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Vern says, ‘F–k WEDDING CRASHERS!’ Do you think he liked it’

SPOILER ALERT !!

Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with our man Vern who is… mighty unhappy with a certain Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson comedy right now. You see, he… well… Shit, Vern can tell you…

Boys –

First off, congratulations on the kid, Moriarty. I hope he doesn’t have too many problems being named after some freak from FORBIDDEN ZONE. But congratulations and in my opinion some credit should also go to the wife, who I bet performed some of the more difficult aspects of the birthing process unless there is something Harry is not telling us.

Second order of business, I saw some movie called WEDDING CRASHERS. Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn play a couple of dickheads who like to sneak into weddings because somehow it causes them to automatically get laid. When I first saw the trailer for this one I felt insulted. It seemed like one of those premises that would maybe seem funny when you first think of it but then you would realize before you got a chance to even write it down that it was not funny enough for anybody to actually make or especially watch. The trailer didn’t show any of the plot but I assumed it would be one of those generic romantic comedies where the protagonist lies and tricks people but then to his surprise he meets someone who he really falls in love with, and there are montages and flirting and laughing and they become close but it’s all based on a lie so then suddenly she finds out the truth and he has to admit that he’s a scumbag but then he publicly humiliates himself and proves to her that he really loves her and then… oh shit, what if in this one they got MARRIED AT THE END? Would that be ironic or what? The hunter becomes the huntress, or whatever.

Wedding CrashersBut there was some good buzz on this one, some people saying it harkens to the glory days of raunchy R-rated comedy (what does that mean, Revenge of the Nerds 2?) and Entertainment Weekly did a big article a while back claiming it would be a huge sleeper hit. So maybe it’s not what it appears? I do like Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn sometimes and the movie was free and I quit drinking a long time ago so what the hell, man, I went.

Turns out what this is is one of those generic romantic comedies where the protagonist lies and tricks people but then to his surprise he meets someone who he really falls in love with, and there are montages and flirting and laughing and they become close but it’s all based on a lie so then suddenly she finds out the truth and he has to admit that he’s a scumbag but then he publicly humiliates himself and proves to her that he really loves her and whatever else I said earlier.

There are basically two types of mainstream comedies: TYPE A, the ones that are all about laughs, not to be taken seriously on any level, basically a bunch of skits and jokes and riffs strung together just trying to get laughs (ANCHORMAN, the AUSTIN POWERS saga, etc.) You’re not expected to care if Anchor Man finds true love or not, instead you get some shit about a talking bear or whatever. Then TYPE B is the ones where they put some jokes on top but the vast majority of the movie is a storyline about two people falling in love and you are actually supposed to give a shit about these people and be touched when things work out for them. Type B can be done well but it usually isn’t and this is no exception.

Yes there’s some funny lines here and there. Alot of the dialogue is probaly improvised. You know how Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are when they improvise, they can be funny. You know. That’s what I have to say that’s nice. Good job on having a couple funny lines.

But this has all the usual bullshit that I hate about this type of movie. I mean not even the premise of the movie is believable. I don’t buy the idea that these guys could or would want to go to weddings all the time and claim to be relatives without being found out almost every time. And if they could, I don’t believe that they would get laid every time, or most of the time, or more than once. Or that there would be hot single women at all these weddings or that those women would ever see or talk to them.

The movie is smart enough to know that you can’t do much more with this premise than a long montage at the beginning (basically the trailer plus 2 seconds of tits) but dumb enough to think we want to see the rest of the movie. Since you see early on that Owen feels guilty about being a lying womanizer, you know he’s the one we’re supposed to think is actually sensitive and sympathetic even though everything he does implies that he’s a prick. The woman he falls in love with (some Jennifer Garner type [Rachel MacAdams]) is already engaged. So to make it acceptable her boyfriend is a total worthless asshole prick who bullies everybody, openly cheats on her and berates her in front of her family, who all still love him.

I guess THE WEDDING SINGER did the same thing, but that one had more appealing lead characters, way more laughs, and a more cartoonish tone. The bad guy boyfriend was a villain but at least they got a couple laughs out of it, like when he pulled up in a Delorean blasting the Miami Vice theme. This one’s an asshole, but not funny. He’s almost a super villain. He even finds out Owen and Vince’s secret just by telling a private eye their fake names and fake jobs. I’m not sure how he looked that up exactly, maybe it’s a new feature on google.

You know, WEDDING PLANNER will go between WEDDING CRASHERS and WEDDING SINGER in the comedy section at the video store, so it might act as sort of a buffer to prevent comparisons.

