"Made of Honor"

I have only come really close to having a panic attack twice while watching a movie. The first time was watching "Hostel Part II," which took all the jokey twists of the first "Hostel" and untwisted them, leaving just half-backed sadism with all the portentous ritual of a well-acted porno – during the first big torture scene, when Heather Matarazzo is hung upside down, naked, screaming, gagged, while a non sequitur torture queen comes inside, disrobes, lays down in a bathtub beneath Matarazzo, picks up a scythe, and, well, fills the bathtub, I became utterly nauseous.

Not because the scene was so gory - Cronenberg has done worse. (Hell, "Happy Tree Friends" has done worse.) It was because of Eli Roth's complete assault on everything that we value about movies - his ridiculous abuse of a fine actress (not that she was naked, nor that she was hanging upside down, but because he never even gave her character a chance; right from the moment she was conceived, she was just a fleshy blood bag.); his complete inability to fill a disturbing scene with any sense of suspense, or of rising action, or of any real forward narrative motion; his concurrent inability to give a character who's about to die any dialogue beyond screaming for long minutes on end; above all, it was his dull sympathy with the nameless naked woman performing the torture, a non-character cipher briefly introduced and never to return.

Don't get me wrong. I fucking love violence in movies, and I used to spend hours driving around Vice City and San Andreas running people over and then getting out of my car and hitting them with a baseball bat. Hell, I even used to love the torture scenes on "24," before they got so repetitive. Of course "24" has consequences, and the reason why "No Country For Old Men" won Best Picture was because it made cool violence look artsy, but also provided us with a memorable character performing the violence, and some consideration of the bleak moral landscape that could create such a character.

Roth is too lame of a filmmaker to realize that everyone can make a good torture scene, but the real key to winning people over is surprise. He doesn't trade in surprises. He prefers that you don't care enough. Great filmmakers - hell, even crappy filmmakers - know that the best way to make people less bored is to spring a surprise on them, to shift their expectations. Roth just gives you exactly what you're expecting, which is why his movies (and the whole torture porn genre) are never as much fun as they sound.

That's also why a movie like "Daredevil" is so much less fun than a movie like "Iron Man" - they tell more or less the same story, but the latter feels loose, like the actors were really trying to stretch, whereas the former feels rote, over-directed, rushing from one plot point to the next without any time to dally on chemistry, on dialogue, on any of the tiny little abstract bits of humanity that make the film Quentin Tarantino and Judd Apatow feel so much larger than they are.

That's also why, towards the end of "Made of Honor," I could feel the world spinning just a little bit and had to lean forward in my chair, so that if I vomited I wouldn't dirty my new white shoes and if I projective vomited I would have two inches of a better chance to cover the filth on the screen. What occurs in the offending scene would be the climax if the movie had any real sense of narrative progression - that is, if what had followed before it had any sort of rising action, or characters I believed in for half a second (rather than monotonous automaton clones the movie kept telling me to like). But whereas the original version of this movie, "My Best Friend's Wedding," had all sorts of complications that built up to its bittersweet, inevitable, and utterly perfect conclusion, this movie basically establishes its ripped-off concept then dawdles around for two hours waiting for itself to end.

"Made of Honor" begins with a bit of oddly topical humor - at a frat party in 1998, a guy in a suit stumbles around, wearing a Bill Clinton accent and speaking in an eerily perfect Bill Clinton accent. Watching this anonymous drunk stumble around and grope women dressed like Monica and run off from a woman dressed like Hillary Clinton, two things came to mind:

1) The 90s really were the lamest decade ever.

2) This movie has somehow stumbled into topicality - we saw it the day after the most recent batch of primaries - but only by making a joke that's ten years out of date.

3) There's no way that the guy under the mask can be Patrick Dempsey, because that's clearly not his voice.

Wrongo! Not only is it Patrick Dempsey - it's a weirdly de-aged Patrick Dempsey, either heavily made-up or digitally botoxed in order to look 22, though instead he looked more like the Ben Affleck synthoid from the crappy "Final Fantasy" movie.

