Season Two, Episode Eleven: Review: “Valentine’s Day”

For the Hallmark-created "holiday" also known as Single Awareness Day, err, I mean, Valentine's Day, I decided to watch Valentine's Day with a couple of my single friends. Coming into the movie, I wanted to keep an open mind since inevitably, I would be comparing it to Love, Actually.

Comparison to Love, Actually is inescapable. In the interest of full disclosure, I happen to thoroughly enjoy Love, Actually, and so I had hopes (though slightly dampened) about Valentine's Day; after all, in my experience, the US adaptations usually falls short of the originals (for example, Ringu (The Ring) , Abre los Ojos (Vanilla Sky) and L'Appartement (Wicker Park) among others).

Directed by Garry Marshall (of Pretty Woman and The Princess Diaries fame) and screenplay written by Katherine Fugate, the whole movie unfolds during Valentine's Day as it follows the lives of several couples, and their stories are told through the seemingly benign interconnections they have with each other.

The movie presents the clichéd conundrums about love that people face; there's the "love-between-two-best-friends-who-don't-know-it-yet", the "we've-been-together-a-long-time-but-I-have-a-secret-that-can-ruin-our-relationship" scenario, the "I-have-a-girlfriend-AND-a-wife" quandary, and the "grade school crush" dilemma.

What was billed as an all-star cast surely is; Jessica Alba, Kathy Bates, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper, Eric Dane, Patrick Dempsey, Hector Elizondo, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Topher Grace, Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah, Taylor Lautner, George Lopez, Shirley MacLaine, Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts, and Taylor Swift are featured in this ensemble film, which is quite a casting coup for Deborah Aquila and Mary Tricia Wood. And therein lies my biggest pet peeve about this movie: too many stars in one film. This all-star overload at times made me feel like the movie was one long cameo after the other.

Most of their stories are half-baked (maybe even quarter-baked?) and underdeveloped. There wasn't enough time devoted to dig a little deeper into the characters and to engage the audience to invest some emotional attachment; I couldn't care less about most of the characters, even if I wanted to. The movie's attempt to address the commercialism of Valentine's Day falls flat and doesn't register. In some ways, the chosen setting of this movie and the script reflect the stereotypical image of how Los Angeles is perceived as: shallow, disjointed, full of hopes and dreams, all rolled up in a ball of sunshine and smog.

Sure, they try to throw in a few kinks here and there, and I would have to say that there was ONE thing that I didn't see coming, but for the most part, the twists were telegraphic and thinly-veiled.

And I know this is a movie, but the suspension of disbelief can only go SO far. Raise your hand if can fathom for one second that NO ONE in Los Angeles would like to date someone like Jessica Biel's character, Kara Monahan. And while we're at it, can we give Patrick Dempsey a role that doesn't involve him being a doctor? The poor guy's going to be type-casted. And what was Queen Latifah's purpose in this movie? Waste of a talented actress. Same thing can be said about Kathy Bates. And don't even get me started with Jessica Alba's character, Morley Clarkson; I know why she was there, but really?

For what it's worth, the movie was entertaining at its finest moments, dragging (a rom-com should NEVER be longer than 90 minutes) and relentless at its worst. The standouts for me were Julia Roberts as Capt. Kate Hazeltine, Anne Hathaway as Liz, an aspiring writer with a salacious way of paying off her student loans, and Shirley MacLaine as Estelle, a retired actress with an impending wedding vow renewal with her husband Edgar, played by Hector Elizondo. Honorable mentions go to Taylor Swift, who was quite entertaining as the ditzy high school dance student (even with this good performance, she's still not out of the dog house for that Grammy autotune-less "performance") and Bryce Robinson as Edison, the gradeschooler stung by the love bug for the first time.

Is Valentine's Day worth the $11.50 for the movie ticket and the 2 hours of your life? Let's just say that I won't be buying the DVD, but if TBS is running a Sunday afternoon movie marathon, I might be persuaded to sit through it.

