In A Guy Thing, Jason
Lee, looking more ski-nosed than ever, plays Paul, a young Seattle
man who's about to get married and wakes up, the morning after his
bachelor party, to discover himself in bed with a strange woman.
Selma Blair plays his intended, Karen, from whom he desperately
tries to hide this fact. And Julia Stiles plays the strange girl,
who's named Becky, takes the whole situation rather good-naturedly,
but who then keeps bumping into Paul, over the next six days before
his wedding, again and again and....
An attempt to do a kooky romantic
farce, the movie plays more like an episode of Love, American
Style gone amuck, only with a newer cast and PG-13 material. It
has sequences which will be truly talked about for months to come,
such as the dinner with both sets of in-laws in attendance (plus a
member of the clergy) where everyone gets higher than a kite from
the pot that's been slipped into the gravy by the chef who's
actually a drug store clerk who sold Paul some medication to get rid
of a case of the c-r-a-b-s. Karen's parents (James Brolin and Diana
Scarwid) are straightlaced
--
although there's an incorrigible Irish aunt, played by the
ubiquitous Canadian actress Jackie Burroughs, who gets to deliver
the immortal line, "I haven't had a bowel movement in 14
days." -- and they're
mortified, just mortified, to learn that Paul's mother (Julie
Hagerty) and stepfather (David Koechner) think nothing of telling
each other amusing double-entendres out loud. (So amusing, I
can't remember a word of any of them.)
Paul's brother, played by Thomas
Lennon as if he were Tony Randall opposite Rock Hudson (only without
all the implications Mark Rappaport mad apparent in his film Rock
Hudson's Home Movies, though the filmmakers do manage to get
some material of that nature into the movie through other means),
openly yearns for Karen from scene one. Meanwhile, Stiles' Becky is
shown to be an unconventional type who would be good for Paul
because she can teach him how to really live by the fact that, one,
she can't hold down a job for more than one day, and, two, when they
break into the apartment of her ex-boyfriend to "steal the
negatives" of some compromising photos, they end up getting
trapped in a bathtub, cornered by the ex-boyfriend's ferocious mutt.
This is a movie that leaves no
barnacled cliché or hackneyed situational comedy device unmined.
(It also presents Seattle as looking like the dankest city seen in
any recent film this side of Feardotcom.) And this is the
second new movie in two weeks to feature a "psycho
ex-boyfriend" --
here, he's a member of the Seattle police force (and, as
played by Lochlyn Munro, gets to punch Jason Lee to the ground,
smash eggs on his head, and then pour a carton of chocolate milk all
over him), and Paul gets to wear a wire so Internal Affairs can
catch the guy when he does something like clamp his arm around
Paul's neck in a "death grip."
(Strangely, Paul also wears the wire during the euphoric dinner
scene, and nobody busts anybody for using an illegal substance. They
must've been more concerned over what happened to the chocolate
milk.)
Review by Lochlyn Munro · Nitrate Online
