Plain View #87 - April 30, 2008

Nim's Island

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Pretty Woman

Day of Silence

Everything Must Change

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Ric and I were in the mood for a comedy, and Wedding Crashers is one of the most popular rentals on Netflix, even a few years after it was released, so we decided to give it a go. The movie starts off with a promising premise: guys who crash weddings to hook up with bridesmaids. There's a great montage of these experiences right at the beginning, and then it quickly settles into its actual plot, which features John (Owen Wilson) falling in love with a bridesmaid named Claire, played by Rachel McAdams. While John falls in love, his partner in crashing, Jeremy (Vince Vaughn), has many misadventures with Claire's family, including a sparky little redhead played by Isla Fisher.

We watched the "uncorked" version of the movie, so I have no idea what the theatrical release was like. Surprisingly, the uncorked version didn't seem all that out-there, with the exception of a few female nude scenes. What surprised us was that the whole movie was a lot less raunchy than we had expected. I thought there were going to be jokes left and right, but it's actually a lot more serious than that, because Claire and John's relationship plays out very gradually and without any gimmicks. There are a lot of scenes that feel drawn out, and a lot of the comedic scenes seem like they were forced in to help lighten the mood.

All of the actors are likable, for the most part. Owen and Vaughn are a good fit together, and the movie's best times are when the two are together. Unfortunately, they get split up and put into their own individual stories for far too much screen time. I was surprised at how well Bradley Cooper from Alias slipped into a comedic jerk role. And Isla Fisher definitely steals the show. But even with this cast, the material fails. It never finds a good balance of funny and serious, and the funny often feels like it's supposed to be funny but just isn't funny enough to make me laugh out loud.

Overall, the movie seemed pretty slow, and based on everything I had heard about it, I just expected more. Oh, and I thought it was pretty funny that the DVD skipped during every nude scene. Did someone rewind too many times, maybe? Anyway. I didn't hate it but I didn't laugh very much either. I'll never watch it a second time.

Right before our trip to Arizona we had a movie night at the Agadoni home. The movie chooser this time around was Amy, and she chose Funny Farm, starring Chevy Chase. In this movie, the ideal of quitting one's day job and buying a home in the country is destroyed, when Andy Farmer and his wife arrive to their new home with great excitement only to realize that the country comes with a lot of nuisances.

The couple go into town and realize that it's full of weirdos, so they buy a dog, and the dog runs away. That pretty much sets the pace for a while, and with all the mishaps going on around the farm, Andy's wife writes a children's book based on Andy's adventures. When the book sells and Andy finds out about it, he loses it, and soon the couple are ready for a divorce. But divorce includes selling the farm, and selling the farm means "selling" the town and its people, so the couple hire the whole town to be hospitable to potential buyers.

There's a great chemistry between Andy and his wife, and the way they interact with each other feels very genuine. I liked that dynamic a lot, which is why Andy's slip into mild insanity and their pending divorce feels a little bit like overkill. But it did create the opportunity to see their townspeople caroling and frolicking in the snow, which was pretty amusing.

Another funny thing was all of the animal injury humor, which we don't see too often these days. The idea of pouring a hot cup of coffee on a twittering bird or hitting a dog over the head with a frying pan seems pretty harsh, but it probably made us laugh the most because it was so unexpected.

I'm glad we got a chance to see this movie. Like Ric mentioned, we had always seen the DVD in the stores and had heard about it, but neither of us had actually watched it.

Our little movie nights are turning out to be a lot of fun. It's fun to see the variety we can come up with and how excited we all get with figuring out which movies the others haven't seen. So far, we have watched: In the Heat of the Night, In the Name of the Father, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Blues Brothers, Kelly's Heroes, Logan's Run, Funny Farm, and whatever Ric picks tonight. Good times.