Wedding Crashers

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

Release date: July 22, 2005

Cast: Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, Christopher Walken, Will Ferrell, Isla Fisher, Jane Seymour

Director: David Dobkin

Screenwriters: Steve Faber & Bob Fisher

Premise: John Beckwith and Jeremy Klein, a pair of committed womanizers who sneak into weddings to take advantage of the romantic tinge in the air, find themselves at odds with one another when John meets and falls for Claire Clearly.

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[mogwai]

ben stiller wasn't available?

[Gold Trumpet]

All cheers for a Rachel Mcadams film!

[Ghostboy]

This movie would be pretty alright if it wasn't so unpleasantly and overtly homophobic.

Nonetheless, Ms. McAdams continues to enchant, even in subpar stuff like this, and Vince Vaugn will always make me laugh as long as directors let him keep improvising.

[MacGuffin]

No longer a scarlet letter
Source: Los Angeles Times

R-rated comedies, often box-office busts, are making a comeback, thanks to big DVD sales. When New Line had its first research screening of "Wedding Crashers" in Pasadena last fall, the studio knew it had a potential hit on its hands. The madcap romantic comedy, which stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as a pair of lovable rogues who get their kicks from partying at stranger's weddings, got a resoundingly enthusiastic reception from a theater full of young moviegoers.

One of the studio's only concerns about the film, which arrives July 15, was its rating. The film's director, David Dobkin, was contractually obligated to deliver a PG-13 movie, largely because R-rated comedies today rarely perform as well as PG-13 films. But when the audience filled out a research survey after the screening, most of the scenes they checked off as their favorites — including one featuring a furtive sexual act performed under the table at a formal family dinner — clearly put the movie into R-rated territory.

According to Dobkin, when members of an audience focus group were asked what rating they thought the movie should have, it was not a hung jury. "Twenty out of 20 people said they wanted the film to be rated R," Dobkin recalls. "After that, New Line never raised the issue again. The scenes people liked the best were the R-rated ones."

New Line's decision to release a potential summer comedy blockbuster with an R rating has raised eyebrows at rival studios — and with good reason. In recent years, thanks to political and demographic pressures, the R rating has been in a precipitous decline. Since 1999, when R-rated movies made up 41% of all box office, the R-rated business has dropped 30%, while PG and PG-13 films have risen considerably. The drop in R-rated movies has been especially dramatic since Hollywood chieftains were hauled before Congress in September 2000 following the release of a scathing Federal Trade Commission report accusing entertainment companies of cynically marketing R-rated movies to children.

This being Hollywood, the decision to pull back is rooted more in marketing concerns than in moral ones. Even though Congress has moved on to more pressing issues, like trying to pass bills against flag burning, many of the studios' self-imposed marketing restrictions remain, notably that R-rated movies can't be advertised on TV before 9 p.m. "Wedding Crashers," for example, was able to advertise on "The MTV Movie Awards" only in a segment of the show that aired after 9.

The numbers speak for themselves. According to data compiled by Exhibitor Relations Co., since the 2000 congressional hearings, 15 comedies have made more than $115 million at the box office. Only one, "American Pie 2," had an R rating. 2004 was an especially miserable year for R-rated comedies. "Eurotrip," "The Girl Next Door," "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" and "Team America: World Police" were all box-office disappointments, with only "Team America" making more than $20 million in its theatrical release.

Studio marketers say the R rating puts them at a clear disadvantage. Many exhibitors are reluctant to play trailers for an R-rated movie in front of a PG-13 film. Even worse, R-rated humor is verboten in TV commercials, so it's impossible to show a film's raunchiest scenes on TV. Despite these restrictions, the R-rated comedy is beginning to make a comeback. "Wedding Crashers" will be followed in August by "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo," with Rob Schneider, and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," starring Steve Carell. More R-rated comedies are due early next year.

The reasons for this mini-comeback are simple. In recent years, the real action in the movie business has shifted from theatrical box-office to DVD sales, which now make up more than 60% of studio revenues. One of the hottest profit centers is a new genre devoted to raunchy "unrated" DVD versions of R-rated films. As The Times' Elaine Dutka reported recently, the unrated versions of such R-rated comedies as "Bad Santa," "Harold & Kumar" and the "American Pie" series accounted for nearly 90% of their video sales.

This trend speaks volumes about the tendency in America to say one thing but do another. People claim they want wholesome family entertainment, but the big money on the Internet and in pay TV comes from pornography. In the rare instances when a studio puts out a feel-good valentine, like "Because of Winn-Dixie" or "My Dog Skip," the movie dies on the vine. For all the talk of our country's obsession with moral values, nothing succeeds with the American people like the salacious promise of a little extra nudity or hanky-panky in their DVD packages.

