Date Movie Review
If there’s one thing that surprised me while watching Date Movie (Unrated Edition!), it’s that it’s easily the best movie in the series. Sure, it’s almost completely unwatchable, but the next three movies somehow managed to get consecutively worse. At this point in their careers, Friedberg and Seltzer were still actually trying, and the result is a glimpse at how all of their worst habits got started. Let’s go back, all the way back to the year 2006, to see just how poorly something can age in only two years.
The movie opens with the sound of a church organ, and we see two people about to get married. One of these people is Julia Jones (Alyson Hannigan in an enormous fat suit). The other is Napoleon Dynamite, wearing a “DON’T VOTE FOR PEDRO” t-shirt. 5 seconds in and I already hate it. I’ve never seen Napoleon Dynamite, but I highly doubt that the entire movie is based around a guy that does nothing but waggle his shoulders and say “Gosh!” over and over again for no reason at all. Well, that’s what this one does. He announces that he’ll never marry her, and then he starts dancing. Fortunately this is all just a dream sequence, and Julia’s alarm wakes her out of this gibberish nightmare. She gets out of bed and goes to write in her diary, which informs us that she weighs 389 pounds, smokes over a thousand cigarettes a day, and drinks like Tara Reid. It’s a good thing we’re outright told this, because she doesn’t smoke or drink once throughout the entire movie. She decides that today is the day she meets the man of her dreams, and if you value your sanity I advise you stop reading right now and close your browser. You’re about to get a song stuck in your head, and you’re going to hate me for it. I’m serious, don’t read any further.
Cue the Milkshake song. Yes, that Milkshake song, the one you haven’t heard since 2006 and were hoping to never hear again. Tough shit, because Julia dances to the entire goddamn thing.
She burst out the door, dances across the street, and stands over a sidewalk vent to perform Marilyn Monroe’s famous Seven Year Itch pose. This may very well be the oldest reference in the entire series, and is older than the oldest reference in Disaster Movie by 25 years. A nearby construction worker shoots himself in the head with a nail gun, and a group of firemen hose her down while she writhes around on the ground. This goes on and on (and on and on) for the entire song, and instead of me telling you what each joke is, I’m just going to say that the punch line to every single one of them is “she’s fat.” At one point watch two portly gay men dance for an uncomfortably long time. The director’s commentary indicates that their dance was even longer before it got trimmed down in editing. This movie, and more so the entire series, has a bizarre fixation on gay males, especially ones who dance. The song finally ends with her chasing a crowd of men down the street and leaping into the air in an Austin Powers pose while the movie’s title pops up. Yes, the title, five minutes and one dance sequence into the movie.
Can you guess what movie this one is parodying? Remember, this is a movie about a quirky chubby girl with the last name of Jones, who opens the movie by writing in her diary. That’s right, it’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding! Julia walks into her family’s Greek restaurant, passing by the sign outside that has a man French-kissing a goat. Inside, she meets her father, played by Eddie Griffin, her mother, played by Meera Simhan, and her sister, played by Marie Matiko. Griffin has actual comic timing, and Simhan and Matiko are both total babes, so of course they’re barely in the movie at all. Also, the fact that every member of her family is not white is pretty much the only joke any of them get, except for Eddie Griffin, who goes around spraying Hummus on everything. For example, in this first scene, he uses it as a wart remover. Dad tries to set Julia up on a date with another employee, Nick, a disgusting, fat nerd who has a rat sticking out of his pants. Julia turns him down and goes to serve customers, where she meets a British guy named Grant. That right there is the movie’s sole Hugh Grant joke. He likes Julia for who she is, and she accidentally knocks him out with a pot of coffee. This causes her to think that he’s run away. Julia decides to do something about her man problems and makes an appointment with Hitch.
Julia knocks on his office door, and it swings open to reveal… nothing. There’s no one there. She looks down to see that Hitch is a midget (and before you ask, yes, it’s Tony Cox). Julia enters his office in a bizarrely edited scene where she seems to teleport from halfway down the hallway and into Hitch’s office in the time it takes him to turn around. The director’s commentary mentions that continuity wasn’t their biggest concern while making this movie. No shit. Hitch shows Julia photos of celebrity couples he’s worked with in the past, which is either a joke I don’t get or just an excuse to list a bunch of celebrities in hopes that one will get a laugh. Take your pick. Hitch asks Julia to kiss him so he can do whatever the hell it is Hitch does, but he winds up just chucking handfuls of mints into her open mouth and flossing a chicken wing out from between her teeth. “Extra crispy!” he exclaims, making the joke extra funny. The two finally kiss, with Julia licking him and slobbering all over his face. The kiss is interrupted for maybe half of a second to show a picture of Tom Cruise for absolutely no reason, and then goes right back to the kiss. The kiss itself is also totally pointless, because all Hitch does afterwards is sign her up for a game show advertised in a newspaper. First, though, Julia has to be pimped out.
