Valentine’s Day

And so the greeting-card holiday rigmarole gets the romantic comedy it deserves—too cocooned in its own shiny little Hollywood world to be called cynical, but in no genuine way romantic or comedic either. The screenplay by Katherine Fugate, from a story by Fugate, Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, would seem not to have been written so much as scribbled on cocktail napkins during the oft-referenced “early seating” at the Beverly Wilshire. But that’s no bother to the now apparently tone-deaf director Garry Marshall, here very much showing his roots in superficially nostalgic small-time TV, nor to stars Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Topher Grace, Jamie Foxx, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Garner, Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Bradley Cooper, George Lopez, Eric Dane, Kathy Bates, Patrick Dempsey, Taylor Lautner, Taylor Swift, Shirley MacLaine, Hector Elizondo, Carter Jenkins, Emma Roberts, and oh, I’ve run out of room to say anything else—just like the movie.