No subtlety is required — in fact, the video stores are lined with DVDs with the cheesy-cake look of a "Girls Gone Wild" assemblage. When New Line released its unrated "Harold & Kumar" DVD earlier this year, the package showed the film's stars superimposed on a naked female body, the woman's breasts coyly obscured by an "extreme unrated" sign. 20th Century Fox's unrated version of "The Girl Next Door" has Elisha Cuthbert, who plays a porn star in the film, seemingly naked, her torso covered by brown paper wrap. Disney's unrated version of "Bad Santa," which come with a racy hot tub scene that didn't make the original film, is called "Badder Santa," as if it were a porn knockoff made in someone's living room in Chatsworth.

This unlikely boom in raunchy videos has been made possible by the fact that the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which rigorously regulates the ratings of theatrical films (and, just as important, their trailers and TV spots), has taken a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach to the video marketplace. Former MPAA chief Jack Valenti, who still oversees the ratings board, told Dutka that as long as the packaging is honest, he has no problem with unrated movies. Apparently the same goes with Wal-Mart, which has long refused to carry hip-hop CDs with parental advisory warnings but now happily stocks unrated DVDs, at least as long as they are assured by studios that the videos would be rated R if they had received a rating.

It's quite a flimflam. The retailers display unrated videos, saying that they've been told they would be rated R if they'd actually gone through a ratings process. But the video packages project an entirely different message. "The Girl Next Door," for example, is adorned with the come-on: "What they couldn't show in the theatres!"

As you might suspect, this boom in unrated videos is quietly playing a role in the studios' renewed interest in R-rated comedies. Whatever a studio loses in theatrical business could easily be made up for on the home-video end. As Universal Studios Home Entertainment chief Craig Kornblau told me, when his studio was debating whether to greenlight "40-Year-Old Virgin," "I was jumping up and down, going on about how well it could perform. I'm telling our theatrical [production executives], 'Whatever your box-office results are, we'll outperform it on our end.' "

In fact, all of those R-rated comedies that underperformed at the box-office last year were big hits in their DVD release. Kornblau says the "American Pie" DVDs, largely on the strength of sales from unrated videos, are the biggest-selling home-video franchise in the studio's history. "American Wedding," the third installment in the series, had a 20-minute "bachelor party sequence" that was scripted specifically for the unrated DVD. It's a no-brainer to imagine that, as this becomes standard practice at every studio, R-rated films will enjoy a renaissance. As Kornblau puts it: "It's really hard to have an unrated [version of a] PG-13 film. In home video, it's a huge marketing advantage to have an R-rated movie."

It's always possible that some moralist like James Dobson may someday try to put the kibosh on this new pot of gold, shocked by the presence of a naked girl in a shower or a puppet sex scene (one of the additions to the unrated "Team America" DVD). But the studios now have a great card to play. In order to get Congress to stiffen penalties against piracy, they agreed to legislation that allows businesses to market family-friendly censorship devices like ClearPlay, which allow skittish parents to edit sex, violence or bad language out of their DVDs. Having embraced ClearPlay, studios can spiritedly defend this new generation of unrated videos, saying that if some parents have the right to defang saucy movies, why can't others enjoy a little extra sex or violence in an unrated version?

In the long run, thanks to the arrival of an assortment of new technology, most of these ratings issues will probably lose most of their relevance. The studios have already quietly found ways to disseminate R-rated marketing material across the Internet. Soon kids will be watching hi-def movie trailers on their 3G cellphones. It won't be long before they'll be seeing the movies themselves on some kind of hand-held video device. Unless the studios feel heat from Washington, most of these areas will remain outside the enforcement capabilities of the MPAA's ratings board.

Despite New Line's jitters about marketing "Wedding Crashers," you can bet the studio will make its money back selling an unrated DVD of the movie. In America, if something is forbidden fruit, you'll always find plenty of people eager to take a bite out of the apple.

[modage]

i really liked this movie.  as much as i like vaughn and wilson the crap to good ratio is usually pretty low for movies of this type but occasionally a diamond will shine through.  i believe this is that diamond.  so, expectations were you know, it'll probably be pretty funny but not very good.  and we snuck in after charlie so we had nothing to lose.  

it was hilarious as expected, but actually really hilarious because it really allowed for vaughn and wilson to just run wild instead of trying to reign them in and shoehorn them into a movie that doesnt quite have room for what they're capable of.  so that was good.  

the surprising thing was that the romance was actually pretty good too.  no, seriously.  i believe it to be for 2 reasons i've come up with.

