The Ned and Daron Report: Some Of Us Went To See A Movie

When I got home, The Wedding Planner was on cable, and I watched it again for the third or fourth time. And, while I am pretty sure that Enough is a good movie, I doubt that it is as awesome as The Wedding Planner. I mean, I know that Enough has both J Lo and Bill Campbell in it, and that is pretty impressive, but The Wedding Planner has J Lo, Ed from EdTV, and that actress I always get confused with Cassidy Rae, from TV’s Models, Inc. and Hyperion Bay.

Anyway, as I was watching The Wedding Planner this last time, I realized that though it's, obviously, not about a modeling company on the surface, it's story line is really a lot like my favorite episode of Models, Inc., called “It’ll Never Happen Again and Again and Again,” when my favorite character, Sarah (Cassidy), pushed David (Ed) away because she was haunted by memories of a previously abusive relationship that she had had. Later in the episode, David (Ed), gets really upset about being pushed away, goes out and gets drunk and has sex with Julie (J Lo), who, then, is seriously, and totally pissed off when David (Ed) calls their night together a total mistake. Later on, Hillary and Lt. Soto consummate their relationship, totally complicating the ongoing murder investigation.

Mainly, the only differences are that in The Wedding Planner, it’s J Lo (Julie) that says that their night was a mistake, not Ed (David), and Hillary and Lt. Soto never actually consummate their relationship so they are still able to solve the murder without many problems.

I’ll tell you what, I would have rather reported on xXx. Who cares that it hasn’t come out yet? Who cares that neither Daron nor I have even seen it? I’ve seen Enough three times now (once for enjoyment, twice to take some notes, and thrice because on the first two times through I hadn’t quite managed to give the bird specifically to each and every character) and I still have less to say about it than I do about xXx.

Like for example if we had been talking about xXx I could have told you my interesting story about The Fast and the Furious. See, last year, punk rock Brooke, who I’ve seen wear a Rancid tee shirt, was driving on the freeway in her gray 1989 Jeep Cherokee when the driver’s side front wheel removed itself and went flying off into the distance. This made her mad and sad at that Jeep, and I guess that since she was a total hard-ass punker she didn’t feel too much like trying to patch things up. She felt more like saying “F off”. And so she was like “who wants my Jeep for free?” and I was like “well, I guess I do” and so she gave me that Jeep. That was pretty awesome, and I think pretty punk, but there were a couple of curious things about the vehicle that Brooke didn’t tell me about. In fact, when I later confronted her about these things, she claimed complete ignorance regarding them. First, there was this weird little plastic canister that would always pop out of its compartment behind the front bumper. It seemed like it was kind of jerry-rigged in there. Practically every time I parked I’d have to put that canister back in its little compartment by giving it a lift with my foot as I walked by. I didn’t have any idea of what it was, or anything. Then there was this little toggle switch somebody had installed behind the hood release handle, and I had no idea what that was for either.

It wasn’t until I saw The Fast and the Furious that I realized I must totally have NOS. I probably totally have the power to blow away all manner of racecars by just flipping that little switch. I mean, I haven’t actually tried it out yet—I haven’t gone to the nitrous store to have them charge up that canister. But I’m pretty sure that that’s what we’re talking about. So, thanks to The Fast and the Furious director Rob Cohen, last year I realized I at least have the potential to be a real cool winner, and for all I know this year with xXx he’ll make me realize that I’m actually a skilled and awesome super secret agent with big, big muscles who can save vast populations from bad things like complete annihilation.

Too bad I don’t get to tell anyone about that. Instead I have to talk about boring Jennifer Lopez in Enough, where she plays a supposedly tough chick, who in the course of nearly two hours only manages to save one person (her daughter) from complete annihilation. That’s one person. One! Not the entire USA or even the population of the tiniest of US states (you might want to know, by the way, I’m pretty sure that in xXx Xander Cage will manage to save the entire world, in its entirety.).

Oh, and I almost forgot: I don’t even get to talk about that. We have to talk about The Wedding Planner now. So, I’ll just agree with Daron. The Wedding Planner was a really good movie. Roughly comparable in quality to most episodes of Models Inc.

And, don’t you think that I would also have rather written about something awesome like xXx? Don’t you think I would have rather talked about how excited I am to see Vin Diesel drive some more really fast cars and save the world by making sweet sweet love to some ladies? Don’t you think I would want to talk about how when I was watching E! I found out that Vin is totally extreme, and that he got to totally learn how to do motocross for xXx? Don’t you think that I would like to tell everyone about my totally awesome experience on Saturday night, when me and Dick and John and Aaron went out to Galaxy Bowling, and Aaron bowled 3 strikes in a row, making the bowling screen show three Xs? Don’t you?

The simple fact is I did the best I could with what I had. And, while I would just love to sit and write about how great that movie will be, and how awesome Vin Diesel will be in it, or how awesome he was in The Fast and the Furious, especially when he and Paul Walker and that Rodriguez Girlfight girl were all chasing down those truckers to steal their DVD players and stuff, and about how they totally would shoot that arrow-type grappling hook into the front windows of those “Big Rigs,” and how they would totally freaking swing out of their cars, while going 70 mph or something, and climb all the way across from their cars to the trucks and would make them pull over and stuff…man, that was awesome…especially when Rodriguez totally drove her car underneath that one diesel. Totally intense!

Ned, do you think that in xXx they just filmed Vin actually doing extreme sports? I read an interview were he said he was totally into extreme sports, you know? That would be great if they totally let him do his own stuff, and they just filmed him. Did you hear that he is going to be in Terminator 3? How awesome is that?

But returning to the subject at hand, I was thinking about The Wedding Planner and Jennifer Lopez, and the way her career has progressed to this point, and several hours of thoughtful analysis made me become very concerned that all the attention given to the ‘J’ and ‘Lo’ parts of her name might make all the other parts jealous. I don’t know. I guess letters probably don’t have feelings. Still, if we don’t want the ecosystem to fall dangerously out of balance, probably somebody’s going to have to start calling her Ennifer Pez. It just seems to follow logic. And whoever does it is probably going to have to do it A LOT in order to make up for all the damage done by those cool trendsters out there, like Carson and…I don’t know…who else calls her that? I guess Daron. Crap, man, I can’t think of anybody who’s already less “with-it” than me, so I might as well just go for it, full on.

I like Ennifer Pez. She’s cute and nice. But Ennifer Pez is also very tough and ready to rumble. I think that Maria ‘Mary’ Fiore (the character Ennifer played in The Wedding Planner) was the cutest and nicest character Ennifer Pez has ever played, but she was still no pushover. You might be tempted to say that The Wedding Planner as a film suffered from the same weakness as Enough, which is that Ennifer Pez failed to save the world from complete annihilation. But, Maria ‘Mary’ Fiore was actually more than capable of saving the day when the day that needed saving was one with a wedding happening on it. In the course of the movie, Pez did manage to save several weddings from complete annihilation, even if the most crucial wedding, the one central to the story was, in fact, completely annihilated. So, I classify The Wedding Planner as a romantic comedy with some tendencies toward the tragic-awesomenist style. It’s a satisfying film, worthy of a 6 or 7 out of 12 by my estimation.

In Enough, on the other hand, Pez plays a character much more within her traditional oeuvre, a tough minded fighter who can compete with and beat the boys. Enough seems like it should be a fantastic piece of straight filmic awesomenism, but it gets so bogged down in social relevance that it fails to really kick your ass, or have any computer animation in it. She seems stranded in a universe that is far too realistic and banal to accommodate the silly and unrealistic behavior of herself or her weird-ass biological father. I can only stand to give it a 4 out of 12.