The movie is mediocre, it’s not easy to hate, but the climax helps. If I had to pick my very least favorite type of scene to have in a movie, it would be the ones they always have at the climax of these types of movies, where the filmatists try to push the word CONTRIVED so far that it loses its meaning. You know, the scene where the lead has to confess their love and the audience has to pretend for 5 or 10 minutes that they’ve never seen humans before and have no idea how they behave. In this one, it’s a scene where Owen Wilson rudely interupts his best friend’s wedding vows to make a long speech to the woman who hates him, in front of the whole congregation. Everyone stays silent and listens to what he has to say, the woman and her family are spontaneously won over by his sincerity, the prick boyfriend is publicly outed, dumped and physically punished, and nobody seems offended or uncomfortable about this happening in the middle of somebody else’s wedding.

I understand that this has somehow become an accepted form of storytelling, but I can’t stand this type of shit. It feels like the movie is stabbing me and then slowly twisting the blade for the whole scene. And as a side note, I would like to mention that when a movie points out that it is following a cliche (“Would it be a cliche if I kissed you now?”) IT IS STILL A GOD DAMN CLICHE. Even Kevin Williamson probaly knows this by now.

And don’t buy that bullshit about it being a good old fashioned raunchy R-rated movie. This is a completely vanilla movie, the same old cutey pie horseshit where the good guys get laughs by doing something morally reprehensible but then instead of going with it the movie also wants to pretend that they are total sweetheart romantics. There are no surprises or pushing of the comedy envelope unless you count a weird bit where a gay guy is portrayed as a freaky hunchbacked Peter Lorre type who forces himself on straight men. Maybe the MTV Movie Awards will have a category for Best New Homophobic Stereotype. Otherwise I doubt we’ll be hearing much about this movie after a couple weeks on video.

For me there were no big laughs. But I don’t know, some people will probaly find it hilarious. If two sweethearts smiling at each other, giggling and playing cute handslap games on the beach is uproariously funny to you, you’re gonna fuckin LOVE this one. And the scene where they ride bikes together! I mean, you will DIE. I’m not somebody that would bow at the altar of OLD SCHOOL but this is not even in that league, it’s much blander, more like something your friend’s girlfriend who you hate would claim is really good.

Wouldn’t it be funny if Moriarty went and saw REBOUND or SKY HIGH or some crap, but he was so jacked up on the emotions of new fatherhood that he cried through the whole thing and came out convinced it was RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK for his son’s generation? I think it would be funny but I bet it won’t happen with this one. Even the Miracle of Life is not gonna make this one particularly memorable.

I forget what I was even talking about. so commence with the talkbacks. I’m first though.

thanks

Vern

Originally posted at Ain’t-It-Cool-News: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/20667

View the archived Ain't-It-Cool-News Talkback
This entry was posted on Friday, July 8th, 2005 at 5:23 am and is filed under AICN, Comedy/Laffs, Reviews, Romance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

31 Responses to “Vern says, ‘F–k WEDDING CRASHERS!’ Do you think he liked it’”

  1. Saw the bit in this where they talk about The Code recently. Terrible film; and now 10 years old! Vaughn and Wilson seemed a little long in the tooth for this crap back then even. The scene with Farrell was true to that, anyway. Here’s hoping they all make excellent Lifetime movies soon.

  2. Came here to see if Vern had anything to say about Rachel Getting Married, stayed to find out what else besides The Mummy is inexplicably hated around here. Not to defend Wedding Crashers; I just wanted to say that Sky High is a pretty good movie and it handily beat the MCU to the punch by several years. AND they thought to have Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald in their movie. Let’s give credit where credit’s due. They’ve figured out their superhero shit way better than most of DC.

  3. I’m surprised this review still exists, I thought the movie disappeared the moment THE HANGOVER came out. I feel like it’s even less likely I would like WEDDING CRASHERS on a return visit than I would THE MUMMY, but this definitely seems like a review where I was reacting to other people’s reaction to the movie, which is hopefully something I have moved beyond in the ensuing decade and a half.

  4. I still haven’t seen this one, although I bought the DVD 15-ish years ago or whenever it came out. In all fairness, I bought it as part of a “5 DVDs for 20€” bundle and was one DVD short, so I bought that one because it was one of those supposedly super funny comedies at that time, but every time I stumbled across it on TV for a minute or two, I tended to agree with Vern.