Dempsey-Affleck-Clinton goes into a girl's room, mumbling "Monica" over and over, and gets into bed next to her - except, wait, would you believe it, it's the wrong girl! And she sprays him in the face, not with Mace but with designer perfume, lest you think she's some butch anti-man freak.

Here's the dialogue that ensues between them, written from memory:

She (clearly intelligent): "You've slept with half the people on my floor!"
He: "Half the people on your floor were women!"

I have a confession - I fucking love Patrick Dempsey on "Grey's Anatomy." He's fast-talking, he's full of himself, he's utterly romantic. Because movies no longer believe in romance, he's just fast-talking and full of himself in "Made of Honor," a fact which becomes even more clear when he (and the movie) tries to turn himself into a romantic. What is it about the transfer from television to the big screen that can turn so many great, complex leading men into such one-note blandies? Matthew Fox and Kiefer Sutherland cram so many layers into single hours of "Lost" and "24" - is it Hollywood's fault for saddling them with such uni-dimensional roles (both have played government agents in the last couple of years, poorly, in "Vantage Point" and "The Sentinel"), or their own for choosing such awful action movies?

In "Made of Honor," along with Dempsey, you also get to see the wasted talents of Kevin McKidd, who was a ridiculously complex ancient-accented antihero on "Rome" and a tortured, confused American-accented everyman on "Journeyman," playing a Scottish-accented other man. McKidd's role as the third man in a triangle, according to modern rules of shitty romance cinema, is to be basically perfect with a few minor particular imperfections that make him less perfect than Dempsey, and sure enough, McKidd is a Scottish Duke who can throw a tree twenty feet and dunk a basketball, but he also shoots animals for sport. What an asshole! What a shitty fucking movie!

By the way, here's how we learn about McKidd's demonic predilection for hunting: after an interminable second act in which Dempsey's character tries to prove to his betrothed best friend that she really loves him (he invented the coffee collar, which means he is yet another modern cinematic protagonist so rich that he doesn't need a job and so does nothing but hang around and live the high life), the entire cast sets off for McKidd's ancestral castle, where the wedding is going to take place.

(The ancestral castle is a composite character - the outside, my lovely fellow filmgoer informed me, is played by one of the oldest castles in Scotland, while the inside is played by Broughton Castle, a famous landmark in England, which also co-starred in "The Madness of King George" and "Shakespeare in Love." I was lucky enough to visit Broughton Castle on beautiful summer day in 2002, on a day trip from a summer program at Oxford. The hosts were a kindly old pair of nobles, related by blood to Ralph Fiennes, who hopefully made a considerably amount of British currency from letting this train wreck of a film despoil their castle's film career.)

Anyhow, everyone sits down for a big dinner. Now, I should let you know about the female protagonist, played by Michelle Monaghan, who is yet another young actress whose breakout role was also her only good role - since "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," she's unsuccessfully tried to spark chemistry with Tom Cruise in "M:iIII" (her largely silent performance in the film's penultimate scene - firing a gun and performing CPR - was pretty much the only exciting moment in the film), scarcely existed as the gal pal pet dick in "Gone, Baby, Gone" (with one great scene - coincidentally, the one scene where she gets to string more than three sentences together), and tried to spark chemistry with the ever-hammier Ben Stiller in "The Heartbreak Kid."

Anyways, Michelle is playing a museum worker. That's not a real job, but I have no idea what she actually does, and neither does the movie. Her barely-defined occupation takes her to Scotland, where she meet-cutes with Kevin McKidd. In the middle of a rainstorm, he rides in from the middle of nowhere on horseback, sweeps her off her feet, and takes her to a local pub, where they have an awful dinner. A whirlwind romance ensues - they take trips together (even though she's supposed to be working). After one month, he pops the question. She agrees.

I should point out that all of this is very interesting, and it all takes place offscreen. While Michelle is meeting the most amazing man in the world, striking immediate sparks, and traveling all across Europe, the movie dawdles back in America with Patrick Dempsey, who is really kind of bummed out that his best friend is gone, and who decides, suddenly, that he's actually in love with her. This is "Made of Honor" in a nutshell - completely ignorant of real romance, real comedy, real humanity.

