The Holiday (2006/Blu-ray + DVD-Video)
Picture: B+/B- Sound: B+/B- Extras: C- Film: C
When it
comes to making fluff films, nobody is fluffier than writer/director Nancy
Meyers, whose films are often torture tests.
The latest and oddest yet is The
Holiday (2006) offering the would-be auteur of cotton candy drama
attempting to be artistic and profound.
It has Cameron Diaz as a wife who is being cheated on, but the Holiday
season might help her. Unfortunately,
the attempts still involve slapstick that make this feel like “Christmas Time – Full Throttle” as the
film tries to have it both ways, serious and funny at the same time.
If that
was not immature enough, we get Jude Law and Rufus Sewell as near doppelgangers
of each other, Jack Black in a “serious” role that does not work and is more
about him being calm than anything else and the underrated Kate Winslet wasted
as another woman who will meet her after they have been “6,000 miles apart”
which is how long the 136 minutes of this fuzzy/phony work is.
Adding
Eli Wallach did not save it (you’ll wish he pulled out his six shooter from
Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns and start shooting up the Christmas Trees) and
having Edward Burns playing another version of… Edward Burns seems outright
condescending and desperate at the same time.
Coming out in March for some reason, you’ll want to mark this one “do
not open ‘til X-mas” and hopefully forget where you put it.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on the DVD is not bad, but the 1080p
digital High Definition version is that much better, with the kind of good
depth and even some detail the DVD cannot deliver. Dean Cundey, A.S.C., shot a much better
holiday film, John Carpenter’s Halloween! At least he knows how to bring the seasons
alive. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix on both
discs are fairly good, but the PCM 5.1 mix exclusive to Blu-ray is clearer,
smoother and will help you stay more awake through it all. Too bad Hans Zimmer’s score is a
sometimes-dippy snoozer. Extras include
several trailers for other Sony releases, a making of featurette and audio
commentary with Meyers and many guests.
- Nicholas Sheffo