Yes, it’s time to haul out the dead “Pimp my ____” horse and give it another beating. Hitch (wearing a basketball jersey) and Julia wander into a garage, where the crew go to town trimming her toenails with an angle grinder, ripping out her back hair, installing a PlayStation in her belly, etc. This montage goes on for entirely too long, until Julia’s finally finished and rises up like Darth Vader from the end of Episode 3. She’s even wearing a full-on Darth Vader costume, and just when you think the scene couldn’t possibly get any lamer, the camera pans over to Tony Cox, who’s face is now made up to look like Yoda. Julia topples over, thankfully saving us from the “Nooooooooo!” joke we all thought was coming. The suit is removed, revealing a sexy new Julia. We also learn that lyposuctioned fat is used to make mayonnaise, and as stupid as that joke is, there’s going to be a callback to it later.
Now we’re on the set of the game show, Extreme Bachelor. The now-unrecognizable Julia is a contestant, and Grant is the bachelor. The way this version works is (I’m not making this up) the women stand in a line, and Grant blows them away with a shotgun one at a time until only one is left alive. Julia is left standing and the host comes over and gives them their prize. That’s it, the entire show. It’s less than two minutes long, including the opening titles.
Now Julia and Grant are on their dinner date, and we cut in to find Grant in the middle of a When Harry Met Sally fake orgasm. He’s moaning, rubbing his nipples, and flopping around like Elizabeth Berkley in the pool scene in Showgirls. This may be the first time anyone has ever written this, but I wish I was watching Showgirls. Anyway, this goes on for a solid minute (I timed it), after which we find out that he was just giving a very enthusiastic answer to a waitress asking him if he wanted pork chops. The waitress appears hideously embarrassed, and I don’t think she’s acting. Julia tells Grant that she’s tried to enroll into pastry school, and we get to see a clip from her enrollment video. It’s a parody of “Girls Gone Wild”, and oddly enough it features a skinny Julia, apparently forgetting that she weighed 389 pounds until earlier this afternoon. The two find out that they share a favorite song – 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop”, which they then sing. The two go for a walk in the park, where Julia suggests they beat up a hobo for fun. They clobber him senseless to the tune of “Do You Believe in Magic?” by The Lovin’ Spoonful, then take his wine and wallet. Really, this actually happens! They must have thought it was absolutely hilarious, because it goes on (as usual) for way, way too long. In reality it’s creepy and kind of sad. They cap off this perfect evening by having sex, which is watched by the creepy old cat lady across the street. She purrs and licks her lips. Grant goes to wash his face, and screams when he finds a giant pair of underwear in the sink. This joke might have been funny if it wasn’t directly stolen from Planes, Trains & Automobiles. The original version of this joke combined Steve Martin, John Candy, and John Hughes at their peaks, and if these two clods think they can make it funnier, they’re out of their goddamn minds. Anyway, Grant starts going through her medicine cabinet and sees the following:
- Vagisil
- Crabs Hotel – “Hides dead bugs from view! Crabs can check out any time they want… but they can never leave!”
- Sphincter Bleach – “Rosebud scent! Leaves rectum sparkling!”
- Oldman’s Own Balsamic Vinaigrette Douche
- Taint Cleaner – “For heavy traffic areas!”
He puts the last one on his, well, taint, I guess. We see him reach his hand down the back of his pants and start rubbing. The good news is that this horrible, and and horribly disgusting scene is finally over. The bad news is that we’ve only now just hit the 20 minute mark.
Now the movie switches to a Meet the Parents parody, which is pretty much just directly lifted from that movie, but more disgusting and with fewer laughs. We’re in the living room of Julia’s parents house, where Grant is meeting her parents. This is explained by one of the characters, apparently to address particularly slow audience members as to what’s going on. Mom wants grandkids, so she asks Grant if he’s shooting blanks, then hands him a “Vicky’s Secret” and sealed cup in a bag and tells him to go make her a sample. He opens the bathroom door to find a cat sitting on the toilet farting, shaking around, and making yelping noises for a full minute and a quarter. The cat finally does his business, lights a match, and sprays the room with aerosol. It probably would have been less disgusting just to show Grant whacking off. This cuts to the family having dinner, where we learn Grant’s full name – Grant Fockyerdodder. Maybe the writers didn’t realize that “Greg Focker” was not only already a joke, but the same joke. At some point during the dinner, dad lifts his shirt to reveal that he has eight nipples. We finally get to the point where they celebrate by popping open a bottle of champaign, and just like in Meet the Parents, the cork knocks the urn on the mantle and breaks it. Instead of ashes, though, an entire corpse comes out. The cat wanders over to the corpse and takes a giant shit on it. That’s such a perfect metaphor for this entire series.
