You’ve gotta love the weather right now. In just a matter of days, I’ve been drunk and outside several times. I’ve even had a brat, right off the grill. Indeed, the sweet life.
But the best part? The very best part, which every guy knows, is the wardrobe change. Not ours - we’re all still wearing the same baggy stuff we always do.
No, it’s the change in the ladies’ wardrobes that makes springtime at MSU so darn great. Sweaters are exchanged for tube tops, those darn jeans gone - with shorts in their place. And the sundresses? Studying for finals never seemed so difficult with my eyes already bugging out of their sockets.
It was this small-minded, typical male attitude that I took with me into the new movie “The Sweetest Thing.”
Surely, a movie featuring Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair would make up for any shortcomings with plenty of T&A, right? Well, woe is me. Even with two of them in their underwear for an extended period, it was awful. Truly, a Cleveland steamer on the doorstep of my dreams.
The flick was boring, unfocused and trite, so much so that no amount of gorgeous female flesh could make up for it. I may be a man, but I’m a critic too, darn it.
Diaz plays Christina, a late-20s professional in San Francisco who barhops and bed-hops at will, enjoying life.
Now, this character has been done - by both men and women - to death. The “I’m a player but I gotta change” thing is old. George Burns old.
Anyway, Christina goes out clubbing with her two friends Courtney and Jane (Applegate and Blair, respectively) and meets Peter (Thomas Jane), almost automatically falling for him. Thus, the quest begins for Christina to once again meet and trap Peter in her web.
As far as the hunt goes, I’ve seen more exciting and funnier ones in Bugs Bunny cartoons. Throughout “Sweetest Thing” is just jangly, overexcited stupidity, complete with all that annoying, nervous giggling that all guys remember from that group of girls on the playground in grade school.
Even a scene in which one character gets her throat caught on a boyfriend’s penis piercing isn’t funny. It becomes so contrived that it just seems ridiculous. Perhaps the initial parts of jokes are funny, but the follow-up is awful, like that annoying friend we all have at parties. They say something, and it just happens to be funny. So, what do they do? They keep saying it, or a variation of it, all night long, until you beat their moronic ass into submission and dunk ’em in the punch bowl.
And that type of good-natured beating is just what “Sweetest Thing” needs, just to get it back on the right track.
The teaming up of the three bombshells works, with each pulling it off in their roles - particularly Applegate.
But with such a weak story behind it, the quirkiness intended comes off as just plain trying too hard, and the strain of such effort on the weak plot brings the whole thing crumbling down, careening into “be out of theaters in three weeks” territory.
“The Sweetest Thing” is nothing more than a mishmash of clichéd ideas pulled out of all sorts of other recent love/bodily function humor joke movies, adding up to yet another movie that didn’t need to be made.
And the worst part, the very worst part, is the ending. I’ve never seen a movie that really looks like someone just went, “OK, we’ve only got three minutes worth of film left - time to end it!”
There is no decent conclusion to the whole scenario. For a moment I thought whoever was running the projector made a mistake and put the reels on in the wrong order. But it really was the end - not that I wasn’t happy to finally see it come.
Besides, with the weather like it is, who really needs to go to a movie to see scantily clad beautiful women? We live in a paradise, my friends, truly a Bacchanalia of epic proportions, complete with places that serve greasy food and pitchers of beer right on our sidewalks. I just may have to go for an advanced degree.