  5. And I still hope that you find one day a reason to review SKY HIGH.

  6. A couple of rascals is what they are, going to these weddings they weren’t invited to and finding sex partners. I mean you simply won’t believe it! But let me pose you this one question: what if these sneaky fellas happened to fall in love… for real? Then what?

  7. This is the one movie I saw at my (first) University’s campus theatre. I didn’t enjoy it much but I thought it wasn’t entirely fair to judge it given the sound in the theatre was incredibly poor (hence I never went again). A few years later I saw it on DVD, and again it wasn’t ideal circumstances (in a room with about ten other people after a night out), but it was enough to make me realise that I just plain don’t like it. I was a fan of that (ugh!) “Frat Pack” wave of stuff at the time, more so than I ever was with the Apatowverse.

    I liked the MUMMY films at the time, but I don’t think there’s much reason to watch them in 2021 when you’ve got the entire history of adventure films at your disposal.

  8. In an earlier thread where I complained about my loss of enthusiasm for many movies, I contrasted this with the fact that there was a period in the late 90s – mid-aughts where I would watch anything. This thread calls to mind some examples that will back that up: I saw WEDDING CRASHERS, MUMMY, and the truly abysmal MUMMY RETURNS all at the theatre.

    I don’t know that I’d go so far as to defend any of these films, but I did enjoy WEDDING CRASHERS a lot, because, heaven help me, I did find the leads pretty charming. And I like Rachel MacAdams. Plus, douche Bradley Cooper!

    MUMMY had some iffy CGI and certainly was not scary, but I was mildly charmed by the INDIANA JONES ish ness of it.

    Back then I was here for a diversion and loved to get out to the theaters. I think some combination of parenthood and internet brain rot and the changing theatrical market and culture (the Marvel-ification and Netflix-ification of cinema) have really transformed things for me. At this point, there is little that makes me want to get out to the theatre, and honestly not a lot I want to rent either. Very different environment and personal appetite from when I first started commenting in the AICN days. At this point, I tend to enjoy commenting on movies and other things on this site more than watching most of them. Weird, I know.

    BTW, they keep threatening to do a WEDDING CRASHERS 2, so, look out world. Can it be worse than ZOOLANDER 2?

  9. Skani- If I’m not quite in the same boat, I’m definitely at the harbour looking at that sea with admiration. There was a large chunk of my life when I would see anything that caused some kind of a rucus, even if I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it, because I wanted to have an opinion on it. In the last three years or so there have been several highly acclaimed film’s I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like all that much which I have happily skipped; could I be missing out on films I would actually love? Absolutely. But when I’m the kind of guy who won’t be put off by a film being made in Pottsylvania in 1919 if he’s into the concept, and stuff like that is easier than ever to see, why should I go out of my way* to say “Yeah, THE SUICIDE SQUAD, is definitely James Gunn doing the James Gunn thing, which I’m really over now and was never all that into honestly, which I could pretty much tell from the trailers, reviews and everything everybody said about the film, but I guess it’s OK, 6/10” . I wouldn’t turn it down if I was invited, as per every bloody Marvel film so far, but otherwise no. There are films I plan on giving a try which I’m as likely to have as love (PIG and THE GREEN KNIGHT come to mind), but that’s not quite the same thing. Having an open mind is great, but at some point in all that open mind film watching you’re going to develop a pretty good sixth sense for whether you’re going to get something worthwhile out of a movie or not. Anyways I’m not 100% secure in this position yet, but I’m working towards it, I think.

    *I should note HBO MAX has not hit the UK yet, so it really would be going out of my way rather than trying something for 5 mind on an app I already have.

  10. Oh man. I just got yelled at for expressing this sentiment in the PIG review, so I’m playing with fire here. But. THE GREEN KNIGHT. No movie symbolizes the ever widening schism between me and the celebrated filmatism of the day. Because that trailer seems right up my alley. A psychedelic freakout medieval nightmare horror action thriller? Sign me up, right? Except there is like a 999.9% chance that all those amazing images in the trailer will be surrounded by acres and acres of droning tedium. These A24 style slogs are the equivalent of freshman poetry: saying nothing new but saying it with maximum self-impressedness. They have a certain precocious command for aspects of craft but arrogance prevents them from making the hard choices that would mold these moments of inspiration into a compelling whole.

    The problem is that I’d be into THE GREEN KNIGHT if it was an actual psychedelic movie. Meaning an acid movie. But it won’t be. It’ll be a heroin movie. It won’t be trying to blow out your synapses with sensory overload. It’ll just be a wash of atmospheric mush with no peaks and valleys. Just something to drift off to. It’s not head music; it’s mood music.

