NEW YEAR'S EVE

I'm one of those people who tends to have boring New Year's Eves in real-life, but this movie makes my evenings, where I sit on the couch in my pajamas and drink white wine while watching anime, look like a hootenanny.

Let me sum up New Year's Eve with a quick summary using bullet points, as that is pretty much how the film comes across... (adjusting glasses, beginning PowerPoint presentation). Dim the lights, please?

• Ashton Kutcher wears pajamas, hates New Year's, and is stuck in an elevator.
• Rachel Berry... I mean Lea Michele is a backup singer. She is also stuck in said elevator.
• Robert De Niro is dying.
• Halle Berry is a nurse.
• Cary Elwes is a doctor.
• Jessica Biel is pregnant and is unbearable (to me, at least).
• Katherine Heigl is a chef that doesn't seem to really touch food.
• Zac Efron is a bicycle messenger.
• Josh Duhamel wears a tuxedo.
• Til Schweiger is a German actor in an English language movie (this one) and has absolutely no comic timing (at least in English).
• Abigail Breslin wants to be kissed.
• Sarah Jessica Parker is her mom.
• Michelle Pfeiffer is bitter and wants to achieve her year's resolutions before midnight.
• Joey McIntyre is in New Kids on the Block and is in this movie for about two seconds.
• Hilary Swank is in charge of the ball dropping in Times Square. She gives a cliched speech that sounds like it has been ripped from a poorly-written Hallmark card, but it has the power to make hundreds of thousands fall quiet in awe.
• Ludacris is a cop that doesn't seem to do anything cop-y.
• Ryan Seacrest is Ryan Seacrest.
• And Jon Bon Jovi is... JENSEN! Jensen is the rock star with one name. Jensen humbly came from the farmland of rural Minnesota, where he was raised by his proud, hard-working Danish grandparents who ran a dairy farm. He knows what it is like to have a work ethic, as he helped with the family-owned business, selling their wares in local markets - everything to fresh milk to butter to handmade ice cream. But when MTV came around... well, Jensen missed it. He didn't actually see MTV until college because the Jensens couldn't get cable TV out on the dairy farm. So Jensen, the teenager, would listen to his transistor out in the barn, and dream of being in a band. This became a reality when he went to college in Minneapolis and starting playing feel-good arena rock with his buddies. Well, it became arena rock when they became so big they started playing arenas. Years later, Jensen could still fill a football stadium, but his heart was empty. He was yearning for love....

Oh. Wait. That whole paragraph about Jensen was a LIE! I totally just made it up. Here is the true story of Jensen, as presented in the movie:

• Jon Bon Jovi is Jensen, a rock star that gets punched in the face at least twice by Katherine Heigl.

These once-sentence character descriptions are not exaggerated in their brevity. There are so many people in this movie (oh, yes, there are many many more than I mentioned), that some have mere seconds of screen time, only to appear again half an hour later when we've forgotten all about them. And you'd think from even these short "plot" summaries that, in theory, this movie could have potential. But it is cursed with the death-knell of bad films: It is boring. BO-RING. I'm one of those people who tends to have boring New Year's Eves in real-life, but this movie makes my evenings, where I sit on the couch in my pajamas and drink white wine while watching anime, sound like a hootenanny.

The only... ONLY saving grace of this dullapalooza is Sofía Vergara. Sure, she plays the same hoochie-mama as she does on Modern Family, squirming like a wildcat and throwing herself, breasts first, in the general direction of Jensen. But at least she is funny. That sure is a helluva lot more than I can say about the rest of this overly long, overly bloated, over-stocked, and underwhelming holiday movie.

DVD + BLU-RAY NOTES

Oh, I know there will be some of you out there that will eat this movie UP, so here are your extras: There is a feature audio commentary by director Garry Marshall, there are unexceptional deleted scenes, there are a couple of featurettes where the cast and a handful of others like Ryan Seacrest and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg wax poetic about New Year's Eve (the real thing, not the movie), and Times Square, there's a gag reel, and a bit about Jon Bon Jovi and Lea Michele filming their song sequence at the climax of the film.