I’m always amused by some of the contradictory rules that existed in our home growing up. Sugar cereals weren’t allowed, but it was fine if I spooned sugar into a bowl of Cheerios. Don’t ask!

Also not allowed? TV on school nights. Even if I had finished my homework, the admonition was, “Read a book!” (I did that, and also talked on the phone a lot.) We only had one TV in the house and you might think the no school night thing suggested a certain philosophical austerity about TV in general or what I was allowed to watch. Nope. Not only that, we had cable. Not just cable, but HBO. 

I bring this up because the Saturday night movie on HBO used to be an event: A fairly recent theatrical release that was getting a prime spot for its TV premiere. 

Flash-forward a few decades and the big movie on a Saturday night earlier this month was … “Wedding Crashers.”

From 2005. A 20-year-old movie.

Is this just the result of an anemic movie slate, or the fact that nobody really programs Saturday nights anymore? Maybe a combination of both.

I don’t think I’ve seen “Wedding Crashers” since it came out and was taken aback by how well it works, despite a least one reason it should not.

Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn play best buds and work colleagues who spend “wedding season” infiltrating various nuptials. They seamlessly insert themselves and become the life of the party, leave with a beautiful woman for a one-nighter, and then it’s off the next wedding, rinse and repeat. Their enthusiasm for weddings, and wedding rituals (they’re "Hava Nagila"-ing with the best of ‘em), is funny, yes, but also improbably endearing because weddings are never this fun, even the good ones.

They’re having the time of their lives. Until they attend a wedding where Wilson’s character — who has started to tire of this charade — falls for the bride’s sister (Rachel McAdams) and finagles a way for he and his pal (who has caught the eye of the bride’s other sister, played by Isla Fisher) to accompany the family to their preppy-wealthy estate for a few days of Ralph Lauren-eseque lounging.

The writing is actually good? I don’t know why that gave me pause, but maybe it’s because the writing in a lot of comedies at the moment just … isn’t. The screenplay is from Steven Faber and Bob Fisher (it’s the most notable film in either’s resume; they also wrote 2013’s “We’re the Millers”) but also because Wilson and Vaughn have chemistry, with the former’s easygoing energy melding with latter’s motormouth intensity.

Together and individually, they strike just the right tone and find the buoyant comedy in roles that could easily tip over into something gnarlier. Director David Dobkin’s resume isn’t especially notable outside of this movie either. For whatever reason, everything came together here. Wilson’s strength as an actor is a light touch that doesn’t come off as vacant, and Vaughn plays his character as both an overgrown child as well as a man with voracious, very adult appetites. There’s something so easy and playful about their performances. They tell each other “I love you” (Vaugh with his mouth stuffed with food) and it feels like, yes, these knuckleheads really do have love for one another.

Here’s Wikipedia on the origin’s of the movie’s premise:

Andrew Panay, co-producer of “Wedding Crashers,” had the idea for the film based on his own experiences of being excited to attend weddings in his 20s due to the prospect of meeting women … [but] much of the film was based upon Fisher's experiences as a college intern in Washington, D.C., where he would make up fake backstories to crash lobbyist events for the free food. Panay and Fisher's experiences merged together to form the idea of a film in which the main characters crash weddings to meet and sleep with women.

Separating the art from the artist

I don’t generally find Vaugh’s schtick all that interesting, but when it works, it works. Which means there’s a certain amount of separating the art from the artist here. I’m of the mind that Vaughn is offputting as a person. Ten years ago, he told an interviewer that he thinks affirmative action is racist. Earlier this year, he posed with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. It’s pretty clear what his politics are. 

I had an up close dose of his demeanor a decade ago when he came through Chicago promoting “Hacksaw Ridge.” It was a fairly innocuous interview until I asked non-fluff questions about working with Mel Gibson, the film’s director. He didn’t like that and pretended Gibson’s history of abuse and bigotry was non-existent. I’ll let you read the interview for yourself, but I will add a few things. Vaughn is not new to any of this and has been giving interviews long enough to anticipate that he’d be asked about Gibson. If he’s going to do press, that is, in fact, his job — to prepare for those questions. I imagine there was also an army of publicists anticipating the same thing, who offered any number of potential ways to engage with these questions in ways that were not … whatever Vaughn chose. What I didn’t include in the piece is that afterwards, he approached me to “hug it out” and I find this instinct so odd. A) I didn’t want him touching me B) This is a professional situation and we are strangers, why would there be hugging anyway and C) Did he think the hug would somehow downplay his earlier recalcitrance? 

