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EW review: 'Wedding Crashers' a hit

By Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly

Wedding Crashers
Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson in "Wedding Crashers."

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(Entertainment Weekly) -- To call them breasts is to miss the point, and to call them tits is just ... wrong. So I'll go with boobs to describe the naked anatomy on display, however briefly, in "Wedding Crashers," an unabashedly jiggly, bawdy, it's-all-good comedy about a couple of guys who love getting laid.

Bare boobs, flashed in good fun in an R-rated comedy without concern for children or politicians or morals police! Ha, not only have the terrorists not won, but the rights of an adult audience to laugh at good jokes about erections have been secured for another summer.

Truly, it feels like a long hard time since moviegoers have tasted a piece of this pie, in which guys leer, girls giggle, and no one gets hurt or produces a firearm; it's been such a dry spell, in fact, that the retro, hetero, '70s-style raunch of "Wedding Crashers" feels new again, modernized by the neo-retro-hetero duo of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as champion skirt-chasers.

In the scenario written by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher, directed by "Shanghai Knights' " David Dobkin with relaxed understanding that on-screen chemistry is what happens between dialogue cues, best friends Jeremy (Vaughn) and John (Wilson) love the swordsman's life so much that the two have made a specialized after-hours career of wangling their way into strangers' weddings, the better to pick up chicks susceptible to the romance in the air and the champagne in their glasses.

The prologue of this funny, ungirdled romp -- a buddy picture about buddies who actually know what women want (and worldly women who know what they want too) -- is a montage of past nuptials. Here the boys relive a few of the triumphs at which they successfully united and conquered. A Jewish celebration, followed by Italian and Chinese and Irish wingdings -- John and Jeremy know that the way to score in any culture is to look like it's the last thing on their minds, devoting themselves instead to entertaining the children, schmoozing with the oldies, and showing their vulnerable side to the ladies.

Swingin', hors-d'oeuvres-stuffing, garrulous Vaughn makes expert use of his off-the-cuff, chow-it-down, guy-to-guy solidity and his ability to get the whole room dancing (he's the first one up for a good hora), while John's foolproof moves include twirling chastely with little flower girls (Wilson a vision of frosted hair and smarmily sincere gestures) in a way sure to be noticed by nearby compassionate bridesmaids.

The two meet their matches, as they must; every horndog has his day.

Crashing the haute Washington, D.C., festivities for a daughter of the U.S. secretary of the treasury (Christopher Walken, the go-to man to play crackpot fathers when Robert De Niro is busy), John falls for one of the bride's two sisters (Rachel McAdams) while Jeremy is waylaid by the other (Isla Fisher).

And the movie becomes a comedy of mixed intentions, culminating in a goofy cameo appearance by a comedian famous for his old-school impersonations, as the long-in-the-tooth swinger who taught Jeremy and John all the intricacies of wedding crashing in the first place.

What the boys learn, of course, is that for mature men, the mating game's more fun with a partner one cares about the next day. What we learn is that the pairing of Vaughn and Wilson is a success to do a matchmaker proud.

EW Grade: A-

'Happy Endings'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

There are pleasing outcomes for almost everyone in "Happy Endings," and that's not good news.

Writer-director Don Roos sets up a game board's worth of dysfunctional characters in his arch trifle of a romantic comedy -- as in his much sharper debut, "The Opposite of Sex," he's entranced by the overlap of gay and straight lifestyles among sophisticates who don't bat an eye at such muddle.

And then he lets them make fools of themselves, desiring the wrong people, things, and L.A. signifiers before stumbling into what suits them (and the narrative game board) best. There's something bitter about the fun Roos has at his players' expense, as if he's trivializing their troubles.

And then there are, you know, wink wink, happy endings as well, involving sex and its potential for making people act really foolishly. Take Mamie (Lisa Kudrow) and her stepbrother, Charley (Steve Coogan), whose teenage escapades resulted in pregnancy. Now Charley is gay and living with Gil (David Sutcliffe). And Mamie, who is carrying on with her Mexican masseur boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale), is being blackmailed by an aspiring documentary filmmaker (Jesse Bradford) who claims to have information about the son Mamie gave up for adoption years ago.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a punk adventuress who seduces a young gay musician (Jason Ritter) as well as his rich father (Tom Arnold). Laura Dern plays Charley's lesbian best friend whose son may or may not be the happy ending for Gil's donated sperm.

