I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

"Tremendously savvy in its stupid way, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is as eloquent as Brokeback Mountain, and even more radical," argues Nathan Lee in the Voice. It's "the first movie to effectively hijack that all-purpose justification for right-wing bigotry, 'protecting the children,' and redeploy it as a weapon of the homosexual intifada.... This sodomite had a gay old time."

And Ed Gonzalez? Not so much: "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is pro-gay but it's less interested in collapsing straight-male hang-ups about gay men than is in putting on a surprisingly mawkish show of political correctness against distinctly retrograde forms of homophobia," he writes at Slant. "This is one of the stranger straight-male fantasies out there: The filmmakers sincerely believe that homophobia is easily resolved, but they seem to desperately want a cookie from the gay community for realizing that 'the word faggot is a bad word.' Their vulgar self-congratulation compromises their goodwill."

Updated through 7/20.

"Like Mary Poppins's spoonful of sugar, a little comedy makes it a whole lot easier for audiences to swallow exposure to concepts that make them otherwise twitchy," writes Alonso Duralde at AfterElton.com. "There are, in fact, three main methods employed by comedies (and even some dramas) that allow filmmakers to teach audiences a civics lesson about equal rights without being thuddingly didactic about it." Check 'em out.

John Hazelton, writing for Screen Daily, finds the film "turns out to be a pretty inoffensive but not terrifically funny buddy comedy that slips its vague pleas for lifestyle tolerance in between bursts of the kind of broad, un-PC humour for which its star is best known."

Following a "list of moments that made me cringe," Rob at I Don't Like Renee Zellweger writes, "I don't usually consider myself easily offended, and am all for humor that pushes the boundaries of taste, but I am honestly disgusted that GLAAD has stamped this movie with their approval and even say so on their website." Thanks, Nathaniel.

Updates, 7/19: "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry is not as hilarious as it thinks it is, profound as it pretends to be, or tolerant as it intends," writes Bill Gibron for PopMatters. "Yet none of this will matter to the throngs who only think of film as a way to waste two hours. For them, this crackerjack comedy will allow them to remain bigoted and have a belly laugh or two. And Hollywood scores another monetary hash mark in the category of knowing audience underestimation."

"[L]ove him or hate him, [Adam] Sandler understands - sometimes more in the breach than the observance - that winking at the audience can derail a comedy in seconds, and that if you're going to offend liberal sensibilities, you have to go all the way. For all the sitcom capering, he and [Kevin] James play out their skittish partnership absolutely straight, if that's the word," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. She wanted to hate it, but just can't. Two more observations: "If nothing else, Chuck & Larry should open up a whole new career path for the ineffably funny, unselfconsciously buck-naked Ving Rhames as an übermacho firefighter who's been sitting on a little secret of his own. Astonishingly, Chuck & Larry's screenplay is credited to Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, with whom one doesn't associate such go-for-it vulgarity, though there were hints of raunch to come in the famous hotel sequence between Thomas Haden Church and Sandra Oh in Sideways."

"Chuck & Larry has more laughs per minute than any movie since Hot Fuzz," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Half the fun is knowing how thoroughly these jokes will outrage the PC brigade - especially with other bad-boy gags in the mix.... This is no Staircase, yet Chuck & Larry ascends - past our seemingly instinctual prejudices. It's a modern classic (despite a cheap-shot plug for Giuliani). By comparison, Hollywood's most celebrated gay comedies - In & Out, Chuck and Buck, Blades of Glory, even the laughable Brokeback Mountain - were all failures of nerve."

"Thirty minutes of this movie will bring the chuckling, immature inner bigot out of even the most staunchly mature liberal," Cullen Gallagher gleefully warns us in the L Magazine.

Alonso Duralde's back at AfterElton.com, this time with a review: "While it's very easy to eviscerate Chuck and Larry from an activist point of view - the pre-enlightened Sandler makes jokes about 'Olympic Baton Swallowing,' while Dan Aykroyd tells the leads, 'What you shove up your ass is your own business' - all one really has to do to slam the flick is look at the lazy, contrived writing and the traffic-cop direction by frequent Sandler accomplice Dennis Dugan (Big Daddy, Happy Gilmore)."

"I'm sorry, what year are we living in?" asks Aaron Hillis at Premiere. "That anyone in their right minds could be fooled into thinking that two hours of overt homophobia with a disingenuous punch line about tolerance is okay makes me pig-biting mad. That the seemingly prototypical audience I watched it with laughed like stoned hyenas makes me somewhat embarrassed to be an American. And that an inane Adam Sandler comedy of lowest-common-denominator gags could rile me up this much just makes me want to cry. It's almost ugly enough to be considered a perverse work of art."

Updates, 7/20: "Fear of a gay planet fuels plenty of American movies; it's as de rigueur in comedy as in macho action," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "But what's mildly different about Chuck & Larry is how sincerely it tries to have its rainbow cake and eat it too." The film "has been deemed safe for conscientious viewing by a representative of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a media watchdog group. Given the movie's contempt for women, who mainly just smile, sigh and wiggle their backdoors at the camera, it's too bad that some lesbian (and Asian) Glaad members didn't toss in their two cents about the movie."

Josh Ralske agrees: "Maybe we're scouring the film so conscientiously for signs of homophobia that we don't notice the way women are portrayed. But in hindsight, the film is more repugnant in its treatment of women than in its (still somewhat troublesome) portrayal of gay men."

"[N]o matter how crass and clueless the trailers make it look, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is something sweeter, and quite a bit messier, than I expected," writes Stephanie Zacharek at Salon. "[W]ith its tepid gags and faltering pacing, [it] may not be a very good movie. But at least, within its clumsiness, it strives for some kind of solidarity."

"There are two ways to look at it," suggests Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Either be depressed that the culture hasn't evolved past its crude stereotypes and gay-panic jokes, or be encouraged by signs that the masses are slowly inching toward tolerance. Whatever the case, the film's desire to simultaneously mock and embrace makes it the most schizophrenic comedy of its kind since Shallow Hal, which chased fat jokes with an earnest message about how real beauty comes from within. Good intentions can only carry these films so far, and this one falls woefully short."

"The depiction of gay life (or more precisely Chuck and Larry's experience of it) is more pathetic than offensive," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times.

"Chuck and Larry's message of acceptance is about as believable as Liza Minnelli's last marriage," quips Kate Worteck at Nerve.

"Perversely, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry uses gayness as a metaphor for male friendship," writes Steve Erickson at Gay City News. "Just as abortion is the unmentionable hovering over [Judd] Apatow's view of unwanted pregnancy as the route to male maturity in Knocked Up, bisexuality is the absence felt everywhere here." If the film "were more daring, it might suggest that his extensive sexual history with women isn't a sign of exclusive heterosexuality, but a high sex-drive potentially aimed in several directions."

Posted by dwhudson at July 18, 2007 6:33 AM