The Sweetest Thing

Starring Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair
Screenplay by Nancy A. Pimental
Directed by Roger Kumble
website: www.sonypictures.com

IN SHORT: The reason why there's a five day waiting period for hand gun sales... [Rated R for strong sexual content and language.]

...'cuz you'll want to blow your brains out for wasting cash on this clinker. (With the exception of every fifteen year old boy who sneaks into the theater to see Cameron Diaz and Christina Applegate squeeze their breasts together. Two breasts, one squeeze. No girl-girl action implied). The Sweetest Thing is, to toss its own website yadda-yadda back in its face, "an embarrassing ordeal that strips you of your dignity and reintroduces you to your soul" and that soul part only comes into play if you pull the trigger.

In one line: aging partygirl (Cameron Diaz) crashes the wedding of the guy she dismissed at a party the night before -- she has no idea he's getting married -- and brings her best partygirl pal and roommate (Christina Applegate) along for support. There's a third roommate (Selma Blair), the less said about, the better.

These three adorables have danced their way through the entire population of geeky guys at the local disco and bemoan the utter lack of the perfect male to settle down with now that they are tired of playing "the game." Why are there no eligible perfect guys to settle down with?

Well, they live in San Francisco [insert snide comment about the intelligence of heterosexual femmes for settling in the gay capital of the Western World here]

There is absolutely nothing more to The Sweetest Thing than that, and more jokes about the male appendage than we could shake our, uh, stick at. All this plus a still-born resemblance to a road flick, a (literal) torrent of bathroom humor and sex jokes desperately in need of some clever raunch.

That being said, we weren't dumb enough to think we were the demo target for this piece of would be fluff, so we parked in the middle of a bunch of twentysomething femmes. One laugh in 90 minutes is not the sign of a good flick. For us, after the eighth or tenth dick joke, all the below the belt humor isn't funny -- unless it's really gross or over the top. Writer Nancy Pimental's humor is downright tame by those standards, once you've become inured to her sense of humor. Or bored by the utter lack of clever gags.

Good God, even the worst of the Saturday Night Live film debacles, at the least, made an attempt to stretch an established setup into a series of sketches adding up to the magical ninety minute mark. Pimental doesn't even have the slightest notion of how to expand the sketch she didn't bother to write in the first place. We'll say it until we're blue in the face -- There is no story. There are dancing Hasidic Jews and Village People clones, exploding bathrooms and tacky costumes and movie montages (perfect for DVD!) meant to pad the film-- and then there is a gag involving the piercing of a man's private parts. We're not sure how it was supposed to work as we lead a sheltered life.

The Sweetest Thing promotes itself as "a romantic comedy without the sugar". That's about the only thing they got right. Except for the part about romance and comedy.

On average, a first run movie ticket will run you Ten Bucks. Were Cranky able to set his own price to The Sweetest Thing, he would have paid . . .

$1.00

and we are being way too kind ('cuz we remember being fifteen and the thrill of sneaking into the films we were "too small" to buy a ticket for. That and a pair of babes squeezing their ta-ta's would've been just fine . . .)

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