Julia and Grant are now taking a nighttime stroll through the streets, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s already time for the mandatory Michael Jackson joke! He’s in the background trying to pick up a small boy, and eventually gets smacked away by the boy’s mother. Later on we see her crushing his head under a dumpster lid as he yells “Hoo hoo!” and spasms around. This is so lame I’m just going to skip ahead to the next scene.
Now our couple is in a jewelry store, and Grant gets on his knee to propose. Just as Julia says yes, two Hobbits and Gandalf wander into the store. The lispy Frodo-ish one gives the clerk a ring and asks how much she’ll give him for it, because apparently in this world, high-end jewelry stores work under the same business practices as pawn shops. The clerk bites the ring and gives him $50. Gandalf objects, as the ring will “destroy all evil” (?), which gets him a swift kick in the nuts from the Hobbits. He falls to the floor moaning “My precious!” This Hobbit part of the scene actually takes up more screen time than the Julia/Grant/plot part does.
Now it’s time for the Meet the Fockers scene. Grant’s family and Julia are driving down the street in an RV. Eddie Griffin, wearing a sea captain’s hat, is telling Grant something about “meeting his parents”, which is a joke the movie already covered (twice), but never mind. Julia is in the back with a baby (I’m not sure who’s), going over flash cards with it. All of them have something to do with drugs or prostitution. According to the commentary, a lot of this scene was cut, so I guess these are just the funniest cards. The baby even says his first word, “beeyotch”.
The RV pulls up to the house to find a grotesquely hairy-chested Fred Willard doing backflips on the lawn. The family climbs out of the RV to meet him, except for the baby who gets flung out still strapped to his baby chair, perhaps as a glimpse of all the hilarious child beating to come in Meet the Spartans. Fred takes the family to meet the mom, a cross-eyed Barbara Streisand parody played by a shrieking Jennifer Coolidge. When we first see her, she’s reading a guide to tantric sex. The families sit down for drinks, and the Streisand character reveals that Grant lost his virginity to the housekeeper. Raise your hand if you can see exactly where this joke is going. In walks the inevitable buff, shirtless male housekeeper. The camera fixate on his ass as he bends over to put down the drinks. Working off that classiness, the Babs character mentions something about her and her husband having “a very long engagement”. Then we get to see her spiderweb-covered thighs as she recommends the Dirty Sanchez sex move to Julia’s mom. Meanwhile, the father characters are playing basketball, which ends in a no less disgusting way with Eddie Griffin getting a mouthful of Fred Willard’s chest chair, and then coughing it up like a hairball. These guys need to give up on comedy and start doing low budget gross-out horror flicks, because I’ll give credit where credit is due, and these guys are really good at being disgusting.
Now our couple is seeing a wedding planner, a Latin woman with an enormous ass named Jello. I mean her name is Jello, not her ass. She breaks her desk under the weight of her enormous ass, and recommends having the reception at Taco Butt and having a pinata at the wedding. Too bad South Park already beat them to this joke three years prior, while it was still relevant. Also, not to draw parallels or anything, but the character who made that joke on that South Park was blatantly racist.
We cut to a swimming pool, where Grant is taking Julia to meet his best man, Andy, who happens to be a woman. Bizarrely enough, she’s played by a supermodel, and even more bizarrely for this series, she’s not played by Carmen Electra. She comes out of the water in slow motion, takes a shower, deep-throats a banana, sensually eats a cob of corn about as well as anybody could possibly sensually eat a cob of corn, shakes her ample talents around using a jackhammer, and finally washes a car while eating a hamburger and wearing a completely different bikini. That last part was a parody of a Burger King ad starring Paris Hilton, which I guess had it coming. She’s the antagonist character, and she’s being introduced just slightly past the movie’s halfway point. She strips naked while chatting with the two of them, although there’s no actual nudity. It’s too bad, it would have been a nice change of pace from the gratuitous amounts of man-ass this series shoves at the screen. We learn that Grant and Andy used to be lovers, and we get a flashback to how the two of them first met. Grant is walking down the street in drag as the soundtrack plays “Pretty Woman”. More specifically, Grant is dressed like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Andy pulls up in a limo and offers him 2 grand to “fuck him in the ass”. That right there is as extreme as this unrated version gets. According to the director’s commentary, one of the director’s has a wife who makes a cameo appearance in this scene. The fact that one of the them actually has an attractive wife totally blows my mind. Back in reality we find out that Grant and Andy only stopped dating three weeks ago. This gets Julia so mad that she has a fantasy about ripping Andy’s silicone implants out. This sets up a rivalry that will take up maybe 10 minutes of the remaining screen time.