So, look, that’s my experience.

It also means if I’m reviewing any of his subsequent projects — including Apple’s “Bad Monkey,” which I thought was mediocre — I have to put that aside and assess the work itself. And in “Bad Monkey,” at least, this is what I wrote about his performance: “He doesn’t embody a specific character so much as play a version of his well-worn persona, delivering a glib, fast-talking patter but little else to suggest there’s a human being underneath all that bluster. He’s blank behind the eyes.”

The screen persona Vaughn developed early on, going back to 1996’s “Swingers,” is dependent on a brazen and highly verbal dexterity combined with an enthusiastic immaturity. That can generate a wonderful tension when it’s coming from a fully grown man who towers over everyone around him. I think that’s been harder to pull off as he ages; there’s a heaviness to his energy that subverts his efforts, and instead of leaning into that and finding different ways into this archetype, he’s more or less doing what he’s always done, and you feel the strain. It falls flat.

A long way of saying, rewatching “Wedding Crashers” was a reminder of how fun that archetype can be when done well. He’s doing a lot and that can sometimes sink an actor, but he judges it just so. He’s spirited and locked in and happy to be the butt of the joke.

Let’s talk about the joke

The running gag, once they decamp to the bride’s family estate, is that Fisher’s character is clingy and not content to just bone some guy she meets at a wedding. She’s all in. Immediately. He’s alarmed and wants to run, but is coerced into tagging along for this extended weekend, and Fisher’s character proceeds to — there’s just no other way to say this — sexually assault him repeatedly.

He’s horrified. She’s cheerily oblivious to his horror. 

The consent issues are overt and he’s very clear about this. When his friend wonders if he didn’t sleep the night before because of a soft mattress, this is Vaughn’s reply: “Yeah, it could have been the soft mattress. Or it could have been the midnight rape. Or it could have been the nude gay art show that took place in my room.” (The bride’s brother, who is gay and just as predatory as his sister, also has a thing for Vaughn’s character. Just … the longest of sighs.)

Vaughn’s character literally says he’s traumatized. “I just had my own sock duct-taped into my mouth last night. The sock that I wore around all day, playing football in, pouring sweat in, was shoved into my mouth and was then duct-taped over it.”

Well, let’s talk about it, comes the gentle reply, to which he responds: “I’m not in a place to discuss what happened, OK? I felt like Jody Foster in ‘The Accused’ last night. I’m gonna go home and see Dr. Finklestein and tell him we gotta a whole new bag of issues, we can forget about mom for a while.”

I suppose one argument is that Vaughn’s character is finally getting his cumupence after so many years of treating wedding guests as sexual party favors — his own personal fuck around and find out — but we’re given no indication that he’s raped anyone, and despite the comedic way in which it’s presented, that’s exactly what’s happening to him. That’s the word he uses!

I suppose we’re meant to laugh, though, because he’s such a lumbering figure and she’s so tiny (their height disparity is a source of visual comedy) she can’t possibly force him to do anything against his will. The subtext: Isla Fisher is gorgeous and therefore what guy wouldn’t want her to climb on his lap and tell him she’s not wearing panties, or surreptitiously rub him off at the dinner table, or tie him up in bed and have her way with him? 

Watching it, I wasn’t bothered by this so much as simply noticing it. A few days later I saw an unrelated post from the very smart Dominique Baker about a different movie altogether, but the sentiment felt similar:

“Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” is the best combination dance/horror movie I've ever seen. You gasp in amazement (that house building scene!) and then you gasp in horror (kidnapping ladies, my word!)

Fisher has a tricky role in “Wedding Crashers” that would make a lot of this unwatchable in lesser hands, but she somehow makes this bubbly, scarily-obsessed ding-dong actually funny.  

To reiterate: Vaughn’s character is very not into it. That, in fact, is the crux of the “joke,” which then pivots on a reversal: Three quarters of the way through the movie, he’s suddenly very into it.

Pouring himself a stiff drink, he tells the family pastor: “Let’s put all the cards on the table. She’s fit for a straitjacket — this broad’s fucked three ways towards the weekend — and you want to know what? I dig it. It turns me on. Yeah. It turns me on. Because you want to know what the kicker is, Father? Maybe I’m a little fucking crazy.”

He clinks glasses.

“I dig talking to you, you’re really an enlightened cat and I really like that about you,” he tells the pastor, who hasn’t said a word the entire time. Vaughn then gets up and grabs him by both cheeks: “I’m coming in for the real thing,” and plants kiss on his lips. “I love you, you’re a sweet man.”

