The movie ‘Valentine’s Day’
Today I saw the movie, ‘Valentine’s Day’ (a little after the holiday) but I wanted to see what all the hype was about. I did not love the movie but it was enjoyable.
The things I liked about it were the varied types of love relationships shown-a gay relationship, an older couple, a mother and child, two best friends turned lovers, child-like love, lustful teen love, a couple who wanted differing levels of commitment, a newly dating couple, a cheater simultaneously engaged in two relationships and a single successful woman who was lonely and looking for love. It showed a variety of situations that could happen on the road to love.
I also think that singles would appreciate the Anti-Valentine’s day party scene where singles were batting open the heart piñata and burning papers with the names of love interests who had hurt them.
We also saw examples of how a person (in this case the character played by Ashton Kutcher) could be wonderful yet still get dumped by a mate due to their emotional issues. This is important to remember in dating because it takes two people to make a relationship work. Likewise, the character played by Jennifer Gardner was attractive and wonderful yet she got duped by a married man. These examples show us that sometimes your relationships won’t t work out if your mate is not honest, emotionally available or ready for the same level of commitment that you are. But in the film, both the aforementioned characters move on and find someone better suited for them.
There weren’t that many deep lessons in this film that I could see. The most obvious one was that when you love someone you need to accept the good and the challenging parts of them and you need to forgive them for their mistakes if they have a great overall track record. We see this in the case of the long married older couple and the newly dating lovers.
The thing that I did not like much was the ending. It was a very Hollywood ending where everyone ends up taken and happy. While of course this is a good thing, it might have been more realistic to leave one person single on Valentine’s day enjoying the anti-valentine’s day bash and loving their life anyway. Also, the act of two best friends suddenly becoming an item at the last moment did not feel believable either. In life sometimes you get the happy ending, sometimes you don’t and sometimes it’s a timing thing and it can happen later. I would have preferred if they had some examples of these different endings so that the audience members felt represented.
Most of us want a romantic partner and this desire sometimes gets exacerbated on Valentine’s day, the day of Love. This movie definitely brings that out and it probably reminds us of our own search to find love, what brought us to this place and what we might still do (if we are single) to find that right person.
So, I guess I’d give this movie 2 or 3 out of 5 stars. It might be a Blockbuster or Netflix pick on a date night in your future.
My Best in Love,
Paulette
www.mydatingschool.com
Author of ‘Dating from the Inside out: How to Use the Law of Attraction in Matters of the Heart’ published by Atria Books.
Related Reviews:
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/445572/Valentine-s-Day-New-Line-/overview
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/movies/12valentine.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/movies/15arts-VALENTINESDA_BRF.html
http://www.iesb.net/extensions/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8377:movie-review-valentines-day-comes-whether-you-like-it-or-not&catid=41:news&Itemid=71
http://www.valentinesdaymovie.com/