Trouble is, every character in Roos' universe plays at having problems in a homo-hetero-Angeleno world but lacks substance, each little more than a composite of quirks and one-liners -- a hip ensemble cast playing games further embroidered by the regular appearance of title cards that comment on the action.

Still, there are three felicitous developments to report in this bliss-deficient project: Gyllenhaal is as wonderfully, naturally slouchy-sexy as her character is artificial and also turns out to be a riveting torch singer; Arnold is impressively vulnerable and honorable as the story's one guileless man; and as she was in "The Opposite of Sex," Kudrow is a heartbreaker, and a muse.

EW Grade: C

'Cronicas'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

Journalists in movies tend to come in two flavors: idealistic or sleazy. The intrigue of "Cronicas" is that John Leguizamo plays a tabloid TV reporter who is both at once.

As Manolo, the star muckraker of a Spanish-language channel based out of Miami, he's a bottom-feeder who suffers a seizure of conscience, yet not at the expense of his exploitative instincts. Leguizamo has given so many whiny, overbaked performances that it's a pleasure to see him set aside his mannerisms to play a shrewdly authoritative adult.

Manolo, who arrives in Ecuador to investigate a local serial killer, saves the life of Vinicio (Damian Alcazar), who has left a child dead in an auto accident. As revealed in the opening scene, however, Vinicio is also the killer. Manolo suspects him, yet he can't prove anything, which is why he agrees to do a sympathetic piece about the accident.

Is he sniffing out the truth or letting himself be used by the devil? The moral murk of "Cronicas" would be more effective if the story weren't so contrived, yet the movie is worth seeing for Leguizamo's sinewy urgency, Alcazar's desperate cleverness as the killer, and the squalid, frantic atmosphere of Latin American hunger.

EW Grade: B

'Lila Says'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

Lila, played by Vahina Giocante, who resembles a sexed-up young Emma Thompson, is a teasing, 16-year-old blond baby doll with a gleam of perception beyond her years. She fixates on Chimo (Mohammed Khouas), a dreamy young Arab, and attempts to seduce him by turning on the slut talk.

Ziad Doueiri's unabashedly erotic cross-cultural love story, "Lila Says," is set in Marseilles, and much of it consists of Lila spinning out her reveries -- of orgiastic sex, of doing amateur porn films for the thrill of it. Chimo, too chivalrous to take advantage of her, thinks that Lila is ''better'' than the naughty-vixen role she has chosen to play. But is that his grace or his puritanism? Both, it turns out, which is why it is also his tragedy.

EW Grade: B+

'The Great Water'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

In the anguished Macedonian drama "The Great Water," adapted from Zhivko Chingo's novel by director Ivo Trajkov, an ailing Communist politician conjures deathbed memories of his tormented boyhood in a Stalinist orphanage for children of political offenders.

No kindly teacher steps in, a la "Les Choristes," offering the balm of music. But wait, it gets sadder, with imagery even more fevered: The young Lem (Saso Kekenovski) admires Isak (Maja Stankovska, a girl believably cast as a boy), a mysteriously spiritual newcomer, who in turn is attracted to a fervent party follower, who ... Well, none of it is good, and all of it, Chingo and Trajkov suggest, goes into shaping a Macedonian national identity uneasily poised between religious longing and ideological resolve.

EW Grade: B

'The Warrior'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

He's bound by honor and indenture to a corrupt warlord in a feudal past. But a crisis of conscience turns a fighter in a remote region of India into a hunted pacifist in "The Warrior." And from the moment Lafcadia (Irfan Khan) lays down his sword, he's on a run for his life against punishing henchmen.

Asif Kapadia's blazing feature debut, a gorgeously photographed saga with a fine sense of the way place shapes personality, has won numerous awards in the filmmaker's native Britain (the film was first released in 2002). That the Hindi-language drama appears in the U.S. only now is one of those mysteries of Miramax, yet another saga of acquisition followed by long-delayed release retold in the empire's final days.

EW Grade: B+


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