Word: lila
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Miranda (Michelle Monaghan), who's all the things Lila isn't: brunette, natural and unmarried. Eddie is warmed by her sporty friendliness, especially in contrast to the harridan convalescing in his hotel bedroom. He even likes most of her family, who come to the resort each year. As Eddie and Miranda fall in love, he never quite gets around to explaining he's on his honeymoon. But when the truth is revealed, he declares his fidelity, telling her folks, "From the second I fell in love with Miranda, I have not once cheated on her with my wife...
...feel as if I've betrayed my disappointment with The Heartbreak Kid by making it sound vaguely amusing. The movie has its moments, like Lila's ring tone (the Wicked Witch broomstick theme from The Wizard of Oz), and Corddry's exasperated description of his secret for a happy marriage ("Sit back, relax and wait for the sweet embrace of death"). I also appreciated Eddie's flailing argument for dumping his bride for another woman. "The heart wants what it wants," he says, quoting Woody Allen's remark to Walter Isaacson of TIME during the 1992 scandal involving the filmmaker...
...Heartbreak Kid doesn't go totally wrong, its big problem is that doesn't really go anywhere. It just sort of lies there, like dumb Lila on the beach, waiting to turn gold. It wants to rekindle the Something About Mary spirit, or perhaps it hopes to twist it into an instructively acerbic fable about answered prayers. But, for all the typically Farrelly gross-out gags (beware the pubic hair scene), it hasn't the nerve either to brand Eddie as an unethical creep or salute his indefatigably amoral ambition to proceed directly from first wife to trophy wife...
...original movie, with Charles Grodin as the heartbreaker (here called Lenny), Jeannie Berlin as Lila and Cybill Shepherd as the adored Kelly, was a more direct parable of ambition for mobility - upward mobility. Lenny and Lila were identifiably Jewish, including the crushed glass at the wedding and the honeymoon at a Miami Beach hotel. Lila's worst crimes are eating candy bars in bed and whining, which is understandable, considering that her husband has abandoned her three days into their marriage. Kelly is the blond shiksa dreamgirl (closer to the remake's Lila than to the fair-haired Miranda), whose...
...other differences: Lenny admits from the start that he's on his honeymoon, and Kelly entertains his advances but doesn't encourage them. He jettisons Lila without a sensible hope of corralling romantic longing and ruthless ambition, then spends the rest of the movie trying to persuade Kelly and his starchy father (Eddie Albert) that he's the right guy for her. The movie echoes The Graduate, directed by Nichols, which set up a tawdry situation involving a sexually ambitious young man, then asked for sympathy for the guy because... because he's the main character. May used her gifted...