I sneaked into the movie theater today and caught a double feature: Rocky Balboa and The Holiday. I'd heard good things about Rocky, and it has a high tomato score, while I thought The Holiday might be just a little too full of coincidences and clichés, and its tomato rating was subpar. But still, it had a great cast, and more importantly it started like 5 minutes after Rocky ended - perfect for movie hopping!

I won't go into a detailed analysis of each movie, just that my expectations were the reverse of my experiences. Rocky was fine, certainly not embarrassing, and it left you with a good feeling, more holistic and less ecstatic than the highs most sports movies try to achieve. Stallone's character is humble and seems to be finding wisdom with age, and there are a lot of quips from him that sound natural and not written in "by force" to make us laugh, which is why we do. He's one of us. The problem is the supporting cast, which does nothing to help him out. And the final fight scene, which I was looking forward to being something special, turned out to be rushed and anticlimactic - maybe even deliberately so, as an artistic statement. So, like I said, a decent good-values movie, even a good character study of the aging protagonist, just not an exciting boxing flick.

The Holiday on the other hand surprised me a bit at each turn. I won't say it's without its rom-com clichés, but the characters are all so good looking, well-dressed, and charming that it's still fun to watch them work. It avoids the big crisis or misunderstanding in the middle that gets resolved at the end before everyone lives happily ever after. Instead there are minor misunderstandings or difficulties that must be overcome along the way, and it all goes pretty smoothly. The dialogue is above average, and there's fairly good chemistry between the couples - one a bit more than the other. I like Jack Black a lot but his character wasn't developed nearly enough, leaving his quirkiness a bit of a non sequitur. I know the writers were probably trying to avoid having a cast of four beautifully bland model-types by going in a different direction with Black's character, but it just didn't work very well for me. Still, it's a solid and up-to-date romantic comedy that resists overutilizing today's memes/zeitgeist and left me smiling and noticing the all the cute woman in my midst just a bit more. *Sigh*