The Holiday

-(Picture to Left) Kate Winslet and Jack Black are a perfect match in Nancy Meyer's The Holiday

*** Stars

This is a textbook chick flick film. In the beginning, the characters are lost with love and miserable. And through the film they see what's important in their lives and have that sudden epiphany. Nancy Meyers creates a very predictable and very corny love story. However, like Rocky Balboa, it is one of the few pleasant surprises of the holiday season.

In England, Iris (Kate Winslet) is in love with a man who is about to marry another woman. Across the globe, Amanda (Cameron Diaz) realizes the man she lives with has been cheating on her. So the two women who have never met and live 6000 miles apart, find themselves in the exact same situation. They somehow meet online at a home exchange website and impulsively switch homes for the holiday. Now any normal person would find this creepy as hell, but somehow it makes sense. Iris moves into Amanda's L.A. house in sunny California as Amanda arrives in the snow covered English countryside. Both these homes and both these women are ridiculously beautiful and are only found in the movies. Shortly after arriving at their destinations, both women are clichéd into finding two men who seem so perfect for one another, that it is borderline insulting to the rest of us ordinary people. Amanda is charmed by Iris's brother Graham (Jude Law) and Iris, with inspiration provided by a legendary screenwriter named Arthur, finds a film composer named Miles (Jack Black). The story journeys back and forth between the two women's lives and they discover that maybe it is time to be impulsive and take a chance.

The cast is great here. Cameron Diaz and Jude Law work well together, but Kate Winslet and Jack Black steal the show. Their chemistry is dynamite. It felt the two should be together in real life. Forgive and forget the Nancy Meyer clichés (like we see in her other films with What Women Want and Something's Gotta Give) with the cheesy lines and recycled romantic comedy ideas, and you will forget that the film is two hours and fifteen minutes long and enjoy this nice Christmas treat.