The Sweetest Thing movie review (2002)

And yet there were whole long stretches of it when I didn't much care how bad it was--at least, I wasn't brooding in anger about the film--because Cameron Diaz and her co-stars had thrown themselves into it with such heedless abandon. They don't walk the plank, they tap dance.

The movie is about three girls who just wanna have fun. They hang out in clubs, they troll for cute guys, they dress like Maxim cover girls, they study paperback best-sellers on the rules of relationships, and frequently (this comes as no surprise), they end up weeping in one other's arms. Diaz's running-mates, played by Christina Applegate and Selma Blair, are pals and confidantes, and a crisis for one is a crisis for all.

The movie's romance involves Diaz meeting Thomas Jane in a dance club; the chemistry is right but he doesn't quite accurately convey that the wedding he is attending on the weekend is his own. This leads to Diaz's ill-fated expedition into the wedding chapel, many misunderstandings, and the kind of Idiot Plot dialogue in which all problems could be instantly solved if the characters were not studiously avoiding stating the obvious.

The plot is merely the excuse, however, for an astonishing array of sex and body-plumbing jokes, nearly all of which dream of hitting a home run like "There's Something About Mary," but do not. Consider "Mary's" scene where Diaz has what she thinks is gel in her hair. Funny--because she doesn't know what it really is, and we do. Now consider the scene in this movie where the girls go into a men's room and do not understand that in a men's room a hole in the wall is almost never merely an architectural detail. The pay-off is sad, sticky, and depressing.

Or consider a scene where one of the roommates gets "stuck" while performing oral sex. This is intended as a ripoff of the "franks and beans" scene in "Mary," but gets it all wrong. You simply cannot (I am pretty sure about this) get stuck in the way the movie suggests--no, not even if you've got piercings. More to the point, in "Mary" the victim is unseen, and we picture his dilemma. In "Sweetest Thing," the dilemma is seen, sort of (careful framing preserves the R rating), and the image isn't funny. Then we get several dozen neighbors, all singing to inspire the girl to extricate herself; this might have looked good on the page, but it just plain doesn't work, especially not when embellished with the sobbing cop on the doorstep, the gay cop, and other flat notes.

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