MY MOVIE SHELF: Wedding Crashers

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 142  Days to go: 96

Movie #296:  Wedding Crashers

Okay, sure, Wedding Crashers is funny in that rude, lewd, obnoxious, manic, crazy way that Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson do so well. It’s flippant and kind of offensive, if you were to think too long on it, but it’s so charming and light you really don’t think about it at all. You ride the wave of happy wedding montages and topless women and Vaughn’s rapid-fire proselytizing and Wilson’s permanent duckface, and it’s all good fun. Rowdy, bawdy fun. There aren’t enough movies like that these days, in my opinion.

However, Wedding Crashers isn’t just your typical frat brothers on steroids movies about dudebros. I mean, it is that, absolutely. But it also has a little bit of depth to it, and interesting flavor not often found in your average dudebro movie, and it comes from the three women characters played by Rachel McAdams, Isla Fisher (NOT Amy Adams, you troglodyte — yes, I am talking to you), and Jane Seymour. (Sadly, the depth these women add to the film still isn’t enough for it to pass the damn Bechdel test, which is sort of ridiculous. How hard would it have been for the two sisters to have a heart to heart before the one’s wedding? Was it in Christopher Walken’s contract that he be portrayed as the wise patriarch and last-word leader of the family or did everyone figure if they were going to pay his salary they might as well give him something to do?)

Now, Jane Seymour’s role (as matriarch Kathleen Cleary) is tiny to the point of almost being insubstantial. Except it’s not insubstantial at all because not only is she the sort of standard cougar-slash-inappropriately-sexual hot older woman who appears in all of these sorts of films from Animal House on through the ages, she’s also — brilliantly, amazingly, astoundingly — the exact maternal, mature version of Isla Fisher’s Gloria. That is, she’s just as oversexed, just as daring, and just as crazy. Once you see it, what a perfect mother-daughter pair they make, it’s simply fantastic. Seriously, it’s so, so great.

Gloria herself is fascinating because she’s really the perfect complement to Jeremy (Vaughn). John (Wilson) throws out this line at Claire (McAdams) early on, that “True love is the soul’s recognition of its counterpoint in another.” Well, Gloria is Jeremy’s counterpoint. Where he’s very hesitant and afraid of commitment, she knows immediately when she’s passionate about someone. When he turns to be kind of tentative about sex after learning she was a virgin, she reveals herself to be bold and unafraid (and not actually a virgin because, like him, she just tells her sexual marks what she thinks they want to hear, to make it easier to bang them). I really like that it’s this relationship that advances further than any other, and that, despite the deceptions of John and Jeremy, no one in the Clearly family objects to its proceeding into wedlock.

Claire, though, is the character that I think is most underrated. It would be really easy to just look at her as the standard prize in a movie like this. She’s the smart, do-gooder daddy’s girl who deserves way more than to be cheated on by her rich, successful, obnoxiously awful boyfriend-turned-fiancé-by-ambush (Bradley Cooper as Sack, which is really this character’s name, even though I always assumed everyone was just saying “Zach” weird, like with a lisp of some kind. What kind of name is Sack?). Only, she doesn’t quite fit that mold. She’s smart, yes, and she has a loving heart, of course, but the defining characteristic of Claire is actually that she’s really awkward and unsure of herself. She flubs her older sister’s wedding speech because she doesn’t know how to read a room or how to really act in social situations. She bites her tongue with Sack all the time because she doesn’t want to disappoint anyone, and she feels she’s “supposed” to marry him, but not even she can tell you whether she wants to or not. I really like that. I like that she’s not confident, that she doesn’t have all the answers. I like that she’s still figuring herself out, just as John is. It’s charming, and it gives the movie a lot more heart than it maybe deserves.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t earn its reputation as a great comedy. It absolutely does. Like I said, it’s funny and rowdy and bawdy and it knows how to mock the wedding crasher lifestyle as much as it lauds it. (Side note: I adore that these two characters are divorce mediators in their actual careers. It lends so much authentic motivation as to their compulsion to spend their weekends in blind celebration, chasing joy without strings or complications or disappointments.) Wedding Crashers is a great, silly, joyfully explicit comedy. There aren’t nearly enough of those these days. Especially not ones that do it as well as this one does.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Night at the Museum

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 182  Days to go: 183

Movie #195:  Night at the Museum

When you say you grew up in New York, most people assume that means the city and fail to realize there’s this whole giant state as well. I wasn’t as far away from Manhattan (while still being in New York) that I could’ve been, but back when I was a kid (when speed limits were lower and even major highways had fewer lanes), it took about seven hours to get there from where I grew up. I don’t know exactly, because the only times I went to (or through) New York City from my hometown were a couple times with my mom when I was really young, by tour bus, and again when I was eighteen, by train (but that was during a blizzard, so it took us forever — we didn’t reach our final destination of Washington D.C. until 3 A.M. and we left Syracuse, because our flight had been cancelled, at 1 in the afternoon). I’ve been to the city a few times as an adult, but mostly my memories of it start and end with those two or three single-day tour trips my mom and I took when I was still a little kid. We went shopping, rode up to the top of the World Trade Center, saw Cats, ate gross Manhattan Clam Chowder that made me puke, and visited lots of museums. My favorite, unsurprisingly, was the Museum of Natural History, where that big blue whale hanging from the ceiling was the most majestic and amazing thing I had ever seen.

