Holding on to “The Holiday”
By Sam Webster
The holiday season may very well be over with, but that is no excuse to pass up an opportunity to see a good seasonal movie. One particular film that comes to mind is the December release “The Holiday.” The movie has an all star cast featuring the always bubbly and bright Cameron Diaz, intellectual beauty Kate Winslet, pretty boy Jude Law, and the loveable and hilarious Jack Black, and carries a fresh plotline with no difficulty.
While many may view this film at first glance as cliché, upon viewing it, that could become an incredibly hard case to argue.
The story is simple. Two love-lorn women desperately want to escape all of their drama over Christmas and end up essentially swapping lives. While in each other’s respective homes, they meet and fall for guys, though they were both looking to avoid men at all costs at the beginning of the arrangement.
Okay, so it sounds like a cheap romance novel of sorts, but what is not told in all of the reviews and previews is what makes this movie so refreshing.
Often in the advertising of a movie, it seems that it has become a trend to give away the story and all of the best parts in the brief thirty-second spots shown every commercial break. The mystery and suspense of even the most drab movie is lost when you realize that you have seen all of the decent parts, and, in context, they were not even that great.
That is one thing to be grateful for when seeing “The Holiday.” While it definitely had its share of spots in commercial breaks, you do not get the feeling that the entire plot has been handed to you in a nice little package, wrapped in car and prescription drug commercials.
You may be waiting for me to delve more into why you should see this movie, and what makes it so wonderful, but to do so I would be compromising exactly what I do love about this movie: the fact that you do not get the full story until the end.
If I could equate this with a book, I would say that you shouldn’t skip to the end because you’ll be missing out on all of the hidden laughs, cries and real moments in the chapters. Or that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but that is so cliché.
