Monday, January 24, 2005

Meet the Fockers

 

When Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo) says, “I'm going to be Pamela Martha Focker! Yes, I know how that sounds!” it pretty much says it all about this sequel to the money-making machine, the 2000 Meet the Parents.

 

By now just about everyone who wanted to has seen this film starring Robert DeNero, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand and Blythe Danner, has done so. Pam and Greg (Stiller) accompany his parents, the Focker’s (DeNero and Danner), to Florida in an armored deluxe mobile home, to meet her parents, the Byrnes (Hoffman and Streisand). The Focker’s take their grandson along - supposedly as an excuse for Grandpa Focker to strap on and use his rubber breast set to feed the little guy. And so on and so forth go the gags, unlikely manufactured situations and body parts and functions double entendres that continue until the wedding.

 

Meet the Fockers is funny; you can’t help but laugh. And Hoffman and Streisand make a good acting team in this comedy which truly is so much ado about nothing.

 

I tend to mix up Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller because their movies are  pop entertainments; in other words, they are not about deep thoughts that keep you awake until 3:00 in the morning – nor are they funny enough to keep you laughing much beyond the parking lot. I am not trying to make a distinction between high and low culture here, I’m just observing that people like different kinds of movies.

 

At the end of the day, however, I tend to like Ben Stiller’s movies more than Sandler’s which play heavily and frequently on our need for occasional mindlessness – Spanglish being an impressive and notable exception for Sandler. 

 

The good thing about Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers is that they are films about parents who love their kids and want the best for them. This, the world can use. The rest – you decide.

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