Night at the Museum takes place in the Museum of Natural History. It’s a mostly fun little movie, though a bit slow and stilted in places. Yes, Ben Stiller (as night guard Larry Daley) can grate and sometimes the comedy devolves a little too much for my tastes, but I still hold a lot of love for this film, and I’m almost positive it’s due to that giant blue whale. It only makes one appearance, spraying Cecil (Dick Van Dyke) with its blowhole, but I adore it just the same.

The basic premise of the movie is that divorced dad Larry is a screw up who can’t hold a job and is constantly getting evicted, disappointing and upsetting his son Nick (Jake Cherry), who is really starting to look up to his mom’s fiancée Don (Paul Rudd, wearing four hundred phones on his belt like a douche). As a last-ditch hope, Larry gets an interview at the museum (Stiller’s awesomely funny mother, Anne Meara, plays the employment agency representative) to be a night guard. Larry gets the job — replacing outgoing and aging guards Cecil, Gus (Mickey Rooney) and Reginald (Bill Cobbs) — but finds out on his first night that a mysterious Egyptian tablet belonging to King Ahkmenrah (Rami Malek) brings everything to life at sunset. Chaos ensues, naturally, as everyone from Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams) — who has it bad for Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck) — to a skeletal T-Rex to a bunch of Neanderthals start roaming the halls and wreaking havoc. Even the tiny little diorama figurines, led by Jedediah of the Old West (Owen Wilson) and Octavius of Ancient Rome (Steve Coogan), start warring with each other and with Larry. There’s also a gross Capuchin monkey named Dexter who likes to steal keys and pee on things. On top of all that, there’s a secret plot to steal the tablet and other items from the museum that Larry must foil, in addition to keeping the displays under control and not losing them to the dawn (when they will turn to dust if they are outside the museum), and still manage not to get fired by museum director Dr. McPhee (Ricky Gervais). It’s a lot.

Like I said, Stiller tends to grate on me, but a lot of the supporting characters are truly great. The old guards, in particular, are fantastically spry, especially belligerent and pugilistic Mickey Rooney. The T-Rex that acts like a dog is also a lot of fun, and while most of Octavius and Jedediah annoy me, I really like the intercut scene where they flatten the van’s tires and the end scene when they jam to some music in a remote control car. Most notable, though, is how restrained but still utterly charming and funny Williams is as Teddy Roosevelt. He seems to perfectly embody the legend of the 26th president, or at least our modern idea of him, and is a steadying force against the wacky antics of literally everyone else. However, there is one wacky antic I unabashedly love, and that’s Brad Garrett voicing the Easter Island head, because that dum-dum wants some gum-gum.

In general, Night at the Museum isn’t a franchise I’m overly fond of, which is why I don’t own the sequel (despite thinking Amy Adams does a jolly good Amelia Earhart) and have little interest in the third movie coming out later this month. But this first movie is special to me, owing almost entirely to a little girl’s memories of her favorite New York City museum and that gorgeous big blue whale.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Cars

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #45: Cars

Look, I have kids. My son was 2 when Cars came out on DVD, and it was something he enjoyed watching. Owning it has to be one of the absolute smallest sacrifices I’ve ever made for my children. However, I don’t think there’s any denying that this is one of the worst movies Pixar has ever released.

The movie isn’t bad, per se, it’s just formulaic and bland. It’s the standard young-hotshot-gets-schooled-by-an-old-pro-and-small-town-folks-into-being-a-better-person (so to speak) movie, done up in some clever animation that anthropomorphizes motor vehicles. It has none of the heart and wit that Pixar is generally known for. The Toy Story franchise is about toys, yes, but also about life, about friends, about loyalty, and about growing older and becoming obsolete. Up and Wall-E are beautiful tales of love, commitment and redemption. Finding Nemo speaks to the power of the families we are born into, and the ones we find along the way. And the two Monsters movies (Inc. and University) tell similar stories to that of Cars — about taking a step back in life and learning what’s really important — but in a much more inventive and satisfying way. Cars mostly uses stereotypes and familiar tropes to throw shade on the rank commercialism and big business mindset of American culture.

Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is an upstart rookie race car who thinks he knows everything, who, through a series of odd occurrences ends up impounded in the little town of Radiator Springs off Route 66, sentenced to fix the main road he accidentally destroyed (lots of odd occurrences, but it’s a kid’s movie). Paul Newman, the original Hustler, shows up as Doc Hudson and has nothing but disdain for this car who is disrespectful to everyone and isn’t even that good a racer, considering Hudson was a former racing phenom. Meanwhile, Bonnie Hunt is a local Porsche (Sally) who used to live that fast-paced life and gave it up because she fell in love with this small-town one. She bemoans the interstate that bypassed the town and all the stores that ended up closing as a result, and teaches Lightning a little humanity through the power of her tramp stamp pinstriping. And Larry the Cable Guy is dim but lovable Tow Mater, who pretty much steals the show entirely with his unique brand of goofiness. It’s no wonder Mater emerged as the most popular character.

Naturally, McQueen turns over a new leaf and gives up his chance at a Piston Cup to show respect to a veteran racer, then moves his entire racing team hub of operations to Radiator Springs so he can be with his friends and revive the town. There’s nothing surprising or new or even all that interesting about it. It’s fine and easy for kids to enjoy, but it’s far too heavy-handed and simplistic to resonate emotionally for adults the way most of Pixar’s films have historically done. Not a bad movie, exactly, but fairly boring in the scheme of things.