"VALENTINE'S DAY" MASSACRE

Gary Marshall's "Valentine's Day"opened to huge box office over the weekend, and to almost unanimous critical pans. So the MLB salutes this big-buck winner by listing some of its top notch, negative reviews -- some funny takes that are actually more entertaining than the movie.

For context, critics do this all the time. When a massive audience pays no attention to their reviews of pop blockbusters (like"Transformers, Revenge of the Fallen," "GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra") they stem off a sense of impotency by flexing a whole lot of creative-writing muscle, extending themselves to put out a good review for a bad movie. It's writing for pure pleasure, piling up jokes and metaphors, and adding an extra dash of meanness to exact revenge for that wasted time in the theater.

Pauline Kael panned "The Sound of Music" as "The Sound of Money"(which finished her job at Redbook magazine).

 Roger Ebert hated the "Ace Ventura" movies with "... he has to snort long and loudly, in order to gather his mucous supply, which he seems to be drawing not only from the sinus area but from every inner bodily crevice. The fundamental principle of this series is that less is not more, and more is not enough."

John Simon went off on a three paragraph riff about Barbara Streisand in "A Star is Born:" "... her clothes, a screen credit states, came out of her closet... so she insists on wearing the most ridiculous glad rags, especially on horseback where she looks like a takeoff on Brando in his "Missouri Breaks" granny outfit."

But nothing in recent memory has brought such a fun glut of critical carping as "Valentine's Day." The MLB selected just a few:

Andrew O'Hehir, SALON

After calling the movie "teeth grindingly, mind-warping boring" he lets it all out: "... it feels like hours, or years, or geological epochs. Generations of mice lived and died under the theater seats, spawning aspartame-poisoned new generations while I was watching this.

Prairie Miller, NEWSBLAZE
As Hathaway moonlights on the sly during work hours as a phone sex operator to make ends meet and pay for her health insurance and outstanding student loan, her dirty talk is so lame PG that the actual phone sex industry may end up losing business.

Betsy Sharkey, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
(lengthy, I know, but it sure makes the point)

Here's the set-up: Ashton loves Alba, while his best friend, Jennifer Garner, is in love with Patrick Dempsey, who lives in the same building as teenager Taylor Swift, who's in love with Taylor Lautner, who goes to the same high school as Emma Roberts, who's contemplating sex with boyfriend Carter Jenkins. Emma also baby-sits 10-year-old Bryce Robinson, who is sure he's found "the one," while his long-married grandparents Hector Elizondo and Shirley MacLaine consider renewing their vows.

Stay with me here, we're not finished yet. Across town, Topher Grace (if only Mila Kunis had shown up we could have had a "70s Show" reunion) and Anne Hathaway are getting serious, Eric Dane's football career is suddenly in question, which means his agent Queen Latifah has issues, to say nothing of his publicist Jessica Biel, whose anti-Valentine's Day party is in jeopardy too. Meanwhile local TV sportscaster Jamie Foxx is forced to spend the day reporting on romance thanks to his heartless boss Kathy Bates, when he really needs Biel to score him an interview with Dane. Flying high above all these entanglements are flirty seatmates Bradley Cooper and Julia Roberts on a transatlantic, or should I say transromantic, flight bound for L.A., though considering the mess below who would want to land.

Manohla Dargis, THE NEW YORK TIMES
This might not be the Titanic of romantic comedies (it's tugboat size), but it's a disaster: cynically made, barely directed, terribly written. But quick: there's still time to escape.

Okay blogsters, you've been counseled, informed and pre-warned.

Let me know what you think of the movie.