Our couple is now seeing a relationship councilor in a parody of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which according to the commentary, the two director’s didn’t even want to do. The scenes where they actually tried are bad enough, but the scenes where they don’t are just unbearable. Julie admits to having Hepatitis C which, coupled with the things from her medicine cabinet earlier, tells us that she got an awful lot of nookey for a 389 pound alcoholic ashtray. Grant mentions how Julia sometimes gets on his nerves, and mimes strangling her, snapping her neck, and smothering her with a pillow. It’s a good thing this movie was made a few years before the directors graduated to actually showing those kinds of things on screen.
Now we move on to Julia shopping for a wedding dress with the help of Andy. They’re shopping at “Best Bride”, which might be the most clever thing in the entire movie. Julie tries on a particularly ugly dress, which causes her to stumble into an open circuit breaker panel. This gives her the power to read minds. It’s now time for an utterly inexplicable and completely toothless What Women Want parody, but with the male/female roles reversed. Given the possibilities of this setup, what do Dumb & Dumber come up with for her to overhear?
- A little boy angry at his mom for dressing him up like a cowboy
- Two gay (of course) bikers who enjoy shopping
- Britney and K-fed analyzing their marriage
Awesome. She also overhears Andy’s plan to get her and Grant to break up, and this triggers the stupidest sequence of the entire movie. Julia steps out from behind a wedding dress display wearing a yellow jumpsuit, Andy is now wearing an eyepatch, and the two women brandish swords at each other. Yes, it’s a parody of Kill Bill, a movie largely made up of characters and sequences taken from other movies. If you want to see how to successfully take scenes from one film and insert them into another, watch Kill Bill. If you want to see it done spectacularly wrong, watch this Kill Bill. The characters stare each other down, and we get the classic red tint/alarm sound that Tarantino did so well, only this time the reaction shot is of the Ben Stiller character from Dodgeball. Then it happens again, except this time we get a flashback to Any eating a hamburger while washing a car from earlier in the movie. Then it happens again, and we get to see the hamburger scene again. Then a telephone rings, and the telephone gets its own red tint/alarm of… Andy eating the hamburger while washing the car. It wasn’t funny the first time, and it doesn’t get any better by the fourth. The characters finally swing their damn swords, which shatter apart and finally end the damn scene.
Now we’re in Hitch’s office again, where Julia is learning to crunk dance while wearing Juggalo makeup. It’s in the same vein as every other dance sequence in the series, in that the act of people dancing is the entire joke. Let’s just move on.
Julia is pacing in front of her mirror, nervous about her upcoming wedding. She sees her old fat self in the mirror, who’s tossing insults back at her and drinking the lypo mayonnaise from earlier. You know what, screw it, I’m skipping this part too.
Now we’re at the rehearsal dinner, where Lil’ Jon is making a toast. Not an impersonator either, it’s the real guy. It’s pretty pointless since Lil’ Jon already seems to be a living parody of himself, and until I saw this movie it never really clicked for me that Lil’ Jon is an actual living person, and not just a popular sketch comedy character. Even so, Dave Chapelle beat this joke to death well before these guys got around to it, so having everyone around the table lift their glass and yell “Get crunk!” falls even flatter than it should have. Andy arrives late to the dinner, and attempts to seduce Grant by twisting a cherry stem into a working model carousel that plays music. Julia asks Grant if he still has feelings for Andy, prompting the entire table to start singing “I Say a Little Prayer”, including two women in sun dresses and matching hats that have no lines and don’t appear at any other point in the movie. Jello crushes a piano with her butt, and the family cat gets drunk out of Lil’ Jon’s crunk goblet. Once again, we have to listen to the whole song, but at least this time it’s something better than the godamn Milkshake song.
