Movie Review

Date Movie (PG-13)

Brian Marder

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Hollywood.com Says
Date Movie is as crude, tasteless and cheap as a movie the Farrelly brothers might’ve made during adolescence. And since the year has only just begun, let’s tack on 2005 and proclaim this the worst movie of the last year and a quarter… Oh, what the hell—the last decade.

Story
Date Movie doesn’t have a story as much as it does a series of miss-or-really-miss spoofs of date movies and cultural hodgepodge; the thin “story” is just enough to keep the film from being a series of vignettes. Julia (Alyson Hannigan), who makes Big Momma look little, is determined to find her Prince Charming instead of wasting away in her lonely apartment. She briefly finds him in Grant Fonckyerdoder (Adam Campbell) before losing him (so ends any originality). So she visits a date doctor named Hitch (Tony Cox)—yes, that movie—who takes her to get barbaric liposuction. Then she meets Grant again, they fall in love and she meets his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Fonckyerdoder (Fred Willard and Jennifer Coolidge), making for a Meet the Fockers spoof (the biggest spoof-ee). Julia has competition from Grant’s ex (Sophie Monk), allowing for more film references, but ultimately they live clumsily ever after.

Acting
It’s hard to see through the utter mess that is Date Movie enough to evaluate its acting, but Hannigan seems to be at least serviceable. Although, it seems like “acting” here means merely nauseating the audience enough so they can taste the vomit but manage to hold it in. Like when she licks Tony Cox’s face for 15 or so seconds—in slow motion… It’s more Fear Factor than Inside the Actor’s Studio. As for Campbell, Date Movie is his first. There’s no frame of reference whatsoever, and yet it’s still clear that he’s above this. He almost seems like a classically trained actor who’s forced to stretch his comfort zone by performing horrendous impressions, such as the orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. The lone semblance of a bright spot comes from Coolidge, impersonating Barbra Streisand’s Roz Focker. Again, way too classy for this Movie.

Direction
Date Movie's trailer brags, “From two of the six writers of Scary Movie...” After seeing it you can’t help but muse, “It took two writers for that movie?!” The writers in question are Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who also co-directed. The film should at the very least be an appetizer for Scary Movie 4’s upcoming entrée (to which they did not contribute), but with no hint of continuity or a passable storyline, it even fails that menial task—and where the Scary Movies have succeeded is in the satisfactory stories that surround the film references. The biggest problem, though, lies in the spoofs: While the rules mandate that only chick flicks/date movies can be parodied, the writer/directors abandon their target audience by referencing movies like When Harry Met Sally. Luckily there’s always an audience member who feels the need to solve the conundrum aloud.

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