After the press screening of I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, I met up with my fellow critics at Musso & Frank. We tried to wrap our heads around the film while wrapping our hands around a steady stream of booze and appetizers. As often happens, we were soon playing the “meets” game, wherein somebody tosses out two movies whose hybridization resulted in the fiasco we just saw.
“Kind of like Tootsie meets Big Momma's House” offered the gentleman from CBS-TV, “only not so hilarious. One of them needed to wear a dress.” I started to explain to him the difference between a homosexual and a transvestite, but he was busy yelling to the waiter for more calamari.
“Given the film's motif and its predictable denouement,” offered the woman from the NY Times, “I think a better comparison would be Cabaret meets Yentl.” It should be noted that, after a few Vodka Gimlets, this woman always uses Yentl as one of her two films, going so far as to describe Ocean's Thirteen as It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World meets Yentl.
I weighed in that this gag-laden movie harbored a pro-gay subtext and suggested The Crying Game meets Spartacus. The young woman from Entertainment Weekly rested her gaze on mine at the same time that she rested her hand on my knee. The thought of Spartacus, combined with a couple of highballs, always has a lubricating effect on her, and the gladiator flick has thus become my Yentl.
She suggested The Scent Of Green Papayas meets Farewell My Concubine. Nobody understood why, and her slurred explanation only deepened our confusion. Yet I was more than willing to let her ramble on about films from the east at the same time that her hand on my leg was traveling north.
Since we were all on deadline, the party broke up before last-call (right after, in fact, the woman from the NY Times announced that her paper wasn't picking up the tab). We failed to reach a consensus on how to describe I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry. It's just as well, since we're each paid to weigh in using our own unique voice. The one thing we did agree on, as we steadied each other waiting for the valet to bring our cars around, was how lucky we were for not having paid to see this movie. If that were the case, we concluded, the descriptor would be: My Hard Earned Money meets A Sad Demise.
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