Word: dan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fiercely communal and insanely competitive. They make the Kennedys seem sluggish. They do aerobics and play touch football on the front lawn. When they're not engaged in Scrabble or an improvised singalong, they break up into speed-solving crossword teams. Come evening, there's a family talent show. Dan and Mitch duet on Pete Townshend's "My Love Opened the Door" (as if that perky tune hadn't been worn out in a half-dozen movies and commercials for J.C. Penney and NBC). And the children, I'm not kidding, give mime performances. In Wedding Crashers and other movies...
...they treat Dan as the runt of the litter? They must think he loves washing his kids' clothes at home, because when he visits his parents they make him sleep in the laundry room. In any matter relating to Dan's rebellious daughters, the family reflexively takes the girls' side over their dad's. His own father (John Mahoney) treats him with the bluff bonhomie of men who wouldn't be caught dead in an intimate discussion. And Dan's mom (Dianne Wiest), it's clear, has been nagging him all his life. "Get lost for a while," she tells...
...effects of the rowdy, guy-centric Judd Apatow movies is that, by establishing new rules for movie comedy, they've make milder romantic ones seem like relics from the 1950s. The Hedges film has antique contrivances aplenty, from a scene where Marie must enter a shower with Dan already hiding inside, to an job interview Dan has, which takes place, with infuriating improbability, at the family home with his parents present. There's also the sitcom omniscience of his daughters, who are exasperated by his paternal protectiveness. "You're a good father," his youngest tells him, "but sometimes...
...this for 50s comedies. Back then America still had a few social conventions and sexual taboos to serve as hurdles or brick walls for the plot. Here, we're to assume that the only reason Dan and Marie don't tell the family they have a thing for each other is that they don't want to hurt Mitch's feelings. The real reason is: they're in a movie, and there wouldn't be one if the characters didn't do implausible things. Hence the creakiest gimmick in all of fiction, the HIBK (Had I But Known) ploy...
...brief review in TIME magazine this week, I gave Dan a gentleman's B-. Let me try to remember why. Because the pressure of keeping his ardor secret turns Dan pleasingly cranky. "I am going to make myself unattractive," he whispers to Marie, "so as not to encourage inappropriate feelings" - but by then he's already become way less adorable. When he's at the edge of a lake with some of the kids, they're skipping stones across the water; Dan throws a rock with the fury of a Spartan at Thermopylae. Emily Blunt, a beguiler in My Summer...