    Critics love to complain about style over substance, but when it comes down to it, style is everything. Who gives a damn what a movie is saying if it says it in a way that irritates the shit out of you? What frustrates me about so many recent acclaimed movies is that I am down with their WHAT but their HOWs can go fuck themselves.

  11. Good to know I’m not entirely alone on some of this. It’s possible I’m just depressed, but there are other indicators that I’m not (I still work, exercise, have enthusiam and energy enough to argue with you all). Still, I honestly can’t figure out which, if any, of the personal or cultural factors I’ve identified, is the main driver. That’s one of the bitches of getting older is that it’s difficult to separate cultural change from general aging and curmudgeonliness (“Those damn Beatles with their long hair!”).

    Majestyk, I generally agree with you on a descriptive level but I don’t have the same distaste. It seems like your issue is wanting faster pacing and more intensity — and more more manic, gonzo energy, gore, flair, and action. I think it boils down to horror-action vs. horror-drama. There is a horror drama sub-genre (aka A24 aka slow-burn), and that’s not your bag. Eh?

    That said, I feel like o.g. Carpenter HALLOWEEN would serve as a fore-runner to slow-burn horror. Sure, it’s less pretentious, but it’s slow-paced, takes quite awhile to really get going, is kind of enamored of its own filmatism, and it’s essentially blood-less and kind of ambiguous. The only elements with anything approaching color or manic energy are the P.J. Soles and Donald Pleasance performances.

  12. “The only elements with anything approaching color or manic energy are the P.J. Soles and Donald Pleasance performances.”

    And that’s two more chords than any of these A24 movies are willing to play. I got no beef with slow, dreamy filmmaking. What I got a beef with are one-note movies that just pound on that one key for the whole movie. In any medium, I prefer dynamic art to static art. Art that moves from one mood to another, that rises and ebbs, that sprint and crashes. These A24 movies can work up a good vibe but then they run it into the ground after 20 minutes. They got nothing else in the toolkit and it’s monotonous.

  13. This activates the “let’s argue about MIDSOMMAR” script, but I’ll spare you and everyone else the umpteenth rehash of that. I would just invite any interested reader to watch that film. Fine to not like it, but I think the simple facts of the case will show that my client, MIDSOMMAR, has narrative twists, visual weirdness and beauty, suspense, gallows humor, and some intensely upseting and shocking moments.

  14. I understand what A24 has become shorthand for, but whenever people use their name as a slur (not just Majestyk in this case – it’s a common occurrence) I wonder which specific movies they have in mind. THE WITCH is a good example of that slow burn, low pay off approach to horror, but it seems like people don’t really complain about that one as much anymore, do they? The other two everyone knows are HEREDITARY and MIDSOMMAR, neither of which fit the boring-humorless-nothing-happens description. What are the other ones?

    I think the thing about A24 is that they’re really good at marketing, and they have a distinct design style, which allows their movies to be identified and then backlashed against. I also think it’s undeniable that they’re good at picking ’em. For a company that has existed for less than a decade to have produced/released SPRING BREAKERS, LOCKE, UNDER THE SKIN, EX MACHINA, GREEN ROOM, THE LOBSTER, MOONLIGHT, THE FLORIDA PROJECT, LADY BIRD, THE LAST MOVIE STAR, FIRST REFORMED, EIGHTH GRADE, CLIMAX, THE FAREWELL, UNCUT GEMS, MINARI and a whole bunch of other movies that some people really love is quite a feat. The only company I can think of that is comparable in going for a certain type of cool director-driven indies is Annapurna, but they’ve had fewer releases.

    But I guess I can’t be against using A24 as a shorthand for a specific type of horror movie, since I know what’s meant when people say it. It’s just kind of weird because the company mostly does a different type of movie that also has a backlash against it, that I think is a sort of reflexive anti-hipster sentiment that’s more about the type of people they imagine the movie is being marketed to or enjoyed by than the movies themselves.

  15. I’m just using it as shorthand for “slow atmospheric horror more interested in mood than thrills” because the term “elevated horror” makes me want to stab myself in the neck. There are a few movies made by A24 that I like, but that’s because not all the movies A24 makes are A24 movies. To me, an A24 movie can be made by anybody. EMPTY MAN is an A24 movie. IT FOLLOWS is an A24 movie. SUSPIREMAKE is an A24 movie. GRETEL & HANSEL is an A24 movie.

