There's Something About Mary
Tags: comedy, boring, stupid, bleak, cult, flashback, humor, entertaining

Plot synopsis:
In 1985, 16-year-old high school student Ted Stroehmann (Ben Stiller) lands a prom date with his dream girl Mary Jensen (Cameron Diaz), which is cancelled after a painful and embarrassing zipper accident. After the ordeal gains the attention of numerous members of the household and community and Ted is carted off to a hospital, he subsequently loses contact with Mary.
Thirteen years later, in 1998, 29-year-old Ted is still in love with Mary. On the advice of his best friend Dom (Chris Elliott), he hires a smarmy private detective named Pat Healy (Matt Dillon) to track her down. Healy discovers that she is an orthopedic surgeon living in Miami with her friend, Magda, and instantly falls in love with Mary as well. He lies to Ted about her, saying she is grossly overweight with many children, to discourage him from having any contact with her. Healy resorts to lying, cheating, stalking, and even drugging Magda's dog to win Mary over, but is exposed by Mary's architect friend, Tucker (Lee Evans), who is heavily reliant on crutches and speaks with an English accent. Enraged, Healy tails Tucker and discovers him to be a fraud himself: he is an able-bodied, entirely American pizza delivery boy also in love with Mary. For years, Tucker has been driving away potential rivals through slander, including one oft-mentioned suitor referred to only as "Brett."
Meanwhile, Ted decides he still wants to reconnect with Mary and, assisted by Dom, drives down to Florida and discovers the truth about her. Ted seems to have won Mary's love, until an anonymous letter exposes his connection with Healy, and she breaks contact with him. Ted confronts Healy and Tucker, and Mary is accosted by Dom, who is revealed to be her former boyfriend "Woogie," who "got weird on her" back in college, stealing all her shoes. When Mary is finally together with all of her deceitful suitors, Ted realizes that the only one who did not resort to lying and manipulation to win Mary was Brett, who turns out to be NFL quarterback Brett Favre. After reuniting Brett and Mary, Ted leaves tearfully until Mary catches up to Ted, saying that she would be happiest with him.
The film concludes with the two engaging in a kiss while a guitarist (Jonathan Richman), who periodically narrated the story in song throughout the film, is accidentally shot by Magda's boyfriend, who was trying to shoot Ted so he could win over Mary.

Review: The idea is simple, a guy (Ben Stiller) who had a crush on a woman (Carmen Diaz) he knew since high school and continued to yearn for her privately, finally getting an opportunity to try to reconnect what never got going.
Movies however very rarely reached the level of this movie ever again, including all of the Farrelly brothers own later work.It's the sort of raunchy comedy, that makes some completely inappropriate jokes and makes for instance fun of both psychically and mentally handicapped people, among many other things.
This movie is still from the time when it was cool to like Ben Stiller and yes, he also really is perfect in his role.
You just can't help but fall in love with her too, along with every guy in the film.This is a very good romantic comedy by the Farrelly Bros..
It's that funny.Thirteen years ago, Ted (Ben Stiller) landed a prom date with the most popular and beautiful girl in school, Mary (Cameron Diaz).
The funniest gag in the movie involves a NEW brand of HAIR GEL (compliments of Ted, and tested by Mary).
I don`t like comedies but I do enjoy much of the Farrelly Brothers stuff and THERE`S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY is their greatest achievment which is probably down to their casting .
I`ll be honest and say that jokes featuring stalking , serial killers , semen , spiking doggie snacks with drugs and learning difficulties are all fair game ,and perhaps I`m being too honest in saying I laughed out loud at these serious subjects being made fun of ?Sorry if this review has been very short but I find it difficult to write hundreds of words about a film I love.
I'm not even opposed to comedy in bad taste -- I thought "Eating Raul" was terrific.No, this film just had few redeeming characteristics.All the characters in this film, with the exception of Mary herself, are hateful, deceitful, pathetic monsters.
There's Something About Mary and there's also something about this movie that makes me like it more than most other gross-out comedies.
Having said that, it is not perfect: The Farrelly Brothers use a retard for cheap laughs once too often, which I did not like, the disabled guy wasn't that funny and the plot is a bit clichéd and predictable, but I expected that.