So, anyways, Michelle and Kevin decide to get married after one month. This almost never happens in the real world and rings particularly false here, since she has been established as such a whipsmart no-bullshit type, and he is, well, a fucking Duke who could probably have anyone and everyone he would ever want. (I bet Dukes get more action than Kings do. I bet Dukes get more ass than anyone except Emperors and Sultanesses. Sultani?) But hey, Nick and Mariah just got hitched, so let's roll with this and give the movie a break. They decide to get engaged after a month. Okay.

But here's the kicker! Not only are they getting engaged after one month of knowing each other - they're getting married about three weeks after they get engaged. (One of my cousins just got engaged and is planning her wedding a year and a half in advance.) Not only that, she agrees to leave behind her entire life and move and live with him in Scotland. "It's a new chapter in my life!" she explains to Patrick Dempsey.

You might think that, well, you wouldn't know everything about a person in such a short span of time. Which is where the whole "your future hubby shoots cute animals!" revelation comes into play. Everyone sits down for a big dinner. Patrick Dempsey is at the end of the table, with a look on his face that would be melancholic if he wasn't the asshole who was trying to ruin his best friend's wedding in order to keep her for himself, after ten years of sleeping with a different woman every night and telling said best friend all about his favorite sluts the next day. (At one point in the movie, Dempsey and his fuck-stupid friends start a chant: "Steal the bride! Steal the bride!" This could be darkly funny, but it's presented without irony during a chirpy music montage - actually, this whole movie is basically a chirpy music montage - and so it's relentlessly disturbing. All of "Made of Honor" is like this - so horribly offtempo, so utterly cutesy about utterly meanspirited people, that if it were less boring and just a bit more sucktacular it would be our generation's rom-com "Plan 9.")

Michelle and Kevin are sitting together, natch. The waiters bring out the meat. It's meaty! Michelle is freaked out. I think she might be a vegetarian, although the movie is vague about that. Actually, I think she just dislikes anything that is embarrassingly Scottish, which makes you wonder why she's marrying a Scottish Duke and why she's agreed to move and live with him in Scotland, where presumably Scottish people do all kinds of Scottish things like eat Scottish food and drink Scottish Scotch and sing Scottish songs.

"Kevin shot that!" Kevin's mom informs her when she stares frightfully at the big hunk of Scottish meat. (Kevin McKidd's character actually has a name in the movie, but I don't want to give the "Made of Honor" IMDB page any excess traffic by trying to look it up what that name was.) "Kevin shot all of this!" She gestures around the room. "Kevin loves shooting." Michelle is horrified.

How can such an intelligent, worldly art-history major museum worker react like such a 50s schoolmarm to the notion that a Duke goes hunting? How can such a kindhearted, understanding Duke not know that his fiancé is a bit freaked out by hunting animals? When, outside of arranged marriages, do you learn so many obvious things about your husband-to-be the night before he becomes your husband-who-is?

The worst part of this movie, which is actually filled with worst parts from start to finish, is the romantic climax. As part of a Scottish tradition, Michelle has to wear a strange sash and accept kisses from the townspeople for money on the night before her wedding. (Although a crappy romantic comedy, "Made of Honor" makes an impressive Scottish social anthropology docudrama.) Dempsey pays her for a kiss. It's a passionate kiss, but it comes out of nowhere - Monaghan has been so starry-eyed over McKidd the whole movie. The fact that she kisses him back makes the movie, briefly, almost interesting - because, for the first time all movie, Monaghan seems to be genuinely conflicted. They have a fight afterwards, these two best friends who would be lovers (we are told by Michelle's mom that her dead father always thought she would marry Dempsey - Awwwww!) Dempsey decides to leave, on the morning of the wedding.

He gets about half a mile away away. (In Scotland, they call "miles" "kilometers," just like they call "girls" "lassies," "basketball" "netball," and "Made of Honor" "American Crap"). A herd of sheep blocks the car. He gets out. He sees a dog. There is a recurring thing in this film (calling it a "motif" would do a disservice to better movies everywhere), where, whenever Dempsey sees a dog, he ruffles its fur and tells the dog, "I love you." He does it again here, and decides, by God, I've got to go and ruin my best friend's wedding! AND HE DOES! HE RIDES ACROSS A LAKE ON HORSEBACK AND RUINS HIS BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING! HOORAY FOR ROMANCE!

