love, Actually and He's Just Not That Into You. I never saw the latter, but I can say most definitely that this doesn't nearly live up to the holiday quirkiness of Love, Actually. Valentine's Day seems to rest on its star-studded cast, and with little if any unifying plot, it just isn't enough.

The target audience for this film is clearly straight middle-aged single women. And with an awkwardly head-over-heels flower shop manager and a sexually frustrated celebrity publicist I think it may have succeeded in that respect.

But so much of the film seemed to be filled with unnecessary attempts to further boost the number of celeb appearances. I don't want to step on any toes, but Taylor Swift is just annoying. Her high school romance with famously well-toned ex Taylor Lautner seems like something demanded in exchange for using her song "Today was a Fairy Tale" during the credits. (For more on why I find Miss Swift so frustrating, please read this article.)

And now, to get to the question on everyone's mind -- the gays. Eric Dane plays a professional football player who (spoiler) comes out in a press conference toward the end of the movie. And it is not until the last few seconds that we find out that his lover, played by Bradley Cooper, isn't a straight man trying to seduce Julia Roberts' character. I was happy to see a gay subplot in this otherwise heteronormative film, but as a sort of "gotcha" moment at the end of the movie this frustrated me. Gay depictions in pop culture are obviously fabulous and necessary, but personally I think we deserve more than being merely a punch line. That being said, this movie did have gay characters that weren't your typical, to quote Lucy Lawless, "cardigan-wearing hand-flappers." You make the call.

-- ANDREW WAILES

Previously > Chatter: Anne Hathaway