This takes a turn for the worse, as the investigator falls in love with Mary and lies to Ted. Ted finds out about his deceiving ways, thanks to Woogy and goes to see Mary himself.This movie is hilarious at times, funny at others; occasionally, it falls flat.
The shock comedy aside (zipper and hair gel scenes), purposeful unpolitically correct moments (humor at expense of handicapped, animal cruelty), the most surprising thing about this film is it has heart and is rather sweet.
Cameron Diaz would be outacted by an ironing board, and you must have been stupid if you didn't see every joke coming from a galaxy far far away.I know many people enjoyed this movie, but I think it was a bummer.
There's Something About Mary is a healthy mix of content which doesn't really work with that of rounded, authentic laughs; of situational comedy which is most certainly at times very funny with that of meaner, cruder humour which most certainly is not.
The whole thing just about forges together into a film worth one's time, although looses energy when its lead does indeed catch up with a particular girl whom he has always liked, but has nary seen for the best part of ten years.
Irregardless, the film's odd air of genre hybridisation, as classical Hollywood-era noir appears to crash head on with latter-part 20th Century gross out comedic laughs, is infectious at the best times and only moderately annoying at the worst – it boils down into something worth seeing.We cover a perilous and injustice-ridden quest involving Ben Stiller's rounded and generally bang-up guy, Ted Stroehmann.
The fact the film takes Ted from sharing a domain built on voyeurism as well as an unadulterated lust to know Mary more personally before, most likely, move onto the next woman, and then onto the places he eventually ends up helps move the film away from accusations of it being crasser than it actually is.Things kick off when Ted scores a date to the school-ending prom for his actions involving Mary's sibling, although it all goes spectacularly wrong when he heads over to pick her up and ends in such a disaster that he does not see her again for the duration that allows him to get to the age of being the late-twenty-something-year-old author he is.
Acting out of fondness, Ted takes to the road and goes to find her anyway.From this premise, The American filmmaking duo of The Farrelly brothers spin an often humorous film within which we are surprised by how much we actually come to care for what transpires.
A few scenes in this movie were funny, but I thought most of it was just boring, slow-moving, and dumb, like something you'd expect in a bad TV sitcom.
I guess teenagers will love this but mature adults like myself will probably share my feelings about this attempt at comedy that comes off as another juvenile independent production foisted on the public by a bunch of recent graduates from film school.
I have seen hundreds and hundreds of movies over the years, and some very very funny comedies, but this one??
Actually I haven't seen much of her movies but I think she's very good at romantic comedies..
But I tried to forget all I had read before about it and also forget that these Farrelly Brothers had made such a terrible stuff like "Dumb and Dumber", which I couldn't see till the end, and I swear I tried to.But I had only two options near home: "Knock Off" or "There's Something About Mary" and I thought that it could, at least, make me laugh on this rainy Monday.
The film has some amusing moments (Stiller wrestling a little dog, the famous hair gel scene), but the pacing is too lethargic for a comedy and it goes on much too long.
Ben Stiller stars as a loser who wonders what might have been after he was unable to go to the prom with his true love Mary (Cameron Diaz).
On discovering this Ted sets out by road to meet Mary himself  assuming he can get there in one piece.I usually like to write a little about the plotting of any film I review and weight it on it's relative merits but can I do that here?
Evans is very funny as Norman and his physical comedy skills are put to good effect in some scenes where `you know you SHOULDN'T laugh'  but you do.Overall this is trashy low-brow comedy.
Anyone who really thinks this movie is funny needs to take a course in Comedy 101 or rent some real comedy classics (Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Bringing Up Baby, M*A*S*H, Arsenic and Old Lace, The Philadelphia Story, Mister Roberts or of more recent vintage As Good as It Gets would be excellent choices).
Ted (Ben Stiller) has been in love with Mary (Cameron Diaz) since High School, and thirteen years later, he is realising his life is going nowhere because of it.
All the other actors were excellent in their parts, (especially the seven-minute abs guy, who was hilarious).The only problem with this movie, and it is a small one, was how 9/10 of the sequences in the film aren't 'laugh out loud funny'.
