The movies have long nurtured the arrested development of the American male, serving as a virtual playpen for legions of slobbering big babies for whom Peter Pan isn't a syndrome but a way of life. Where once Lou Costello's roly-poly cheeks shuddered as violently as a milk-starved newborn in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Vince Vaughn's jowls now tremble excitedly in Wedding Crashers. The difference being, of course, that while Costello had only Abbott, Vaughn conquers vixens and virgins alike with his signature mix of alpha-male braggadocio and thumb-sucker hunger.
And what of Owen Wilson, Vaughn's partner in booty call from Wedding Crashers, the smooth operator with the zigzag nose who's looking to score again this week with a trifle called You, Me and Dupree? This time Wilson's partner in bad-boy crime is Matt Dillon, providing yeoman straight-man support as Dupree's best friend, Carl, whose new marriage to Molly (Kate Hudson) puts a kink in the men's friendship. Will Carl and Dupree remain tight? Will Carl and Molly do the same after Dupree moves in and almost burns down their house? Will it all end happily after the poop jokes, pratfalls and modest disturbances? Are you kidding? Will you laugh anyway? Possibly. Loudly? Not so much.
Fans of the director Wes Anderson know Wilson as the writing partner on his best films — Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums — as well as one of his most important on-camera collaborators. Wilson's brother, the actor Luke Wilson, wore his heart on his hospital togs in The Royal Tenenbaums, and eventually secured both the beautiful girl and a melancholically happy ending. But as crucial to the film's emotional and psychological texture was Owen Wilson's turn as a drug-addled writer of purple-sage prose fated to unwittingly stick pins in his own pomposity. Anderson was clearly the artistic genius in residence, but it was Owen Wilson who helped make sure the air they breathed never became too rarefied.
PHOTO COURTESY OF UIP
With his beach-bum good looks and an instantly recognizable twang suggestive of easy and high times, Wilson has in recent years become something of an unexpected if modest star. Although he has taken on serious roles — a serial killer in one film, a downed fly boy in another — he often plays Zen masters and slackers with more than a passing resemblance to Spicoli, the stoner-surfer played by Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The shocks of blond and the broken beaks are the obvious points of comparison, but there's something of Spicoli, the eternal teenager, in Wilson's characterizations, too. Now 37, he has found success splashing in the shallow end of the pool alongside Vince, Ben, Will, Jack and the other boy-men of modern Hollywood comedy.
“All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz and I'm fine,” Spicoli explains in Fast Times. Dupree doesn't say anything nearly as memorable (the writer is Michael Le Sieur, earning his first big-screen credit), though he embodies a similar hang-10 vibe. The film actually opens in Hawaii with a blowout wedding paid for by Molly's creepily overprotective father, whom Michael Douglas tries and fails to make funny. Soon after, Dupree moves in with the newlyweds and proceeds to stink up the bathroom, among other offenses. More entertainingly, he woos a lady friend by serving up Tone Loc's ridiculous hit Funky Cold Medina with a large helping of butter, an amusing bit that, like most of the setups, is soon lost amid too much choreographed mayhem.
There are several problems with Dupree, not least that there is no filmmaking to speak of, just a progression of competent-looking scenes in which the actors appear to have successfully hit their marks. The directors, the brothers Anthony and Joe Russo, have made a few other features, including Welcome to Collinwood, an unnecessary redo of Big Deal on Madonna Street that nonetheless looked like someone was paying attention to the lighting and how objects and bodies fit in the frame, which isn't the case here. That said, they do manage to shoot Hudson most attractively in a fantasy sequence that finds her promenading in a bikini, thus fulfilling her primary function in the film as a decorative accessory.
Despite Hudson's itsy-bitsy bikini and that dollop of butter, You, Me and Dupree remains a limp attempt to wed a romantic comedy to a buddy comedy, largely because the filmmakers see women as visitors from another planet, which is more or less what they now are in Hollywood. Not surprisingly, as is often the case with comedies like this, the important love in the film — the one that dares not speak its name, but compels the guys to toss around the word “homo” so no one gets the wrong idea — isn't between a man and woman, but two male friends. Considering that Molly comes off as such a killjoy, clucking and scolding and nagging like mom, you understand why Carl and Dupree might want to sneak off — so do we.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
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It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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