    And yes, to me, HEREDITARY and THE VVITCH are the poster children for A24 movies. It’s mere coinicdence that they happen to actually be A24 movies.

  16. The worst (real) A24 movie that I have seen so far was IT COMES AT NIGHT, which was 90 minutes of nothing happening outside of a few quick nightmare scenes and dramatic shots of doors in the dark, until it turned into the usual “People like you and me turn onto each other in extreme situations, because the humans were the real monsters all along” bullshit.

  17. Yeah, when I saw the cover of that movie, all I could think was:

    IT COMES AT NIGHT

    NARRATOR: It doesn’t.

  18. I appreciate and have no problem with any of that, but I am physically incapable of not pointing out once again that HEREDITARY has (SPOILERS) a shocking child decapitation (and shot of the head covered in ants), Gabriel Byrne set on fire, an Academy Award nominee giving a Cage-worthy performance that culminates in sawing her own head off on the ceiling in front of her kid, a bunch of great dark humor, etc. There are many ’80s horror movies considered acceptable and cool that have way fewer thrills. So I will never understand that reputation, no matter how many times we go over it.

  19. Vern: Sure, but as I said earlier, my problem with these movies is not with their WHAT but with their HOW. By your argument, I could list off the events of THE MUMMY RETURNS (family of old timey pulp adventurers seeks ancient tomb! Pigmy zombies! A dirigible chase through ancient canyons!) and it might sound like some shit you’d be into. But Stephen Sommers’ style makes that impossible for you. That’s the same with these A24 movies. They concern events which, in a vacuum, would entertain me, but the style in which those events are conveyed renders them unpalatable to my tastes. That’s why I extra hate these movies. There are plenty of kinds of movies that I can ignore altogether, but these movies are ABOUT things that interest me, but they’re about them in ways that make them impossible to enjoy.

  20. By the way, speaking of Rachel Getting Married… admittedly, I don’t have much personal experience with this, but it seems like the narrative goes fairly quickly from people walking on eggshells around Kim to snapping at her for being an addict (thinking of the lilac scene here). I realize it’s like an hour-forty movie, it’s already a slow-burner, things have to happen sometime, and they’ve been through this before with her, they’re all sick of her shit… Still, it seemed to me that if I were dealing with someone who’d just gotten out of rehab, I could hold it together a bit longer than they do.

  21. Or then there’s shakycam, which is a style that everyone on earth can agree sucks. The fault with shakycam movies is not in their content but in the manner in which that content is presented. You might be able to get over it sometimes, but in your heart you know this style is holding the movie back for you. I see no difference between this and my disdain for the A24 style.

  22. I just don’t see how it fits “slow atmospheric horror more interested in mood than thrills.” That to me describes THE WITCH but not HEREDITARY, which is very interested in thrills along with the great mood and atmosphere.

  23. I don’t know what to tell you. I did not find it thrilling. There was some tension leading up to the decapitation (a legitimately good moment) but then the combination of Toni Collette’s hysterics and the uneventfulness of the rest of the story just pissed it away. I was completely disengaged by the time anything started happening again so the last-minute pyrotechnics did little to sway my opinion.

    I’ll give you that the little girl’s funeral was hilarious. And I’ll even buy that it was on purpose.

  24. Okay, I will concede that HEREDITARY is the most interested in thrills of all these movies. I still didn’t like it but it’s not trying to JUST be a mood piece.

  25. Thank you. This is the greatest progress I’ve made in the Aster Wars since (apologies, I forget who it was) saw MIDSOMMAR and decided I was right that HEREDITARY has a sense of humor.

  26. Talk of IT COMES AT NIGHT being boring makes me think of the Prime original movie THE VAST OF NIGHT. Did anyone watch that? I couldn’t get past like 20 minutes. It took way too long to get to anything. I think I gave it 20 minutes, but it felt like an hour. I guess it could’ve been less than 20. It was just following a guy around a high school gymnasium with everyone talking over everyone saying dumb shit about people we don’t know and don’t care about yet – like about setting up the sound system and looking for someone or something. Some directors are adept enough to make this kind of establishing of a location and people interesting. This movie was not that. It looked bad and the audio was bad and I turned it off. I was just curious if anyone lasted longer than me and if it improved.

