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JD [ 7.0 ]
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Likeable and sometimes funny film in which DeNiro plays a tough father-in-law to be to Ben Stiller. I had no trouble with DeNiro in that role since he can play the 'mean father' role perfectly. This film is nowhere near as good as There's Something About Mary, but it is an improvement over Keeping the Faith. Ben Stiller has certainly found his niche.
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Love_Spoon [ 7.0 ]
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Meet the Parents is what I would call a pretty funny movie. In fact, in some places, it's hysterically funny. The [small] problem is that in some places, it's just not. In other words, the humor comes in spurts. Robert DeNiro completely engrossed himself into the film, even reportedly staying in character on and off the set. He has that sort of creepy, torturous quality that he displayed so masterfully in The Fan. The film moved along pretty well, and it kept itself together pretty well. I enjoyed it, like I said, because of the great humor, even by DeNiro. However, because of DeNiro's character and the absolute dreadfulness of the rest of Stiller's "hecklers," as well as some painfully obvious humor (Stiller's character's last name is "Focker") I just couldn't settle down and enjoy the movie as much as I wanted to. I'd recommend seeing it, but unless you're a huge Stiller fan, you might want to wait for the discount theaters.
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sloth [ 4.0 ]
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I'm struggling to understand what was so funny about this film. What troubles me deeply is apparently I'm the only one who isn't raving over this wretch of a film.
Problems with this film:
Robert DeNiro isn't funny. He's cool. Cool people are not funny. Funny people can be cool, but being cool does not make you funny by default.
The perfect Robert DeNiro role was in Heat. *That* was DeNiro. Any role which allows him to play a character that might, at the slightest moment, slam someone's head into a car door is a perfect DeNiro role.
In this film, his role was that of a cool ex-spy. Unfortunatly, it floundered. That type of role is not funny.
Ben Stiller isn't funny. He is slapstick stupid. Predictable and banal. The kind of funny a 16 year old kid likes.
Litmus test:
PENIS
RECTUM
Read those words aloud. Do you laugh? Are body parts funny to you? If so, this film is just your speed. While you're at the video store, pick up Dumb and Dumber and have a double header with this movie.
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chapter11 [ 8.0 ]
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Jay Roach's fine comedy "Meet the Parents" features Ben Stiller in his usual role as the hapless victim of the escalating, domino-like pitfalls of life, and Robert De Niro in his usual role as the tough guy - only here De Niro, as in "Analyze This," is lampooning himself, skewering his tough-guy image by playing to every son-in-law-to-be's fear - that the price to pay for marrying the woman you love will be to incur the responsibility of dealing with a De Niro-esque father-in-law. As such, De Niro infuses his role as ex-CIA family man with an unexpected, heretofore unnoticed comedic streak. In fact, he's oftentimes downright hilarious. The film is really an unexpected comedic gem, a wonderful film that maintains a steadily high smile factor throughout. Complaint: the great Owen Wilson is severely underused, but this guy's one of the greatest scene-stealers in Hollywood today, so nobody should feel TOO bad for him. A great flick.
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doug [ 1.5 ]
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I'm a bit tired of the Stiller brand of humor by now. I rolled my eyes when I see how pathetically hard it tries to be funny. While I've chuckled at moments where it's not supposed to be funny. sigh.
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babyduck [ 8.0 ]
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The most common reaction I see to the previews of this film is "WTF is Robert De Niro doing in this film???" After doing his comedic stint in "Analyze This" and starring in this summer's flop "Adventurs of Rocky and Bullwinkle", De Niro seems to be broadening his horizons. Thankfully it works great in this film.
Ben Stiller plays the hapless son-in-law to be and puts in a good performance (but he's doing nothing new in this film that we haven't seen in the past). Similarities have been drawn to his character in "There's Something About Mary" and I think that's a fair characterization.
There are some great moments in this film that had me rolling in the aisles, but I wasn't the only one. There's nothing to here that can't also be enjoyed on the small screen, but watching it with a big crowd is great fun.
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Corto [ 7.0 ]
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Like many, I have always disliked De Niro as a comedy actor, but in this case he is the right man for the job. I admit that the film is hysterically funny at times, but it gets mushy in the end. There shouldn't be any shallow emotional scenes in films like this one.
SIKAOS has a point - the trailer covered the film pretty well...
