This Scary Movie-like pastiche (one hesitates to say “parody”) of
romantic comedy plots is indeed the perfect date movie, assuming the evening
will end with a murder-suicide pact.
The tag line for this is “from two of the six writers
of Scary Movie.” This must be the reason it’s about a third as good. (Scary
Movie 4 will turn up this spring.) Date Movie, starring Alyson
Hannigan, follows the Scary Movie formula of cobbling together
plots from other movies. Oddly, the movies it purports to spoof--primarily My
Big Fat Greek Wedding, Hitch and Meet the Fockers--were comedies in
the first place. A parody really should be funnier than its source material.
Instead, the movie merely re-creates goofy scenes and makes them slightly
goofier (but not funnier). If the cat in Fockers used the toilet, the one
here makes loud bathroom noises, too. In case anyone forgot Meg Ryan’s most
famous scene (the fake orgasm one) in When Harry Met Sally…—and yes,
that did come out in 1989—the male lead re-creates it here. Oh, and there’s
one scene parodying…I don’t know what (recent news stories, perhaps?), where
he and Hannigan simply beat a homeless man. The first ten minutes are a very
long fat joke. This was all in the first half; the second half was much less
funny, the theater oh-so-quiet. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll say
that I chuckled in three places. One was when the lovelorn heroine takes a
“Lonely Woman Dinner” out of the fridge. That’s about as good as it gets.
Somewhere people are doing without running water. Somewhere schools can’t
afford textbooks. It’s good to know there was still $20 million in the world to
make this.
No comments:
Post a Comment