When I saw this film, I was thinking of The Wedding Singer because both movies were set relatively the same time and both lead actresses happened to be blonde.I thought Ben Stiller played an excellent character in Ted as he tried locate the girl he had a crush on in high school.
Cameron Diaz was superb in her role as Mary and the actor who played her brother was an excellent addition to the movie because he played his part as a disabled man really well.
Here's how you know you're watching a keeper: when Brett Favre shows up with his complete lack of screen presence, yet the laughter continues unabated."There's Something About Mary" is every winning virtue of the Farrelly Brothers served up in an oddball love story.
Ted (Ben Stiller) is a nice guy who come to the defence of Mary (Cameron Diaz)'s mentally handicap brother.
Needless to say that it wasn't reciprocal, but I never cared, if she smiled at me, she'd had made my day, if she talked, I would spend one minute thinking of the best response, and if we had a date , well, only my dreams involved me as the 'lucky one'."There's Something About Mary" is a cinematic tribute to this eternal lovely figure that either enchanted or indirectly ruined our memories.And Cameron Diaz, with her blonde hair, communicative smile and eternally positive attitude, embodied the most fascinating traits of these dream-like creatures.
Granted movies have their shares of geeky escapism, but Cameron Diaz makes believable that such a girl would not feel indifferent to an awkward braces-wearing schmuck like Stiller.
For the trivia, the film made the last Gene Siskel's Top 10 before his death in 1999, it was in the Top 10 highest-grossing movies of 1998, and holds a honorable 27th spot in the American Film Institute Top 100 comedies as the most recent film to make it in the list.And there's a reason why the film meets with such popular acclaim: it IS funny to a level of slapstick that could have only been possible in a spoof movie, which "Mary" is not, but it's beyond labels and no gag is taken for granted, they're all pushed to their extreme limits.
We never know what we see exactly, but we know it might hurt like hell.After the incident, Mary moves to Florida and Ted loses touch with her, for several years and determined to find out her new whereabouts, in order to exorcise his unfulfilled obsessions, he hires Matt Dillon as a private-eye.
Stiller, Dillon and Elliot are perfect, the other cast features a disabled close friend who's not totally blameless, a roommate named Magda who seemed to have spent her whole life in a UV oven, and naturally, there's no comedy without a scene-stealing animal, the dog in "Mary" reduces the one from "Mask" to the level of "Benji".
Some were a bit too much even for me (the "hair gel" and the zipper scenes) and I generally don't mind "inappropriate" jokes (one of my favorite movies is Bad Santa).But my only real complaint about the movie (and the reason I decided to write this review) is not about its content or directing but this: What in the world did they do to poor Cameron Diaz?!
This Farrelly brothers comedy was a huge success, and I clearly remember knowing about it and seeing that famous cover image of Cameron Diaz in the role of Mary back in 1998, but I was too young for R-rated movies at the time.
I didn't find Mary's mentally handicapped brother, Warren, being assaulted after being tricked into saying, "Have you seen my wiener?" very funny, and still didn't the second time, which was not surprising.
After two viewings of this hit romantic comedy from the controversial Farrelly brothers, I still can't say I understand all the high praise, but after seeing it a second time, I can't call it a bad movie anymore, nor can I even call it a mediocre movie, even if I still think it comes close to that.
The specific vulgarities were nauseating, yes (the sperm in the hair perhaps being the topper), but the real objection is in that EVERYONE in the entire movie is a complete and utter reprobate,  from Ben Stiller's imbecilic character to Cameron Diaz's sexy but senseless (she's a doctor?
Since it was only 101 minutes, the Farrelly boys had plenty of room to really make this film a comedy classic -- by persuading Spielberg to allow them to include the opening scene from "Saving Private Ryan" -- then, by the time we got to the genital mutilation, police brutality, and paraplegic contortions, we would truly be rolling in the aisles.