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DokBrowne [ 8.0 ]
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Ben Stiller has cornered the market on stuttery likable guys who get screwed over. Robert DeNiro has cornered the market on no-nonsense tough guys with an effeminate quirk (in Analyze This it was his weepy neurosis; here it's his wuvvy duvvy relationship with his cat). Owen C. Wilson has cornered the market on laid back guys prone to punctuating sentences with the hipster referential pronoun "man" ("I know, man"). Then there's sweet Gwyneth-progeny Blithe Danner, and the splendidly-radiant Teri Polo, who I'll expound on later. All these respectable performers (sans Owen Wilson, who has a bit part only, but was an easy target) infuse the sitcom universe of Meet the Parents with a seamless chemistry you wouldn't expect from its bland tapioca trappings. If you didn't recognize Ben, Bobby, and the others from iconic films like There's Something About Mary, Taxi Driver, and, uh...Danner's guest appearance on "M*A*S*H" as Hawkeye's old flame, you'd swear this was a polished documentary that just-so-happened to be peppered with comical absurdities
Nothing about it suggests the pitch-perfect credibility with which every one of these players – even down to James Rebhorn's ill-defined friend of the family – nails his or her part. As taxing as "I Love Lucy" was, even it had more spunk and story material than the framework outlining this domestic comedy of errors. Yet Jay Roach, whose talent was heretofore buried under the star power of Austin Powers, harnesses the vigor of Hall of Fame-worthy comedian Stiller and unexpectedly hilarious DeNiro, as well as the enchanting finesse of his leading ladies, to mold from the Lemmon-Matthau school of mundane wackiness a fluid yet wrenchingly sympathetic farce. Without prurient potshots pandering to our most Cro-Magnon, simplistically reactionary, Farrelly brothers/Scary Movie/American Pie/Home Alone sense of humor, where humor is less crafted than it is smeared in your face; like a horror movie painting the screen with the splatter carnage of a murder, the effort put into modern comedy too often equates to using stock footage instead of actual filming, by showing us funny rather than letting us make the determination for ourselves through scenarios that can be funny. Their goofiness has sunk to the guilty pleasure level of lampoon comedy - you can't help but laugh when Foil A is bonked on the head with a piece of wood. It takes a pinch more thought and preparation to grab solid laughs from the ordinary act of two characters squinting at one another. Jay Roach and his cast pull it off masterfully
"Gross" isn't a characteristic completely absent in this movie, however. Many mishaps involving the family feline, Jinx, result in such crassness, but the dominant tone of the movie is pure, simple, and wholesome. Instead of watching Ben Stiller masturbate in a bathroom to newspaper lingerie ads, we watch him mouth off to a framed photo that conceals a revealing item, and watch him do so with an intense, imperial causticity the expertise of which the rest of us neophyte sarcazmos could never even hope to comprehend. As it goes, the droll is plentiful, complemented by a few rat-a-tat-tat combos resulting in immense fits of laughter. The elements employed may be standard-issue (desecration of sacred objects, mistreatment of animals, elaborate Rube Goldberg but-not-in-a-gruesome-Final-Destination-context catastrophes, airport inconveniences, some good old-fashioned pyrotechnics, and a polygraph, a machine that essentially epitomizes everything that could go wrong for a Ben Stiller-brand itchy caricature of a maladroit human being, but which is restrained, admirably, as an easy comic device), yet they're never labored or so blatantly obvious that they become irritating. Somehow it all flows naturally. My theory is that the cast works so well as a unit that we the audience accept and even welcome the predictable situations because we're assured not only that hugely entertaining professionals are making the most of this material, but also that the mood is so delightful, not forced or bored or too outrageous. Likewise, the smoothly aqueous progression of the plot proves that a real story, however ordinary on the surface, is being told, and not simply a thread of jokes arbitrarily assigned to a random story (as the sexual flippancy of American Pie attached itself to a coming-of-age teen fable, or in the way that lots of porn movies bog down the hot-and-heavy with scant plotlines and exposition as a means of superfluous justification). Circumstances often overlap in Meet the Parents, and even more impressive, during many of the earlier scenes, there is more than one focus in a single shot – Greg (Stiller) speaking to Jack (DeNiro) while Dina (Danner) mouths something to Greg, or when Jack explains his new voyeuristic occupation. Also interwoven for the effect of impeccable cohesion and identifiable realism is the dialogue, especially that between Greg and Jack. Their interaction in the first half of the movie is meant to be awkward and embarrassingly prickly, as Greg fumbles all attempts at bonding, and Jack clearly delights in making sure Greg answers all his questions badly. Hence they share a Woody Allen-esque freedom of conversation, defying the ubiquitous formula of “character 1 speaks, stops, character 2 responds, stops, character 1 speaks again, ad infinitum…” Enhancing this honest, ingenuous interplay is the amazingly believable familial atmosphere among the Burns’ Jack, Dina, and Pam (Teri Polo). No typical uni-functional family, these in-laws (and fiancée) of Greg. Just watch their behavior when Pam arrives at the Burns household – it’s like watching your own family, with all the intimate understandings and