Now it’s the wedding day, and Julia wakes up sporting an enormous zit on her face. We’ve already had blood and poop, so why not a little pus? She can’t pop it with her fingers, so she ends up crushing it with a pair of pliers. The force of it popping sends her flying across the room, a joke so funny they used it again in Meet the Spartans. This makes her late for her own wedding, and she arrives just in time to see Andy planting a kiss on Grant. She runs away. Arriving home, she finds that Grant has filled her living room with flowers and balloons, one of which says “I FXXXED UP BIG TIME”. Remember, this is the “unrated” version. Later that night, Grant stands outside her window, holding up a boombox that’s playing “Baby Come Back”. This gets him pelted with garbage from someone who yells “I’m trying to watch Desperate Housewives!”, which might make more sense if we weren’t outright told that this scene takes place at 4am. Julia decides that she doesn’t want to end up like the crazy cat lady next door, who we see having dinner with Julia’s parent’s cat, despite the fact that it’s, you know, 4am.
The next day at the Greek diner (remember that?), Nick proposes to Julia and she turns him down. Julia and her father have a heart-to-heart chat, and we find out that the parents have been married for 30 years. This joke is blatantly swiped from “Don’t Be a Menace” by the Wayans brothers, the same folks who gave these two clods their big break in the first place. Classy! Julia finally agrees to marry Nick, and we cut to their wedding at the office of the Justice of the Peace. Julia has a flashback to the hairball scene, to her and Grant having sex in an elevator, to her and Grant buying DA SHIZZNIT rings and gold teeth, and finally to her parent’s cat pooping in the toilet. Both her and her father realize that she loves Grant and not Nick, and this leads to them reading a six month old magazine article by Grant called “How to Lose a Girl in 10 Days” about their relationship. This timeline makes no sense, but I’ll let that pass since we’re five minutes from the end. Grant and Julia make up through a conversation in their heads, and Grant’s picture keeps changing in the magazine article, and I’ll be damned if this sequence doesn’t actually approach being funny. Then, just as the movie is about to conjure up an actual laugh, they blow it by having Grant send her MapQuest directions to her mother’s Blackberry-enabled phone. Oh well. Julia rushes to meet him, since he’s been waiting the entire six months on the roof of a building. Outside, Hitch helps get her a motorcycle by clobbering a passing rider with a baseball bat. She shows up just as Grant’s given up and is riding down the elevator. Grant passes the time by (what else?) dancing. We also see him playing maracas and the trumpet. Julia, meanwhile, races up the stairs to meet him. She comes across Andy, also racing up the stairs for Grant, and hurls her violently back down. She gets to the roof just as Grant walks out the door, and ends up falling off the roof and landing right into his arms. The two are so happy that they quote Jerry Maguire lines to each other.
We finally arrive at the damn wedding, where find out that Hitch is also a minister. The old lady is there with the cat, and we see that Andy has since hooked up with Nick. The Fred Willard character gives Julia a vaginal thermometer as a gift as she and Grant ride off in a horse-drawn carriage. An Owen Wilson impersonator sporting a giant fake nose wanders in and asks if it’s too late for him to crash the wedding. Nothing much at all happens, considering the entire movie is supposed to be building up to this point.
We finally, finally come to the last scene of the movie, the honeymoon. It’s not what you think – the two are taking their honeymoon on Kong Island. That movie wasn’t even out yet when this movie was in theaters, setting up a tradition that the two directors would take to glorious extremes by Disaster Movie. The two of them are filming Carmen Electra (finally!), tied up and screaming, getting prodded by a giant CGI Kong hand. He rips off her dress to reveal a leopard-print bikini, which one of the native island boys takes a picture of with his camera phone. This turns on Carmen, who starts making suggestive comments to Kong before he flattens her with his fist. And with that completely pointless reference, we’re done!
THE END!
Running time: 73 minutes
This is usually the part where I talk about what happens during the credits, but screw it, this movie has something even funnier to talk about: the DVD commentaries. Namely, the fact that none of the commentaries are allowed to mention the films being referenced, and every film name has been bleeped over by by the Fox legal department. Normally this would be perfectly understandable, but for some reason the two directors spend the entire commentary talking about which movie each scene is referencing. The result is totally incomprehensible, and you leave the commentary no wiser than when you started. Another commentary is nothing but a laugh track, which I genuinely tried to watch, but had to turn off fifteen seconds in when the Napoleon Dynamite dance got a round of applause. The third commentary track is from two critics who hated the movie, which I guess is supposed to be “ironic” or something. There’s really not much for them to do aside from pointing out the same things everyone else has already complained about, but they end the movie with an absolutely perfect summary, and it’s really the only comment anyone ever needed to make on this entire series:
“Well, that was just totally unnecessary.”