Goofily endearing
Mark Steyn
American Pie: The Wedding 15, selected cinemas
Was it last year or the year before that they came out with / Still Know What You Did Last Summer? That was the sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer, though, technically, it should have been / Still Know What You Did The Summer Before Last. Anyway, I think it's safe to say I know what movie studios will be doing next summer: making fewer sequels. This year has been a terrible year for summer movies: Ang Lee wrecked The Hulk, and Gigli would have done better as a low-budget Europic about the late operatic tenor than as a big-budget blockbuster with Hollywood's hottest couple. If! were Saddam and looking to hide out somewhere where no one will ever see me, I'd
pick Ben and J-Lo's next movie. And in between those two flops came one terrible sequel after another, from Charlie's Angels 2 to Legally Blonde 2 to Dumb And Dumberer to Spy Kids 3D: Game Over, the last part of which title may prove the most accurate.
This summer alone there have been 17 sequels, twice as many as in 2002, and more than in 2000 and 2001 combined. And the more sequels you make the less original material you have to make sequels of. (If I were Vice-President of Titles at Universal, I'd discourage the use of sequential numbering even when you retain the character. Die Another Day may not mean much but it's better than James Bond 0078.)
But when all else fails there's American Pie. The hottest movie couple in America isn't Affleck and Lopez but Jason Biggs and Alyson Hannigan, who play Jim Levinstein and Michelle Flaherty in the Pie trilogy, as we must now learn to call it. Biggs is best known for having sex with a hot apple pie, and Miss Flaherty for the finesse she demonstrated when pleasuring herself with a flute. But they're goofily endearing and they've got tons of chemistry: they look like a real high-school couple.
In American Pie: The Wedding, Jim and Michelle are out of college, still in love, and enjoying a candlelit dinner in a fancy restaurant. Jim is intending to propose, but he's forgotten the ring and while he's stalling till his dad can bring it over Michelle gets the wrong end of the stick and slides under the table. Dad arrives at the proverbial awkward moment and somehow Jim winds up exposing his bottom to the other diners, and so on and so forth.
I can't honestly say I was looking forward to this movie. I don't remember if I reviewed either American Pie 1 or 2 and, if I did, what I said about them. And the American critics' notices for The Wedding were so bad I was dreading it. I'd still dread it if I were seeing it at a press preview. But an audience of regular folks makes all the difference: from the minute Jim starts gripping the table to try to conceal his immense pleasure, my fellow moviegoers — not all of them under 17 — were howling with laughter. Oddly enough, the only thing they didn't laugh at was the only line most reviewers singled out: the moment when the Irish father of the bride salutes the Jewish father of the groom by saying that he hopes 'we can sit many happy shivas together'.
I'm with the crowd on that one. It's the sort of verbal wit we wordsmiths like, but, in the context of the movie, it's not quite credible: it's a scriptwriter's line put into someone's mouth. By contrast, most of the rest of the stuff is organic character comedy, very literally in the case of the pubic hair shavings that wind up in the wedding cake.
That's quite some achievement when you consider that if you were contemplating the lamest of lame sequels the comedy of wedding preparations is one of the most tapped-out seams in the gag mine. Matters aren't improved by the director Jesse Dylan (son of Bob, amazingly), who has little sense of timing and goes on way too long. But as the comedy proceeds through the usual confusions — the bar that turns out to be a gay bar, the in-laws who show up ten minutes after the stag night strippers arrive, the dog who swallows the wedding ring — the actors bring just enough conviction to the proceedings to make you feel there's something at stake.
That first scene sums up the movie's appeal. Even after yet another public humiliation, even with the restaurant's patrons staring at his butt and his girlfriend emerging from under the table, Jim goes ahead and proposes anyway. And his dad (the splendid Eugene Levy, veteran of the Christopher Guest mockumentaries), in the midst of his embarrassment, loves Jim and Michelle and is full of paternal pride. Underneath all the bodily fluids and animal excreta, there's a sweetness here that distinguishes this franchise from the other gross-out movies. Even in a debased and degraded culture, you can't afford to patronise your characters.
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