Anyway, the Times talked about how Wedding Crashers is the return of the "hard" R rating. That means they say "fuck" and "shit" a lot in addition to what Hollywood's marketing pricks call frequent nudity. The article I read smelled like the byproduct of the studio New Line's marketing push for the movie. Rather than talk about its worthiness, they want to get people nostalgic for the good old days when filth flowed like Mountain Dew at a ComicCon. Because, you know, it's pretty damn hard to find dirty stuff these days.

The problem with New Line making a big stink out of how raunchy their movie is is, first, it ain't nearly as dirty as they want you to think, and, second, it means they spent a lot of time thinking about it. In other words, the raunchiness of Wedding Crashers is amarketing ploy, and it feels like it, overly planned and meticulously arranged. The flick is dirty enough to advertise itself as dirty, but nowhere near enough to be satisfying. That sucks, because the truly great raunch is the kind that surprises you, like those football players pouring a big bucket over their coach. Except, instead of Gatorade it's full of dog shit. And they dump it while losing by 21 in the first quarter.

The "generous" nudity the movie promises is as much false advertising as last spring when the Harelip told us she had easter eggs down her pants. There weren't any eggs, but I got a hell of a fungus under my fingernails, either from the moisture or whatever it was that bit me. Hell, even Candy Bottoms's Buttload of Butts 4 isn't as generous with nudity as it could have been. So, the quick flashes of tits totaling about 15 seconds in Wedding Crashers are as stingy as a Mormon at a strip club.

Which had me thinking about nudity in big budget movies. Why do we want to see it? Especially now that there is so much free porn on the Internet. Or so I'm told. Fuck if I can find it. Anyway, porn is so mainstreamed that I'm not sure why seeing naked ladies at the megaplex is still exciting. Is it the thrill of seeing the moments a nubile young actress dumps her career into the shitcan?

It's not because we get to know the characters better and so have more stake in them. You know, like seeing a good friend of the family nude. Especially not in Wedding Crashers where only unknowns flash their boobs, and even then only briefly. It's not because it's arousing, because only teenage boys can get their rocks off this fast. My only conclusion is that the nudity still feels naughty to us, I guess. And a movie like this only puts it in there for that reason. To manipulate us and make us think we're seeing something naughtier than it really is.

Wedding Crashers front loads the nudity almost entirely into the first ten minutes. It's as though the movie wants to quickly establish its R rating so it can get to the real business of being just another shitty, poorly written, completely predictable romantic comedy. What a phony fucking turd.

Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are two divorce mediators who have those really cushy kinds of jobs that movie characters often do; they work about five or ten minutes a year and only then at the beginning of the movie to present an artificial background that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story. Their hobby is crashing weddings. That is, going to strangers' nuptials in order to meet single girls so aroused by the ceremonies that all they can think of is getting humped harder than a bear in heat. Why Wilson and Vaughn don't skip the weddings and just bumrush the receptions is unexplained. I know that's what I'd do. Hell, I'd rather cut off an ear than sit through another one of those things. When the Mrs. and I tied the knot, it took all of seven minutes, and that included the preacher passing out the free buffet coupons and plugging his CD of inspirational music.

In the first twenty minutes of Wedding Crashers, the movie delivers a corny collage of the boys dancing and joking at strangers' weddings, and then seducing and bedding ladies who all shopped at Victoria's Secret and bought varying pastel shades of the same bra. I swear to God. The movie doesn't even wait ten minutes for the first 60s-music-themed montage. But then the whole wedding crashing bit is largely forgotten, replaced by a by-the-books romantic comedy that will feel familiar to any watcher of CBS Sunday night movies. It's a fucking bait-and-switch.

Wilson, similar to the cop who wants one more score before he retires, plans to quit the crashing game but agrees to one last wedding before hanging it up. And it's a monster. This one's for the daughter of the Secretary of the Treasury (Christopher Walken). At the wedding Wilson goes gaga over the girl of his dreams (Rachel McAdams). I guess he always dreamed of overly smiley dullards spawned from the minds of screenwriters who have no clue what makes a girl cool. McAdams plays the stereotypical "perfect girl": environmentalist, nurturing, even-keeled, and shows no cleverness or aptitude to anything but smiling real pretty. In fact, no woman in this movie shows any characteristic beyond overly sweet or overly shrill and shrewish. Scared little male moviemakers tend to do that to women.

Of course, McAdams falls for Wilson, at the expense of her laughably over-the-top fiancee, and she doesn't know Wilson is a wedding crasher. Plus, she has the complication of a violent, asshole fiancee. Hell, the fact that she'd latch onto a dick this broadly painted would be enough to keep me away. But not Wilson. McAdams doesn't even know his real name, yet she can't help falling for him.

As anybody with a pulse would predict, Wilson's detection is exposed at just the moment McAdams was going to express her love and dump the mean, mean fiancee.

And so, the lovers are separated. Of course, Wilson and McAdams can't stop thinking about each other. so the audience is subjected to a string of mopey, winsome looking out the windows and acting depressed scenes before the lovers wind up together. That's because true love always, always wins out over things like common sense and inertia. Hell, that's so obvious that the screenwriters hardly even had to try to make it convincing. In fact, I'd guess they didn't try at all.

Along this well-traveled path, the gags come at the expense of a granny with a foul-mouth, a potentially retarded artistic gay man who leads the parade of lame homophobia jokes, a besotted nympho mother looking to seduce younger men, and a psychotic girlfriend who goes from virgin to sex-starved maniac in minutes. They're all crazy! Ha ha. And they're all stock characters from the playbook for bad screenwriters who don't know how to fill the space between setting up their premise and the final credits.

The movie weighs in heavily at a Rosie O'Donnell-like two hours. What the fuck? Did someone involved in this heap think we actually cared how everything would turnout? Or that we couldn't guess? Still, the movie just dawdles toward its conclusion, only enlivened by a funny cameo by Will Ferrell as a crasher who has moved on to funerals and a handful of good punchlines.