1. they actually spend a good deal of time on it.  and the point in the movie when you know that the truth comes out and from that point you're just going 'okay now get on with the next 5-10 minutes of misery so we can get on with the happy ending', (which at this point in the film took place when mcadams was on the swing and will from alias comes to reveal what they've done.  she almost turns around and i was really just hoping "c'mon, just tell her all the truth etc. so she can turn around and we can end the movie cause the next 5-10 minutes will probably just bore me."  AND she didnt.  but then what happened actually stretched out to be like another 25 minutes or more of movie.  which ended up being good, cause with ALL that time they were able to develop the story a little more with vaughns character and wilsons decline past the point of what is usually required by these movies.  so what could've been a normal funny 90 minute comedy was actually a good 2 hour comedy by just leaving in all the story they would normally cut out.

2. mcadams i believe elevated this role past what is normally required to create someone that is believable and grounded somewhat in reality amidst the wackiness. just like ellen pompeo in old school.  so usually there are two types of comedies: the kind that is all wacky at the expense of any character whatsoever (anchorman, zoolander, austin powers, starsky and hutch) AND comedies that try to have a story and really make you care about something (wedding singer, old school, something about mary, etc.) and a lot of times comedies try really hard to be in the 2nd category and fail badly and its just embarrasing.  like 50 first dates, mr. deeds, etc.  what is it about wedding singer that strikes the right balance?  i dunno.  anyways, so the romance was not a time waster in this.  they gave the storyline the right amount of time, and mcadams made her likable and nnot a waste of screentime.  wilson was also good.

so, basically i really liked this.  unexpectedly good.  B

edit: oh, one thing i did notice was that it seemed they were setting up will from alias to be a cokehead and then they never followed that up.  like, he looked like shit with red eyes and nose, had superhuman strength and kept sniffing and playing with his nose.  i guess that got cut out.

[Kal]

I really liked it... I feel the same way as modage in most things... and i was also expecting something funny but not so good... and it was really good. vaugn's acting reminded me a lot of swingers, and owen was just great as he always is in my opinion.

mcadams also impressed me a lot, and she looked beautiful with dark hair.

[NEON MERCURY]

gt, everyone is talking about your beautiful new starlet...
let 'em know that you called it first.

[grand theft sparrow]

I liked it.  Much better than I expected, to be honest, though it was a little long for a silly comedy.  The gay artist brother was unnecessary... if the movie ran under 90 minutes, I can understand them wanting to put that in to fill up time but with it almost at 2 hours, Vince Vaughn vs. the psycho sister was more than enough... btw, Isla Fisher is not quite McAdams but Ali G is a lucky man.




SPOILER

The most disappointing thing about the movie was that the Will Ferrell cameo wasn't really that funny.  The reveal was funny and the "MA!!! MEATLOAF!!!! FUCK!!!" was great but beyond that... first time he let me down.

[SiliasRuby]

Saw it last night and laughed my ass off. It really had a strong story like themoderage said, it could have flopped on it's ass but it didn't and I was very happy it didn't.

[pete]

parts of it were funny, I guess that's all that mattered.  I mean it's a pretty meathead movie (despite the fact that the bad guy is a meathead) with terrible arcs and things like that, but a few bits and deliveries were quite funny.  I feel like critics overpraise this movie the same way they did the rundown (though I LOVED the rundown) just to show that they were still hip and to show how bad most studio films are these days.

[Tryskadekafobia]

Just saw this one.  I don't know what's with a lot of critics calling this the return of R-Rated comedies.  'Cause with the exception of a few bare tits and Vince Vaughn getting a handjob under the dinner table, there's nothing really in this movie that seems to make it really an R.  Overall it was good I guess (does every single comedy nowadays have to feature a combination of the Wilson Brothers, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and Wil Ferrel?)

The whole "meeting Chas" part would've been better as a deleted scene than to drag the movie out even further.

[Finn]

I enjoyed it. It's probably more entertaining than funny but it has some good laughs.

[ono]

I really enjoyed this for the most part.  Really makes me feel a little bit better about the shit Hollywood puts out most of the time.  So depressing usually, but this is a diamond in the rough.  Only problem I had with the flick was the overbearing score, and the predictability.  But what else is new?  Nothing much to say about it, just a real feel-good movie all around.  I'd buy it, if only to have something to throw in when cynicism about love rears its ugly head.  But of course, it's a Hollywood flick, so the hope is manufactured, backed by the score.  There's that cynicism again.