A few days ago, Susan and I watched Wedding Crashers.
Wedding Crashers is a film about one good supporting actor and one terrible supporting actor. They both sign up for an R-rated summer comedy that has a vulgar, witless, terrible script. Before they know it, Satan is proved to be real as audiences flock to their film, and before long it makes over $200 million during a year where audiences are supposedly staying home.
Wait, sorry. My mistake. What I just wrote was the real-life story behind Wedding Crashers, not the story of the film itself. To say the film is witless probably doesn't do it justice; it is as if they made the funniest film in history, examined the funny scenes, and decided to reshoot them all, only doing the exact opposite of the original content. The jokes are sophomoric, stupid, tasteless, witless, and stupid, all at once.
Not a single good performance is turned in. Owen Wilson is terrible, devoid of any charm and reading his lines from a cue card and pretending to be stoned without actually being stoned. Vince Vaughn has proven his worth before, but trades in his usual sarcastic calm for a slightly panicked jerkiness. Christopher Walken is in many scenes, but obviously the producers thought that simply having Walken around is funny, because he is not assigned one single joke. Will Ferrel turns in a cameo as the most over-exposed idiot in show business. Wait, there I go again, confusing the plot of the film with real life. In the film, he plays a funeral crasher.
Every character is achingly unsympathetic. Wilson and Vaughn play two dickheads who come to weddings uninvited to score with lovelorn chicks. Both are total liars and frauds, even to each other. The script demands that Wilson fall in love with Rachel McAdams after four minutes of movie flirting, and her character is a grade A bitch for cheating on her fiancee. Wait, this infidelity is supposed to be okay, because the fiancee is a sadistic sociopath who maliciously injures every man and joyfully fucks every women he sees. Rounding out the list of wonderfully pleasant characters are a cursing granny, a psychotic redhead who molests Vaughn, and a gay 'artist' who only wants to molest Vaughn. Ho ho.
Wedding Crashers is bad beyond belief. Startlingly unfunny with the moral compass of a horny 16 year old football player, all involved should be ashamed, including the audience that made it a financial success. At a time where those on the right and the left claim our culture is spiraling into Hell, Wedding Crashers is a painful reminder of the divide between smart people and stupid people of all nationalities, races, or creeds.
0 out of 5
3 comments:
Here is a good idea for a graduate thesis.
Take all known movies and show them to any number of audiences. Analyze the audience reactions. If the reaction of a particular scene was "Laughter" then mark that scene as "laughter". Other such marks could include "Tears," "Yawning," or "Edge of Seat". Sceens that received the most "Laughter" points will then be good to use over and over and over again in comedy movies. Simply remove the character names and replace them with variables. For example, if the scene "Sylvester slips on a banana peal" generates laughter in 90% of all audiences, then this scene is useful. Remove the name sylvester and replace it with the variable { S : Cat that likes to eat birds }.
With enough data, it is possible to generate a movie purely using a comuter with a random number generator that contains only scenes that everyone has seen before but really enjoys. Such movies are guaranteed to be successful as they only contain scenes that people like. I propse a 20 million dollar research grant be awarded to me to research this method of writing movies.
(This thesis was rejected as it has already been a common practice for writing movies since Michael Eisner became CEO of Dieney.)
Ouch (the Disney thing-modern Disney sucks; I would hope Walt would be ashamed.)
Also remember:
A thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters would one day fill the largest landfill with paper covered in inky gibberish.
Sorry, no Shakespeare.
Actually dustin is misquoting, infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters would eventually produce shakespeare by mere chance. If it's only a thousand then he's probably right, Disney must only have a thousand monkeys on staff.
I myself sat through this one with my girlfriend and some friends, one of whom had insisted we watch it. Everyone laughed, except me. I was honestly kind of grossed out by two men lying and using women, none of the women seemed to mind though. I was then sort of frightened when it seemed like vince vaughn was about to get sodomized while he was tied up, but in a movie that seemed to take it's biggest plot points from a perverse sense of justice I probably shouldn't have been surprised.
I guess whoever did the casting thought that bringing vaughn and ferrel back together would give them the funniest movie since "old school" Well, they were right.
Post a Comment