Real Life Much More Exciting

Rating: Null/10 (16 October 2000)

Years ago, movies USED to be funny. No more. Now they're just tasteless and painful, thrown together by Hollywood insiders who haven't had dinner in a normal middle class home in years and have no idea what life is like for most of us. Nowadays, the characters in movies are not inspired by real life flesh and blood people but by other characters in other movies (in this case I believe the moviemakers are mining Stiller's role in Something About Mary). In this picture, the main character is a nurse who has a smoking problem. Huh? I am sure there are a few nurses who smoke, but the vast majority of the ones I know don't, but hey, who cares about accuracy, this is a movie. And besides, a nurse who smokes is really funny, right? The father, played in his best scenery-chewing fashion by erstwhile Hollywood screen icon Robert DeNiro (is anyone besides me tired of seeing his grimacing face up on the big screen in every other movie?), is so over the top mean that it's hard to guess what's at all funny about him. He has pictures up in his den of himself with world leaders even though was actually a CIA agent with a cover. Whatever.
And then there's the lame attempts at humor and comic timing in the plot. Caught in a lie about living on a farm, the Stiller character makes up a story that he once milked a cat (the bride-to-be's family has a beloved cat). Ho ho. The slow pacing of the movie only amplifies the staleness of the many bad jokes like this one.
I would love to tell you what I thought of how the movie turned out, but I got tired of watching a bunch of actors in obnoxious, unfunny situations portraying people you would only see in a movie so I left early and went home to talk to some real characters. It wasn't a movie but it was much more entertaining.