My Last Valentine in Beirut in 3D

"This movie is for serious and smart people only" said the marketing tag-line. Then by all accounts, I'm a stupid person who knows nothing of seriousness. My Last Valentine in Beirut is not a movie. I have no idea what to make of it actually. It's a horrid mess. It's a nauseating spectacle. It's a disgustingly bad atrocity. It's a jumble of scenes with no apparent link between them except a quest to build up into a running time of approximately 80 minutes. Meet Juliette, a whore in Beirut. Meet a movie director and his assistant wanting to make a movie about Juliette. That's basically the entirety of My Last Valentine in Beirut for you. There's no depth in the movie. Not one bit. The characters are as flat as a board. The storyline – or lack thereof – is so void that you shouldn't even attempt searching for anything in it. The jabs at Lebanese society are delivered by the characters turning to face the camera – there's not even one hint of subtlety anywhere. The movie takes cheap shots at other Lebanese movies such as Caramel, Bosta and W Halla2 la Wein which by all accounts are much, much better than this mess. Juliette's attitude, obviously hyperbolic, becomes more than grating at points. The point of this being a critique of Lebanon today becomes entirely detached from what's happening on screen that any message the movie tries to pass feels forced especially as the last scene rolls around and you start wondering how the movie got to the conclusion it tries to bring forth with its obvious lack of build up towards anything mentally stimulating.

The absolutely useless 3D is only here for the extra revenue and it's so distracting at times that it visually hurts. Some camera angles, which are supposedly "artistic," don't make sense – even to someone like yours truly whose expertise when it comes to movies is restricted to being an enthusiastic viewer. Even the only sex scene in the movie is of such catastrophic execution that it becomes one of the movie's funniest moments. Those are not many.

You'd think that struggling Lebanese cinema would actually bother to come up with good enough movies especially with production being so scarce. But no, you get movies like My Last Valentine in Beirut which keep throwing one crappy scene after another at you in order to break the worst movie in history record, which is a shame really because the premise of a movie discussing prostitution in Lebanon is so dense that this movie, if actually done like a proper movie with a decent script, could have turned out well. Maybe. Who am I kidding. At some point during My Last Valentine in Beirut's rather short running time, I wished I was watching Breaking Dawn again. This was one of the worst movie experiences of my life. And that's not an easy feat at all. My Last Valentine in Beirut has shattered my faith in Lebanese cinema into so many little pieces that next time a non-Nadine Labaki Lebanese movie is released, I'll rely on other people going on a martyrdom viewing mission before I venture out.

Do not watch this. Even if your life depended on it. Even if your mother's life depended on it. You could use the $10 admission price in so many better ways, not to mention the time of your life you wouldn't have wasted trying to watch this cinematic massacre.

You can also find my review at: http://stateofmind13.com/

"To be honest, I've never been a fan of Selim el Turk's earlier attempts and I have nothing against the earlier Lebanese film-making experiences, but what 'My last Valentine in Beirut' offers is highly different. The movie is nothing like what you have seen before; this time, there's no waxing stories or Islamo-Christian melodrama; the content is a pure satirical approach that makes you lost between two scenarios: A: the director has too much money that he decided to fool around and set his own rules (highly doubtful), or B: we should man up as Lebanese visual artists and start having some balls, going experimental and caring less about the box office or the international feedback.

Don't get me wrong, I'm one of the few who proudly state their 'w halla' lawen' love story, but 'my last Valentine in Beirut' just took me on a ride to the absurd. The movie is indeed a visual risk, a game that could easily end in the trap of the 'sex sells' and the clichés connotations, but gladly it doesn't. The movie is an interesting piece of crap (in a positive way) that pokes fun of the film-making and audio-visual industry in Lebanon, and if you have missed the point then the whole thing is not really addressed to you.

A smart story-line playing in the midst of a visual chaos that reaches a moral without being too preachy; in the end 'Juliette' – the lead character – proves that we are all whores, from different backgrounds and for different reasons.

"My last Valentine in Beirut" is totally worth seeing if you belong to an audience that gets layered visual approaches and cherishes the huge need for imagination, actualization and self-criticism."