However, after going to her house and getting his genitals caught in his zip the evening goes from bad to worse with Ted spending the night in hospital and missing the prom.After years of failed relationships Ted reminisces about Mary with his best friend who advises him to seek her out through a private detective friend of his (Played deliciously by Matt Dillon!) who also falls for Mary along with every other man in the film, thus begins this comedy of errors that made both Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz a star and put Matt Dillon back on the map, and also, to some degree, began the rebirth of American comedy.This film has largely been forgotten in moviegoers minds by more recent films such as "American Pie" "40 year old virgin" and "Knocked up", but this is the film that started that flurry in that it shocked people with how far it could go.
The sight gags are side-splittingly funny and the physical comedy throughout is hilarious, from Matt Dillon playing ball to the legendary dog fight, it's all good.
The script is great and allows all the characters to shine, but as always with films like this it's the chemistry between the leads that's the key and Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz come together with such charm and ease that it carries you along.As with a number of other examples over time,such as "Rocky", "Airplane" and "Pulp Fiction", it is clear that the Farrelly brothers had a very clear indication of what they wanted to do with comedy and put a lot of themselves in there and it shows.
Ted (Ben Stiller) was a nerd who almost went to the prom with a high school beauty, Mary (Cameron Diaz).
But as the PI begins to fall in love with Mary, he does everything he can to keep Ted away from her.The plot sounds like it could be entertaining, but this movie just doesn't deliver.
In 1985 Ted (Ben Stiller) is a geeky teenager who has a crush on beautiful Mary (Cameron Diaz).
This was a film that I very first see as a teenager around two years after its release when it was first televised....back then I found it 'quite funny and a film that had its own style' though now after watching it the second time around in 2018 I can truly appreciate what a well written and distinct comedy it is and though it fits that 'goofy comedy' genre, there is no film quite like it, it makes me wish the 'Farrelly Brothers' still had the spark to produce good films (especially comparing to 'Stuck On You' and my recent first watch of 'Dumb and Dumber 2' which was underwhelming).
The most memorable scenes, and funniest I think is when Matt Dillon's character is telling Cameron Diaz's how he control's his "retards", and what he does with him.
In this Farraly brothers flick, Cameron Diaz, Matt Dillon, and Ben stiller all team up to tell us what is so special about Mary.
There is something about Mary, she stars in a comedy movie that isn't half bad, I actually didn't expect to like it as much as I did.
The story includes a lot of funny scenes so we can enjoy whole part of the movie..
Seriously, I can't help myself because this might just be my favorite comedy of all time.This is the perfect storm of political incorrectness matching the talents of Ben Stiller, Matt Dillon, Chris Elliott,Cameron Diaz, and The Farrelly Brothers hitting everyone's sweet-spot all at once.
Coming off with hits like "Dumb & Dumber" and "Kingpin", audience must have expected funny but juvenile and uncomfortable scenes from Farrelly brothers .But what they did not expect was a mature and sweet love story.
"There's Something About Mary" is a comedy and romance movie which has to do with a man who gets a chance to meet his dream girl from high school and in his date comes the disaster.
I believe that the interpretation of Cameron Diaz who plays as Mary was simply great and Ben Stiller's who plays as Ted was equally great.
Another good interpretation made by Matt Dillon who plays as Healy.Lastly I have to tell you that "There's Something About Mary" is a really nice movie which I believe you will love, it combines romance and love with comedy and laugh..
Mary's smile and childlike personality attracts many boys I think.If you want to watch American comedy, I recommend this..
I guess some people thinking about this movie ever happened at their high school or college, when we like a girl and then lost her for a long time.
Ben Stiller's acting as Ted and Cameron Diaz as Mary are very great and the others also have a great acting.
It really worries me that films like "Mary" actually make people laugh!Someone must be truly desperate to laugh with this film's disgusting and pretty rough jokes.It might be better than "Dumb and Dumber" and C.Diaz is ,as always,gorgeous but is that a good reason to tolerate this outrageous attack on good taste?
There are only two reasons you would not find this movie funny:1) Everyone's told you about the good jokes before you've seen it2) You are so politically correct as to have no sense of humourYeah, that last one may sound a bit harsh but I can't see any other reason why you would not like this film.
Ouch........I wanted to puke.The most scary thing about this movie was seeing it, hating it, constantly looking at my watch, and realizing that a lot of people actually laughed.......