Anne Hathaway Is Made of Teflon-Coated Adamantium

It's taken me a few days to really recover from the ordeal that was Valentine's Day.

The film takes the concept of dreadful to new depths. It's an abomination, a safe, sterile, cynical mess that is more concerned with making sure all possible audience demographics are pandered to than it is in saying anything. Wait, I take that back; that would imply the committee who spawned this horror were in any way concerned with saying something. Calling the movie Valentine's Day must have been some kind of sick joke on their part. It's an unromantic anticomedy that will almost assuredly result in far more children being killed (as their mothers, in a desperate act of mercy, try to spare them the knowledge that they were born into a universe that could allow such a hollow, soul-withering, cancerous dung heap to exist) than conceived in its unholy wake.

Watching Valentine's Day is like staring into the dripping, newly risen, sanity-blasting visage of Cthulhu, if Cthulhu were played by Ashton Kutcher and dressed in pink.

And with that said, Anne Hathaway is impossible not to like in the movie.

I'm now convinced she could do anything, and still come across as cute and lovable. "Hey, look, Anne Hathaway starred in a remake of Salo. Aww, look, she's being forced to eat shit and mechanically fuck the guy she kind of has a crush on in front of witnesses. How adorable!"

It's uncanny. Here she is, trapped in the kind of vacuous hellscape that only Garry Marshall could vomit up, and she ends up being the only remotely human, remotely likable character in the whole damned thing. She's forced to do terrible Russian dominatrix and Southern belle voices (because, silly, she moonlights as a phone sex operator and Valentine's Day is the busiest day of the year! Even though she has a date with Topher Grace! Wacky hijinx must surely ensue!) and even the fact that she's doing truly abominable accents just makes her seem all the more charming and quirky and sweet.

I've got no desire to see the inevitable train wreck that will be Tim Burton's Alice in BeatingMyStalePseudogothyVisualShtickIntoTheGroundLand, but I'm sure Hathaway will emerge from that one unscathed too.

By the way, I'm not sure if this came across or not, but Valentine's Day isn't actually very good.