long-established, personal communicative styles. DeNiro, Polo, Danner, and the other, more secondary family members (James Rebhorn, the sister, everyone except brother Jon Abrahams, who doesn’t match at all, which may explain the quandary as to why he’s barely ever around despite living in the same house) may each be deemed excellent in this context alone, although Ben’s three main co-stars deserve a lot more praise for the additional pizzazz they contribute. Danner is an ideal mom: cordial, compassionate, forgiving, non-judgmental, sympathetic to accident-prone son-in-laws being hazed relentlessly by her husband, etc. Teri Polo is indescribable: purely beautiful and in all ways the kind of girlfriend every guy should be so lucky to have. Tangential as it is, I was smitten by every shot of or including her. Like the Albert Camus passage, "Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time", a part of me was detached from the movie to gaze dreamily upon Miss Polo, spellbound by this personification of my own romantic sanguinity, and not wanting it to end. It's wrong of me to describe this sort of reaction, because it's deeply personal, and why should anyone care, but I implore you to tell me Teri Polo is not at least a beautiful woman. Say what you will about her aptitude (or non-) as an actress (which would be unfair anyway) – okay, she lacks the world acclaim that Michelle Pfeiffer and Meryl Streep cart around – she is nonetheless perfect in this movie. A thankless role? Only if we demand either overacting exhibitionism or grandiose, Oscar-hungry drama queens as mandates for a "quality performance." She's as great as Ben Stiller and the legendary Travis Bickle are in Meet the Parents, worthy of equal praise, and that's not just my awe-struck love-at-first(or 3rd, considering she's been lovely in Mystery Date and The Arrival, among other things)-sightedness talking. Three cheers and a Supporting Actress nom for Teri Polo! (like anyone gives a damn about those nepotistic Oscars anymore)
Of the film’s few weaknesses, however, the worst is just how excruciating Greg’s folly becomes. Scene after scene is increasingly painful to sit through, no matter how funny. Greg may be somewhat to blame for his misfortune, what with the lies and all, but mostly he’s set up to take the fall for all the horrors that transpire. Eventually we start to think that if we were subjected to Greg’s nightmare, rather than laugh we would rage or grieve. The movie would have been flat-out unbearable had a happy ending not snuck up at the very last minute, in a resolution that is all the more gratifying thanks to the searing torture and guilt we have so exhaustively shared with Greg to that point. The thing is, most of these conflicts could promptly have been resolved with honesty or the presentation of all information, but instead remain stunted in that frustrating "Dawson's Creek" way (in which they're so hyper-articulate yet barely communicate at all). For his part, Greg definitely needed more of a backbone. Thankfully, Greg is Ben Stiller, one of the best leading men in pseudo-romantic comedies these days. After Keeping the Faith, wherein his traditional victimization was minimized and his dramatic range was brought to light, he has bookend-ed the year with this second rich performance. Thus far, Stiller has avoided the glorification that has trapped bigger stars in capsules of calculated, preset expectations, such as Jim Carrey, who has become so authoritative a presence that every single project he does means something, means everything. Like Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, Carrey appears a whole lot less frequently nowadays because he’s so…valuable, I guess. Stiller, though, has kept his stardom in the middle for us to enjoy again and again in all sorts of ways, maybe because his roles aren’t quite as universal as the others’. Jim has endless versatility, so we look forward to seeing how he will contort his image from one role to the next. Tom is the ultimate equalizer between comedy and drama, gracing each with an affable effortlessness – that whole Jimmy Stewart likeness. As for Spielberg, all he works on anymore is the award-winning movie of the year. But Stiller, he’s still accessible to the public. Just look at how much mileage he gets out his eye movements in this movie – he’s as good as it gets
It should also be noted that male nurses aren’t as much of a joke as they are here, not any more than women in the army are. And that never has a person’s surname been so consistently well-milked for humor. Toss in one well-known comedian and another brooding thespian-turned-wacky-dad, plus Gwyneth Paltrow’s darling mom and the stunningly gorgeous, lovable Teri Polo, and whiz-bang, the year’s best comedy, and a cinematic treasure to enjoy for decades to come
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Stitch [ 8.5 ]
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What a hysterical movie. I haven't laughed as long or often in a movie in ages. Ben Stiller is certainly developing a great career as an everyman to whom outrageous things just seem to happen. Flirting with Disaster, There's Something about Mary, and even Keeping the Faith show the evolution. Robert DeNiro is also fabulous in another role that allows him to make fun of his earlier, much more serious roles (another role being Analyze This, in case you were wondering). Together they are just phenomenal. Just thinking about certain scenes puts a smile on my face. The previews give enough of the story and show enough of the some of the funny parts that I don't want to mention any more. It's funny, smart and eminently worth seeing.
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.5 |
| No. Ratings | : 30 | |
| No. Reviews | : 15 | |
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