journal features

movie review - There's Something About Mary

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 1998.07.17

This is a screwball comedy designed to teeter at the edge of being too obnoxious. It features a young woman with several suitors of varying character. With semi-plot-related scenes stitched together with scenes of moderately offensive humor it certainly stakes out its own space. Everything about the film, its sets and the seemingly endless sunshine included, supports a story that doesn't take itself too seriously and lets its gross comedy strut its stuff. There's not a lot else to say; the best of the suitors prevails in a satisfying fashion (he wins the girl through earning the respect of her handicapped brother) and we see the last of the rest of the creeps.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton