Meet the Parents

Haha this is one of those comedies that you will always remember. Full of classic lines that my wife and I constantly use on daily bases, like "if it has teat then you can milk it, puff the magical dragon, the circle of trust and so on..." Meet The Parents is full of those phrases that makes me laugh every time I think about it. And that's what defines a good comedy to me. If I watch a comedy I want to laugh and with this one it's what you get. Some people might not like it but then to me they just don't have a sense of humor and that's just a pity for them. You have to like Ben Stiller though because it's basically him that is the great comedian of the movie. If you don't like him you probably not going to like the movie either. Like I don't like the movies with Adam Sandler. I think that guy is not funny and so his comedies are painful to watch for me. In Meet The Parents the whole story is basically about the relation between Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro. Robert De Niro that plays his role brilliantly as well by the way. The other actors are good as well but it's not them that carry the movie. To me it's already a classic movie when I think about the best comedies I ever saw.

Odd to state that "Robert De Niro is the star of this comedy," but that's the case here. One doesn't normally associate him with comedy, but he's a pretty versatile actor, and can play a lot more characters than Mafia-type thugs. He's also a pretty darned good comedian, as he first proved way back in the early '80s with Rupert Pupkin in "The King of Comedy."

Anyway, De Niro and Ben Stiller provide a lot of laughs in this modern-day comedy. No sense going into detail as there are plenty of other reviews here. I hate to see the "hero" of a movie being a character who is chronic liar (Stiller's "Greg Focker") but that's not unusual in the world of films. That, and Blythe Danner's excessive use of God's name as exclamations gets annoying.

Other than that, it's a fun movie that turned out to be a hit and justifiably so. I imagine you could get a lot of laughs from watching this over and over. That would be better than watching the sequel.

Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) is a male nurse, poised to propose to the woman he loves, Pam (Teri Polo) but the right thing to do would be to ask her father's permission first. During a weekend of getting to know them, he manages to make a strong impression; for all the wrong reasons. Her father (Robert De Niro) isn't quite what Greg has been led to believe, and right from the start he seems to have it in for his daughter's partner.

De Niro and Stiller play off each other brilliantly, and both of them give fine comic performances, with a surprising level of depth for comedy characters. This film is packed with slick gags, hilarious scenes and it has a really fun story; it's a comedy film that you don't want to miss.

8/10

Most of the funny moments in 'Meet the Parents' involve painful scenes with Ben Stiller. He plays Greg Focker, a male nurse who loves Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo). He wants to marry her with her father's permission. He hasn't met her parents yet. The movie shows us the weekend where Stiller meets the parents. Pam's father is Jack (Robert De Niro) and her mother is Dina (Blythe Danner). The more Greg tries to impress the parents, especially Jack who is a former CIA-agent, the more he humiliates himself. Not only with his actions, also with his words and stupid lies to look better.

Stiller is perfect in this kind of role. We already saw that, especially in 'There's Something About Mary'. The more he gets in trouble, the more painful it gets, the better Stiller gets and the more we laugh. There is also a fine little part from Owen Wilson as Pam's former lover. Stiller and Wilson have made a lot of films together and for some reason their scenes always work, they at least make you smile. De Niro doesn't try very hard to be a strict person who doesn't give Greg a chance and therefore succeeds even better. The way he slowly gets harder and harder on Greg is good for a new laugh every time. 'Meet the Parents', directed by Jay Roach who also directed the 'Austin Powers' trilogy, is a fine comedy with a lot of sequences where you might feel a little uncomfortable.

I know I'm late to the party, but probably so are you if you're reading reviews at this late date. "Meet the Parents" is a funny flick that hearkens back to the glorious late-80s, or maybe even earlier, when comedies weren't so preoccupied with shocking the audience with gross out gags or surprise twists. Most of this movie is wonderfully predictable, and aside from a few deliberately clumsy drug references and maybe a sexual innuendo or two, it was good clean fun from start to finish.

Most of all, I'd say it's a good date flick to prepare yourself for the inevitable agony of meeting your own boyfriend/girlfriend's parents. We all know it sucks. (If you don't think so, oh, just you wait. Sometimes it takes years for them to expose themselves as the hideous flesh eating monsters that they are.) De Niro manages to take us to the utter extreme of monster but without shattering our suspension of disbelief. This is a key point. If the situation were to become too absurd , we would lose focus on the story and instead hone in on the individual gags. While there are plenty of funny gags to go round, they are really just dressing on an already funny premise: the story of an underdog who just cannot fit in to a judgmental bourgeois family no matter how hard (and usually because of how hard) he tries.

Ben Stiller shows his acting diversity (while on a different movie set playing the terminally airheaded Zoolander) as a dorky protagonist whose best intentions are always poorly timed or received completely the wrong way.

The antagonists, in this case, everybody else in the movie, tread the fine line of comedy and irritation. That is, at any time you could find yourself laughing or hating them. What's masterfully done is the filmmaker's (and of course actors') ability to turn you on a dime, take you to the edge of wanting to kill someone but then having a hearty laugh at their antics. Like I said earlier, Robert De Niro is the anchor that makes this possible, and any casting short of him (well, or maybe Christopher Walken) would have resulted in the film falling apart due to the demands it puts on our willingness to accept a complete jerk like the character he plays. Really his only redeeming quality is that he likes cats. But that's the point, I guess. No matter how rude a person may seem, there's always something redeeming in there.

Well, maybe except for the hilariously loathsome airline attendant who appears in a short but pivotal role at the film's climax. To me, that scene was worth the price of admission.

Don't think twice, this is a movie worth seeing. Other similar films focusing on severely dysfunctional families trying to act normally include De Niro & Billy Crystal in "Analyze This", a great Andy Garcia movie called "City Island" and--this may be a stretch but--I think fans of "Meet the Parents" would really enjoy the original British "Death at a Funeral" (2007). Ya just gotta love comedies about trying to be normal in an utterly abnormal situation.