Valentines Day

Last weekend I watched the movie Valentines Day. It is the type of movie that reminds you of a soap opera. There's way too many characters to count and somehow in the end you realize they all know each other. There's drama, comedy, and romance. It was just what I suspected it would be, yet once the movie was over, I said to myself: "Wow that was actually a really good movie." Which left me wondering: what made this movie so good?

To explain every character would just be confusing and very strenuous, so I will make things a little simpler. There is a man named Dr. Harrison Copeland who is shown with his girlfriend on the morning of Valentines Day. He tells her he has to leave right away to go to San Francisco for work. Turns out he goes to Beverly hills to visit his wife and daughter which his girlfriend doesn't know exists. When he gets there and sits down at the breakfast table he picks up 3 oranges and starts to juggle them, and following that his wife says "doesn't daddy juggle well." I caught that quote and realized how it also applied to how he handles his life. He can "juggle" having an affair with his girlfriend, while also living with his wife and daughter, and have no one else know. Ashton Kutcher plays a character in the movie named Reed Bennett who proposes to his girlfriend. While proposing he says that is dad told him "If you're ever with a girl that's too good for you, marry her." As soon as he said that, I started to wonder if the marriage would really last. In a way this was almost a type of foreshadowing because without directly letting the audience know, Reed implied that his girlfriend was way too good for him. Just as I had suspected, in a matter of hours his girlfriend had left him. This had made me realize that there can be foreshadowing like with Dr. Harrison Copeland where it is evidently implying the quote not just literally, and then there is foreshadowing like with Reed Bennett, where it is very subtle and indirect, yet it still makes you think.

Being called Valentines Day, the movie is all about romance. It's about heartbreak and proposals and falling in love. Throughout the movie the writer threw in little inspirational quotes to set the mood of the movie. One quote that I caught was from a man working at a flower shop who said: "For some people love doesn't exist unless you acknowledge it in front of other people." Following that quote, a different actor would have their dilemma about how his girlfriend wasn't ready to be seen in public with him wearing her new engagement ring. I found that just those few lines and bits and pieces of how they made the movie flow from one scene to the next is what kept me interested. By every once in a while throwing in a few of those lines by each character to help set the mood was a good way to let the movie flow and not seem "choppy" like some soap opera's can when moving from scene to scene.

Watching this movie helped me realize the dynamic of how movies are put together, and in particular I noticed all the small and subtle things that turn a movie from "alright" to "great." In a story with so many characters it would be difficult to transition from one character to the next, but this movie really helped me notice that without the little things such as transitions and foreshadowing, a movie can be a lot less interesting.