Feast of Love

Remember in the 40's when composers and lyricists would get together and right a dozen or so good songs and then sit there and say - "How do we turn this into a musical"

What happens here is a writer, who clearly thinks he is more profound and prophetic than he really is, wrote down a dozen or so Hallmark lines and then must have said to himself "How do I make a movie out of this"

I have to admit the premise sounded interesting enough. A crop of people, seemingly connected to one another, each stronger to find love and identity within love and we'd have God himself commentating on the action and even offering advice to these lonely hearts.

Yup, that might have made a good movie.

What we have instead is a group of dumb, glorified losers who can't learn from their mistakes regardless of how many opportunities they are given.

It's hard to feel anything for characters who are so unrealistic and who you want to slap over the head to many times.

Performances were wasted all over the place. Selma Blair, who I think is desperately lookingfor respect in diveristy is an absolutely pointless character, simply there to propel Greg Kinnear's character. Kinnear himself might as well have done is blindfolded (a gag wouldn't have hurt either). Kinnear is a respectable actor who has made some great choices of late, but it seems he was looking for another Little MIss Sunshine but missed the bullseye (I think he may have actually missed the board). The rest of the cast is made of of your typical starts of direct to DVD fare with the exception of Morgan Freeman, who actually turns in a reasonable performance in an impossibly mundane and contrived role.

The biggest problem was that this film made every attempt to be a little bit of everything and failed miserably at every turn. It wanted to be poignant, it wanted to be bold, it wanted to be quirky and it wanted to have a message. It was none of those things and the message was "be careful when you green light a crap script". It's an impossible task to have your audience feel anything when you don't devote enough time to any character or any story and then are forced to wrap it up in such a contrived way simply to wrap it up. It tells the audiences that you believe they are stupid enough to buy into it and it's offenisve enough to completely turn us off your film. Oh, and boobs won't fix those problems either.

I've certainly seen worse movies in the past year, but this one is different because it left me jaded. The other movies were bad, and knew it and tried to make the best of it. This movie tried to trick me into liking it. Didn' work.

1.5 out of 5