 

Grade: C-/C

Season Two, Episode Ten: The World Wide Web of Dating

Beta-max, Sony Walkman and floppy disks: What do they have in common? Marvels in their own time, but pushed out of ubiquity in favor of the newer and better available technologies. Could the "traditional" way of dating be next?

Through the years, the popularity of online dating sites like Yahoo!® Personals, Match.com and eHarmony.com is on the rise. According to a 2003 U.S. News and World Report, in August of that year, 40 million unique users visited online dating sites in the United States, about half the number of single adults in the US, and in all likelihood this statistic figures to have grown in today's time. Successes of the sites like Match.com and eHarmony.com have spawned off copycat sites like Amor.com, Gay.com and Shaadi.com, sites that cater to a wide range of interests and audiences.

OkCupid is another dating website, a site the Boston Globe calls "the Google of online dating," and New York Post declares "a perfect example of the Web 2.0 revolution." In many respects, it's a bit similar to other well-known dating sites like Match.com or eHarmony.com in that it tries to "match" its users. The way they do this is by having each user answer questions, both generated by the site, and by its own users. The big difference between OkCupid and other sites is that they rely HEAVILY on mathematical algorithms and analysis as the basis for their match percentage calculations. And it takes into account basically everything that a user does on OkCupid, from the number of messages sent and replied, to how often and when a user logs in, and the way the user answers the questions to generate a match percentage. And the best part of it all is that most of the site is FREE!

With this in mind and in the interest of full disclosure, I myself have partaken in this societal exercise. Come to think of it, I was a bit hard pressed to think of the last person that I was in a relationship with that I have met NOT using the interweb (for the sake of completion, we were in the same dance group when I was a senior in college).

The way that OkCupid works is that like other social networking sites, you have your profile, and it lists your basic information, hobbies, favorite books/music/food, the six things you could never do without, and other pertinent information. Then you can peruse other peoples' profiles, and if there is a connection there, you can either contact them via email, or if you're a bit reticent, you can send them a "wink" to try to get a conversation started.

I guess, subconsciously or consciously, we put our best foot forward when we write our profile pages. Many people have different ideas and different interpretations of what that phrase, "best foot forward" actually mean. Some people use the opportunity to show off their literary or artistic prowess, while some opt to show off their adept skills in sarcasm.

One of the advantages of online dating is that in theory, it makes the whole process a little easier. In many ways, sites like OkCupid streamline the whole dating process. This statement may come across as if I think this makes the whole online dating process more sterile and devoid of sentiment; that's not what I'm saying. You get to look through people's profile and see if there's anything there that piques your interest. For the most part, for me, it's not so much that I "know" if I'll get along with the other person. It's more that I'll "know" if the person has interested me in any level , enough to cross the threshold and warrant an email or a wink. In theory, it's a good allocation of precious resource (time). Pharmacy school surely has not helped in this regard. The tough curriculum and other school-related-extracurricular activities (and many more self-imposed forms of masochism) have left me with virtually no time to branch out and just live. When I can "weed out" potential non-matches, the likelihood of waddling through bad dates after bad dates is, in theory, dramatically decreased. It's just good allocation of precious resources. Now, there does exist the risk that I can disregard a particular profile when in fact, he would be something that I would greatly get along with. For now, that's the risk I'm willing to take.

The last couple of dates that I have had from people that I've met online have both been successful to an extent. Successful in that the first dates had lead to a second date, which led to a third date, but I guess after that, online dating can only take you so far? There are things that don't come across from an online profile that you can only ascertain from having a face-to-face interaction. "The game" is not just played out on cyberspace, but lived out in real-life as well.

The verdict? The question is not "is online dating the wave of the future? " because it's already here, and more and more people are getting in on it, but rather, has the time come to where online dating will be the predominant. Methinks that for now, online dating works for me and where I am in my life right now and in the near-term, but the "traditional" dating is not going out by the way of cassette tapes just yet.