So … it wasn’t assault, then? He secretly liked it the whole time?

I have to give it Vaughn, these kinds of tonal shifts — undergirded by a supreme confidence and an appreciation for the comedic potential of indignation paired with gusto and immaturity — are tough to pull off. But he does.

I don’t want to undersell Wilson, who is usually a less-is-more kind of performer, but when his character hits rock bottom and starts messily crashing weddings as a solo act, he does it with a Wilsonian charm that gives it an endearing, wonderful ridiculousness.

“Wedding Crashers” was the 6th highest grossing film in the U.S. the year it came out.

It’s also the only role in which I’ve found Bradley Cooper — as the massive dick to whom McAdams is engaged — remotely believable.

There were no sequels, which feels like too much to hope for in our current environment, although Wilson and Vaugh did team up again a few years later on the “The Internship,” a far lesser movie.

Here’s the thing. Nobody in “Wedding Crashers” is a developed character at all, even McAdams, who is the most grounded character in the ensemble. But the writing is strong enough to make up for this thanks to a real sense of storytelling economy (with a running time of two hours).

There’s an arc. The movie has something to say about two guys who once viewed women as short-term amusements, and then coming to the realization that a romantic relationship is actually something they want. Desperately.

Not everyone may agree. Two years after the movie came out, David Denby wrote a piece for the New Yorker about the dismal state of the romantic comedy and its rut of the man-child formula featuring …

… [the] slovenly hipster and the female straight arrow. The movies form a genre of sorts: the slacker-striver romance

He names everything from “High Fidelity” to “Fever Pitch” to “Knocked Up” to, well, “Wedding Crashers,” which are ultimately about the (apparent) civilizing effects of marriage:

Romantic comedy is entertainment in the service of the biological imperative. The world must be peopled. Even if the lovers are past child-rearing age or, as in recent years, don’t want children, the biological imperative survives, as any evolutionary psychologist will tell you, in the flourishes of courtship behavior. Romantic comedy civilizes desire, transforms lust into play and ritual — the celebration of union in marriage.

Hollywood would benefit from more Ryan Cooglers

Let’s change the subject and talk about a recent interview Ryan Coogler gave to the New York Times, in which he talks about declining an invitation to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, aka the Oscars org.

Though “Sinners” looks to be a major Oscar player, that voting body has never nominated [Michael B.] Jordan for his acting or Coogler for his directing — indeed, no Black filmmaker has ever won in the latter category. Asked to join the academy in 2016, Coogler declined the invitation.

“It’s not out of animosity,” he told me, noting that he’s stretched thin with commitments to his film school and unions. “And I’m not good at judging things, bro. The act of ‘Hey, pick the best thing’ is very stressful for me, even when there’s no stakes involved.”

He is more drawn to the everyday elements of his career than to the glamorous ballrooms. “People see the tuxedo, they see the red carpet, but it’s real blue-collar folks making these movies happen,” Coogler said, adding that he truly fell in love with filmmaking once he understood that, at its core, it’s a job.

At its core, it’s a job.

What a refreshingly down-to-earth perspective from a profession that tends to get overheated when it comes to self-regard.

It’s worth remembering there are entire teams of publicists, agents and managers who try to dissuade their clients from opting out of these opportunities, so I have a lot of respect for Coogler's insistence that it's just not his focus. He doesn’t need that validation.

It’s a mark of his confidence in an industry that embraces big egos but also expects a lockstep mentality about things like "wanting" to join the Academy.

Related, the Golden Globes nominations were announced this week and I can’t believe news organizations still treat this as a legitimate entity.

I mean, I know why the Hollywood trades do it — Variety, Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter are all owned by Penske, which, as of 2023, now runs the Golden Globes. The conflict of interest is blatant, but it explains the conspicuous absence of skepticism. You can’t say the same of any other media outlet that’s treating the Golden Globes as legit.

The reasons might be as boring as, “We need content, here are a bunch of stars, and if we don’t cover the Globes, someone else will and they’ll steal our traffic.” And maybe audiences are understandably desperate for any kind of news that isn’t about the depressing state of affairs of the moment.

At least the LA Times published a column this week from Glenn Whipp that did not mince words, with the headline: The Golden Globes' ethics are worse than ever, and no one seems to care

Privately, there has been pushback. Publicly, not so much. We live in a culture at large where we've come to accept flagrant corruption as the norm, and Penske's Globes are just another example, skating through our collective consciousness.

Instead of accepting it, let’s all be a bit more like Coogler and simply just decline.