Word: vaughn
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...laugh with them. Just now, they are two of a dozen or so movie comics who are giving the genre a clout it hasn't seen for decades--maybe since the great silent era of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Vince Vaughn and their jolly colleagues aren't of Chaplin's artistic stature, but they are something the industry loves (moneymakers) and the public needs (pleasure givers). Fronting hit after hit, comedy stars have taken the place of those Hollywood stalwarts, the action stars...
...flow from Steve Martin. As a stand-up comic in the '70s, he played the idiot with an utterly unwarranted belief in his coolness, while in his first hit movie, The Jerk, he played ... a jerk. The first type has bloomed in the strutting film personalities of Ferrell, Vaughn, Jack Black, Owen Wilson and many others; the second in Sandler, who teams this summer with another lout, TV's Kevin James, in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Lower on this fast-food chain are Rob Schneider and Larry the Cable...
Like major league teams with their farm system, comedies offer a chance for young talent to move up. Vaughn provided comedy relief for nearly a decade before his breakthrough with Wilson in Wedding Crashers. Rogen was one of Carell's buddies in The 40 Year Old Virgin; in Knocked Up, he had his own posse, and one of that group, Jonah Hill, will star this fall in the Rogen-written Superbad with Michael Cera, who's the male lead in the just wrapped Juno. John C. Reilly, Ferrell's foil in Talladega Nights and the forthcoming Step Brothers, gets...
...diff between this movie and the Hollywood product it either parodies (the cop-buddy action pics) or resembles (the current wave of Stiller-Ferrell-Vaughn-Wilson-Wilson slob-buddy comedies) is that Wright is an actual filmmaker. His acute sense of visual wit, rich but not assaultive, puts me in mind of Buster Keaton's classic silent farces. To Wright, the movie screen offers a smorgasbord of small, savory gags to be sampled by the attentive viewer; it's not a grapefruit pushed in your face...
...Which may be why it was such a catharsis to see the Rutgers players respond to Imus at their press conference in their own words. "I'm a woman, and I'm someone's child," said Kia Vaughn. "I achieve a lot. And unless they've given this name, a 'ho,' a new definition, then that is not what I am." She stood with her teammates, a row of unbowed, confident women. For a few minutes, anyway, they drew a line we could all agree on and formed a line we could all get behind...