'Fock'ing A!

So, there's this movie out now - Meet the Fockers. It's a sequel to Meet the Parents. At the risk of plagarizing "PvP" (www.pvponline.com), I don't have to see the sequel 'cause I remember the original and I can think. The trailers feature more of the same: Ben Stiller as a nice guy visited by ludicrous, would-be comic predicaments that might seem funny to most people (read: idiots), but are simply uncomfortable to me. You'd think after his superb, pants-soilingly funny turn in Dodgeball: a True Underdog Story, Stiller would continue on this creatively lucrative road, But no; it's once more to the well.

My main problem with ...Parents isn't so much the situations that Greg finds himself in, but Greg's reaction: he doesn't make even a token attempt to defend himself, which may have made the situations a bit more bearable. This goes back to Welcome to the Dollhouse: Dawn doesn't try to stand up for herself either, which is one of the larger reasons I can't stand that film.

However, the film picks up in its last ten minutes, where Greg chews out a snippy stewardess. That was hilarious, and it is my feeling that if the film were more like that scene and less like the preceding 95 minutes, I'd have liked it more. As it stands, it is the second-most overrated comedy of, perhaps, the last two decades (first is There's Something About Mary).

As for Robert DeNiro (a fine actor, no doubt), I prefer his other effort from 2000: The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle. Unlike with Jack Byrnes, when you watch him as Fearless Leader, you actually get the sense that DeNiro is, well, acting.

P.S. To anyone who didn't laugh (or at least, smile) at the Taxi Driver parody in R&B, I'm forced to wonder what it's like to live without a soul.