The wages of skin

Apa and I always tousle over the merits of Wedding Crashers, a film I wanted to love and ended up disliking intensely. It's a cowardly film, lacking the courage to follow its smut inclinations through to the denouement (Wedding Crashers is also an interminable 120 minutes-plus):

After dismissing Broken Flowers as an "an exercise in inertia," made by a filmmaker whose idea of awakening a dozing audience is to treat us to some unasked-for Lolita skin, James Wolcott lets'er rip:

A make-work project, Broken Flowers at least isn't as slapdash, bulldozingly obvious, and lumpily arrogant as Wedding Crashers, one of the worst comedies ever to win good reviews (the , disjointed 40 Year Old Virgin at least had the Bollywood finale), its dinner-party scene so badly staged and acted that someone should have nailed a "condemned" sign across Vince Vaughn's mugging mug and arranged for whoever wrote the "Eleanor Roosevelt" dyke jokes to be shipped to destinations unknown.

I wish I'd come up with "The Frat Pack," his derisive name for the Owen Wilson-Vince Vaughan-Will Ferrell trifecta