Wedding Crashers

New from Nick at Nite:

Wedding Crashers

This is the funniest movie I have ever seen. It has no match, it has no equal. Vince Vaughn (Couples Retreat) is as funny as it gets. Who could have seen this coming for the lanky kid who got his big break playing the spoiled legacy in Rudy? That is right, I saw Rudy again the other night to celebrate the impending college football season and couldn’t believe it when I recognized him in a bit part. When he scores one near the end of the game to help get Rudy on the field and tells Sean Astin “that one was for you,” no one could have imagined several years later he would be immortalizing the word “Motorboat.” Speaking of immortalized, what about Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman? Holy smokes, one can only hope this movie has a sequel and that Jane Seymour (Live and Let Die) returns to reprise her role. I am not suggesting this movie is long on plot. It is not. I am also not suggesting that it has any highbrow humor. It does not. It is filled with one liner after one liner. It contains the kind of jargon, lingo, and back and forth that mirror most interactions between men. As such, it is brilliant. Vaughn and Owen Wilson (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) play each other’s wingmen as they go from wedding to wedding to wedding hoping to score with whatever cute girl they can find (basically mirroring what men do all of the time, whether at weddings, the grocery store, doctor’s office, wherever). Hilarity ensues when one of our heroes actually falls for one of the girls at a wedding. I won’t spoil any of the gags because that is where the humor is, I will suggest that you have one or two beers before you see it or during the movie, as I think it could only add to the experience. I give the movie an “A.”

Wedding Crashers; East of Eden

From the desk of The Movie Snob:

Wedding Crashers (C-). There were some chuckles in this buddy-flick-slash-romantic comedy, but not nearly enough to justify the two-hour running time. Owen Wilson (The Internship) and Vince Vaughn (Four Christmases) are buddies (and apparently divorce lawyers, judging from the opening scene with cameos by Dwight Yoakam (Four Christmases) and Rebecca De Mornay (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle) as a splitting couple), and they get their kicks by crashing weddings and picking up women at the receptions. Complications set in at their biggest crash of all – the wedding of the oldest daughter of the U.S. Treasury Secretary (played by Christopher Walken, Jersey Boys). Vince’s character gets mixed up with the Secretary’s psychotic youngest daughter Gloria (Isla Fisher, Confessions of a Shopaholic), while Owen’s falls hard for the sensible, sensitive middle daughter Claire (Rachel McAdams, Mean Girls). Vaughn and Gloria get most of the laughs, while the usually entertaining Wilson is mired in the laborious cliché of the main plot. Can he win the girl away from her jerk boyfriend, despite having met her under false pretenses? More importantly, does it have to take 119 minutes for him to do it?

East of Eden (B-). I completed my traversal of the James Dean trilogy by watching the DVD of this, which I think was his first major picture. Set in northern California in 1917, it is the story of brothers Cal and Aron Trask, who have been raised by their strict Christian father after the early death of their mother. Aron (Richard Davalos, Cool Hand Luke) is the favored and dutiful son, while Cal (James Dean, Giant) is the troubled ne’er-do-well. The plot is set into motion by Cal’s discovery that their father may have been less than forthright with him and Aron about what happened to their mother. Throw in some strong attraction between Cal and his brother’s girlfriend, and you’ve got a real soap opera on your hands. Worth a look, although I still don’t think Dean was a particularly good actor.

Shanghai Knights

New from The Movie Snob

Shanghai Knights. (D) It’s never good when you see a movie at a dollar theater and feel like you didn’t get your money’s worth. That happened to me last night. Although I don’t really remember Shanghai Noon very well, I distinctly remember liking it and thinking that it was a cut or two above the average comedy on offer from Hollywood. I didn’t expect the sequel to be as good, but it turned out to be a disappointment despite my low expectations. Maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety, but Knights resorted to vulgarity and crudity for laughs way too often for my tastes.

P.S. Trivia–The actress who played Queen Victoria in this movie also appeared in what recent Renee Zellweger film?

Shanghai Nights; Old School; The Good Girl

These reviews are courtesy of John. John is the oldest member of our Movie Court, and we sometimes affectionately refer to him as “The Grade Inflater.” But he was surprisingly rough on this latest batch of movies….

Shanghai Knights. (C+) The follow-up to the surprisingly entertaining Shanghai Noon, starring Jackie Chan (Rush Hour) and Owen Wilson. This time, they’re in England chasing down the . . . yada yada yada. Mildly amusing but more of the same. I like Owen Wilson (ex-boyfriend in Meet The Parents) enough to make it worth a matinee, but am uncomfortable making a recommendation.

Old School. (B) I laughed out loud a few times, mostly at Will (Talladega Nights) Ferrell’s idiotic hijinks. There was enough funny stuff to keep me entertained and at least a semblance of a plot, albeit completely unrealistic, to officially qualify it as a top-notch guy flick, for what that’s worth. A relative lack of the gross-out Austin Powers Goldmember-type humor was a positive.

The Good Girl. (D+) I rented what I believed to be some basic chick-flick feel-good movies. I got this one wrong (maybe I’ll actually read the box for a description of the movie next time). Jennifer Aniston (The Switch) plays a hapless check-out girl at a generic dept. store who’s discontent with her bland life. John C. Reilly (Chicago) plays the likeable but simple underachieving devoted husband. Jennifer meets a Holden Caulfield wanna-be and her life becomes even more of a struggle. Aniston is a reasonably good, as is Reilly, but the movie is just a depressing bag of turmoil (works well with geraniums). I thought it sucked, frankly, though there were a few humorous scenes involving a female co-worker (Zooey Deschanel, The Happening).

Finally, with due respect to the Queen, I liked Undercover Brother. No way that’s an F. I agree fully with the One Hour Photo review.