Yesterday, my parents-in-law gave me The Holiday for my birthday. I've seen it before (with my mother and sister-in-law), and loved it then, which is why I wanted to own it. We watched it last night and I still love it.

It's a very gentle tale about two women, one from L.A. and one from England, who swap houses to get away from their lives and their failed relationships, and, of course, each find love in the intervening two weeks. At one point, legocoach said, "It's almost like they didn't have enough movie to fill the time," and it's a recurring theme on the Rotten Tomatoes reviews as well, but I think the movie did a great job of actually showing how two couples fall in love with the real person inside their partner. These were real people, with real issues, and while they may have been solved rather quickly, you know that the couples truly connected with each other.

The other comment that shows up time and again on reviews of ALL romantic comedies is how predictable they are, which I think is the other side of the same criticism that condemns romance for the requisite happy ending. Of course romantic comedies are predictable--that's the point. But as we repeat time and again in romance criticism, it's the journey to that predictable ending that's the point. And maybe film critics/reviewers are saying that the journey is predictable--they rarely make that clear--but I still say it's time for a film reviewer who analyzes romantic comedies for what they are, rather than for what they aren't.

As one of the characters says in The Holiday, before films needed to be "Blockbusters," before they needed to be engulfed in special effects, the writing and the acting made the movie, and romantic comedies were lauded as much as dramas. But it's very rare nowadays to find a romantic comedy that critics appreciate, because of bemoan what it isn't.

I'd like to make this into a TMT post, but I'm really not a film critic and I know it, and I don't want to sound like too much of an idiot and have people be able to pick apart my main argument because of my lack of film knowledge.