Ned, the lovely, sweet stoner who tries to always see the good in people is a good role for Paul Rudd and he disappears into his skin, if only the dialogue and plot gave him more to do. But he's just so clueless, you wonder how anyone can function. He believes his bizarre brother-in-law Dylan (Steve Coogan) when Dylan tells him that he is also naked when he films his subjects (he's a documentary filmmaker) naked so they can feel comfortable. But he opts not to tell his sister (Emily Mortimor) about her husband's actions. Instead, he eventually tells another one of his sister's Miranda, the tightly woven business woman, desperate for her first big break, and too blind to see that her neighbor is in love with her. (Elizabeth Banks plays the sister, Adam Scott the neighbor.) Then there is Ned's youngest sister, Natalie, a struggling lesbian stand-up comedian (a decent Zooey Deschanel), who also models for the attractive Hugh Dancy, who is deeply in love with her, and there one night stand leads to unexpected complications. The mother of all these children (Shirley Knight) deals with this by drinking tons of red wine.
However, the most important person in Ned's life is none of these people, instead it is his lovely golden lab, Willie Nelson, but his nasty ex-girlfriend, a burned out hippie with dreadlocks (Kathryn Hahn) does not let Ned back into the house, business and though it is Ned's dog, she is not letting him get him back, and Ned is just devastated by this.
Though the plot is thin and incredibly weak, the film is saved by the great performances from some tried and true comic actors, but still, the laughs the film provided are horribly weak, and overall, nothing much is learned from the film. Grade: C+
No comments:
Post a Comment