  27. Yes, Maggie, there was some buzz about that film, but I couldn’t get into it. It’s possible if I’d have suck it out to the hour mark, maybe it would’ve heated up, but I never got there. This is one of the big things w/ the Neflixification of cinema — watching something casually at home just dramatically reduces the barriers to disengaging, as opposed to leaving the house and plunking down $5-20, where the gravity is much stronger as far as staying in your seat and riding it out. I know there are people who will walk out of a theatre if they get bored, but I think the threshold for that has to be higher than the threshold for pausing something or setting down a tablet and then just getting off onto something else or going to bed and then not getting back around to finishing it. I feel like I start and don’t finish as many movies as I finish these days, which wasn’t always the case.

  28. If you can stay awake through The Vast of Night, there’s two (or three?) pretty amazing long-take shots that are truly impressive. But I will also admit it took me countless watches to make it to them, and I honestly don’t even remember what happens at the end.

    And yes Skani, I too, have never had so many not-finished movies in my life. Mainly because my new worst habit brought on by the pandemic is watching movies specifically to go to sleep. And by movies I mean real, “good” movies, that I should be staying awake for – Barry Lyndon, Picnic at Hanging Rock, anything Hitchcock, anything Studio Ghibli, Black Narcissus, Beyond the Black Rainbow – I hear these movies are great and the first 5-10 minutes usually are pretty great. But they lull me to sleep harder than any sleeping pill, probably because they’re interesting enough that I don’t get bored enough to start surfing the web on my phone.

    Re: “A24” movies, i also totally use that phrase as shorthand for movies that aren’t even A24 and don’t see much wrong with that. Because for me, it’s kind of a compliment since I like most of the real A24 slow-burn horror movies (I even thought It Comes at Night was pretty good), and I’m sure I’ve called multiple dumb 80s action movies “Cannon movies” that really weren’t. Hell, I’m sure I’ve referred to some Don Bluth 80s movie as a “Disney movie” too, so who cares. Btw, the absolute worst real A24 movie has to be False Positive, which is borderline unwatchable. It’s everything everyone hates about slow-burn, low-thrills, art-house horror, with nothing going for it except the promise of “wait these famous people must be in this movie for a good reason, right?” and you’re hoping there’s some kind of plot hook or reason for being, when it’s basically the same “is she or isn’t she a reliable narrator?” bullshit we all got sick of 10 years ago.

  29. The pandemic has given me the bad habit of wanting to put something on while I do something else. I HATE it when people play with their phone while we’re watching a movie and yet I’m ashamed to admit I’ve become that person. But, I always put on something I’ve either seen already or don’t care about too much. And it’s usually something other than playing on my phone (although I do that sometimes) like working on a puzzle or a coloring book or sodoku. But the bummer is more and more I’ve found myself gravitating to stuff I don’t really care that much about instead of actual quality stuff.

  30. So wait a sec, people don’t like the opening to THE VAST OF NIGHT now? That opening is fantastic. If the whole movie had been at that level, we’d be talking film of the year. The camera is beautifully choreographed, and there’s a nonstop barrage of great dialogue. (An example at random: “I don’t know what you just said, but you sound like a mouse being eaten by a possum.” You can expect a line like that, oh, every 30 seconds or so.)

    Then eventually the plot kicks in, and the plot is hardly there.

    I’m not sure how to describe this movie. Try this. Say you’ve got an audio play written for some kind of scifi anthology show. It’s full of terrific, juicy patter, but the science fiction trappings seem kind of an afterthought — like the writer is is cannibalising bits of an older script for some freeform drama. And then you give this audio play to a director who makes a movie out of it instead. And he’s a very inventive guy, with a great sense of visual geography, who nonetheless keeps this audio script pretty much as written, without the major structural changes you might expect when adapting for the screen.

    This is not remotely, I should stress, how the movie was made. But that’s what it feels like.

    It’s still very worth seeing. It doesn’t all work, but what does work is gold. I hope somebody’s giving Andrew Patterson money for whatever he wants to do next — it’ll be enjoyable, at a minimum, and he might turn out to be a major talent.

    Oh, the actors are great too. Jake Horowitz and Sierra McCormick. I’ve never seen them in anything else. I guess Horowitz is in the remake of CASTLE FREAK — was that any good?

  31. Castle Freak has the clumsiest, worst shot post credit scene to tie it into whatever shot on digital video Re-Animator remake they will inevitably make. Thumbs up!

    I recently watched The Empty Man and I thought it was excellent. It’s long but I thought it was very engaging the entire time. I liked it better than any A24 movie I’ve ever seen.

    I liked the three Fear Street movies on Netflix because they were fun, pulpy films full of color, music and teenagers that aren’t fucking stupid.

    I hate Ari Aste films.

    Also I grew up a middle class white kid so of coarse I think Wedding Crashers is funny as shit.

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