Naturally, he walks into the wedding just as the preacher is saying the whole "speak now or forever hold your peace" bit. It's that kind of movie. Except he doesn't walk into the wedding - the horse stops, and sends him flying through the door head first. It's that kind of movie. Michelle turns away and runs to him. In front of everyone, he tells her that he loves her. It's that kind of movie. She tells him he's the worst Maid of Honor ever, and kisses him. It's that kind of movie.

I forgot to mention - the reason the shitty movie is shittily named "Made of Honor" is because she jokingly asks him to be her "Maid of Honor," which leads to not nearly enough gay jokes, in my opinion, because although a Catholic preacher and an old Scottish woman both think that Dempsey is gay, no one ever tries to set him up with an attractive gay Scotsman, and by the end of this movie nothing would have pleased me more than to see Dempsey arm-in-arm with an attractive gay Scotsman. What the fuck does "Made of Honor" mean, exactly? It's without a doubt the most non sequitur title pun ever, of all time. There is no honor in this movie, and thus no one made of it. Unlike, say, "Legally Blonde," the title says nothing about the movie except that one of the three credited screenwriters must have a homophone dictionary. It just means that whenever I think of the title, I always get it confused with "Maid in Manhattan" and "Made in America" and "Men of Honor" and "Medal of Honor," all of which were better movies than "Made of Honor," and "Medal of Honor" wasn't even a movie. (Another, better possible title: "Scotch Frisky.")

Anyways, we've finally reached the point that made the world spin for me, but not in a good way. After finally kissing this man, this wonderful man who has slept with everyone she knows, Monaghan turns around and faces Kevin McKidd, who was about to be, you know, her husband. He has this absolutely crushed look on his face, and suddenly, a character who was barely even sketched in the movie suddenly came into sharp focus.

I realized, at that moment, that, in this movie's worldview, Scottish people are actually happy retard cavemen who live in a state of permanent idiot bliss and actually do fall in love with women in one month or less, and who dream of taking these women to their lovely castles on the coast where they'll spend the rest of their days growing old and happy and having tasteful Old World sex and drinking Scotch whiskey (but only to comfortable excess.)

And Monaghan, in her wedding dress, tells her formerly betrothed:

"Kevin, you're the perfect guy, just not the perfect guy for me."

SELFISH BITCH! YOU COULDN'T HAVE FIGURED THIS SHIT OUT AN HOUR AGO?

This scene - the mid-wedding climax - has been played so many different ways, and I don't mind that this movie is using a cliché. One of my favorite movies, "Love Actually," is basically just a systematic hyperventilation of every romantic cliché ever invented, sometimes several times over. But the cliché isn't even used well here. It's just depressing, because you feel bad for Kevin McKidd, and it's even more depressing, because Monaghan, who has spent the whole movie being an unlikely but quite unselfish and really very thoughtful person, has now become exactly like Patrick Dempsey, completely selfish and utterly thoughtless.

"Gag!" I thought, taking in deep control breaths like my first therapist taught me and imagining the bad thoughts as small waves on the beach running back into the good-thought-ocean, trying to stare away from the screen so as to remind myself that reality wasn't nearly as awful as "Made of Honor" made it look. "What could be worse?"

CUT TO: Another wedding! Dempsey and Monaghan! Presumably getting married about three days later! Hoorah happy ending. But no! Wait! CUT TO: The honeymoon bedroom! They're in bed together, just like they were back at the start of the movie, when Dempsey was wearing a Clinton mask and Digital botox and Monaghan was as semi-believable character.

Dempsey hits the lamp: "I just want to make sure you're the right girl this time."

Monaghan giggles at this sarcastic reminder of the fact that her husband is a walking STD factory. The movie makes her out to be a squeaky-clean vegetarian pacifist virgin messiah figure, but at least she has a sense of humor.

Monaghan: "Oh, Bill!"

Dempsey: "Oh, Monica!"

Oh, romance!