Thresholds of Goofiness: Made of Honor

My older daughter is home from college, distracting the ReelFan from the important business of blogging. The good news is that she likes to go to movies, but she has a low threshold for goofiness; this explains why I recently saw Made of Honor.

A truly dumb movie, Made of Honor features Patrick Dempsey and Michelle Monaghan as “best friends” who everyone who has ever seen a romantic comedy knows will get together in the end. This sort of ruins the suspense. The set up is straight forward: Hannah (Monaghan, showing a genuinely confusing resemblance to Liv Tyler) leaves town for six weeks, leaving Tom (Dempsey) bereft enough to finally figure out that he has “feelings” for her. But she returns engaged to a Scottish guy and promptly asks Tom to be her maid of honor, and right away the movie quits making any sense. Tom is expected to do all kinds of traditional “girly” things, like plan bridal showers, and make gift baskets full of smelly soaps; if this was supposed to be funny it pretty much missed the mark. Hannah (apparently a brilliant art historian) is saddled with lines like “I’ve looked forward to my bridal shower my whole life.” Excuse me? The only redeeming part of the film is Tom’s friendship with a bunch of guys; they mostly play basketball together but their relationship feels authentic and those scenes are pretty entertaining. Patrick Dempsey is generally fun to watch, but if you must see him in a show like this, rent last summer's Enchanted on DVD. Similar role, much more entertaining movie. Incidentally, in spite of my insightful opinion of this film it does seem to be making money; this means someone likes it, possibly Gray's Anatomy fans. I'm not one of those.