Oh Thinamon...

The Game Plan(dir. Andy Fickman)
I have to preface this review with the fact that I probably enjoy watching the classic TGIF line-up(Family Matters, Step by Step, Full House, and so on) more than watching Friends or The Office(both versions) so if you don't often find treasure in another man's cheese then maybe you shouldn't take my advice when it comes to this movie. It doesn't reach it's full potential as seen from the previews. The parts that were shown in the previews were easily the best parts outside of some scenes with a "sensitive big black man" character(and he's not played by Michael Clarke Duncan) who behaves like a gorilla most of the time(he even growls!). It stays consistent in it's cheesiness, but it doesn't quite take it to the poetic heights that Rush Hour 3, a film that transcends classification of bad or good with it's ridiculous nature, did. It seemed like there were some moments thrown in with sexual connotations just for the hell of it like a ballet practicing scene where the instructor feels up The Rock's muscles(it's basically the equivalent of the "lick lipping" scene in Transformers but a tad bit subtler) and a brief moment in the beginning where it shows a woman at one of The Rock's parties making a gesture that makes it seem like she's describing some dude's Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. It becomes predictable near the end but that's to be expected. It's just not all that funny in it's predictable cheesy uplifting manner, which was disappointing. I slightly recommend.
**1/2 out of ****

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry(dir. Dennis Dugan)
It's strange reviewing this since I was expecting to watch some hypocritical piece of shit like 300, but I actually ended up liking it quite a bit. Sure, it's a little heavy-handed with it's speechifying about acceptance, but if it didn't feel so honest and heartfelt, I would have found it much more unbearable. Yes, it does utilize gay stereotypes extensively but the view the film has on it's gay characters compared to previous Sandler efforts is surpisingly warm and embracing. Unlike his older films, this film doesn't want the audience to laugh at it's gay characters but laugh with them. It's easy to see how some critics found it to be offensive given the sterotypicalness of the characters, but wouldn't you think it's more proactive to take a stereotype of a certain demographic and make it more "acceptable" than simply creating characters of a certain demographic that are seemingly "acceptable" like Brokeback Mountain. It's easy to rally behind Brokeback Mountain for critics since it's "high-minded" and appears to be more graceful with it's depiction of homosexuals but since stereotypes are usually viewed in a negative light by a number of people, making the "negative" appear "positive" to these people is much more progressive than simply showing that the "negative" isn't always the case for everyone in that demographic. Also unlike Brokeback, it has no pretense of changing the world(or it at least it hasn't been labelled as socially important by critics because, well, it's a god damn Adam Sandler move), it simply wants to change the perception of gay people commonly found in it's target demographic and there's nothing wrong with that. The only thing I found particularly "politically incorrect" or "in a bad taste" was Jessica Biel's character given that it seemed fairly misogynistic since she was pretty much T&A and was a little too dumb when it came to their case even in the film's realm of logic. She was pretty much a stereotype of a "hot chick" minus an attractive personality. With that out of the way, I recommend.
*** out of ****