The old saying is that all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun. Zombie Dawn, a micro-budget horror feature imported from Chile and presently hopscotching its way around America in a series of limited engagements, has both a girl and a gun, but I think the more accurate adage for it is that all you need to make a movie is an idea, a camera, and some friends who can work for free.

These days, just about everyone can put their hands on a camera, and most people can come up with a few friendly volunteers. But it’s the idea that’s the nagging thing, and I have seen movies made for many thousands of times the budget of this one that didn’t bother to have an idea.

This is a feature so rife with technical flaws that it will never be mistaken for the work of professionals, or something that cost real money to make. Despite that – and I don’t think it’s my natural predisposition to zombie fare talking although I’ll allow the possibility – this isn’t a movie I can completely dismiss, because you can’t blame a movie for what it isn’t trying to be, and this isn’t trying to be an expensive movie. And filmmakers Cristian Toledo and Lucio A. Rojas, who share seemingly dozens of crew credits on this picture between the two of them, have a genuine idea that, within the means they have, kind of works.

This is not a wall-to-wall feast of zombie splatter – in fact, the undead hordes are off-screen for the majority of the picture. In this way, the film is reminiscent of the unconventional 2010 alien invasion film Monsters (though without the ingenious filmmaking polish that tiny crew managed), in that it is most often a journey through a landscape that contemplates a changed world; a world that has been made uglier, possibly not by the intruders but our own reaction to them.

This time around, the zombies are the product of an undefined mining disaster that led to a messy and ruthless evacuation and quarantine of a large part of the country. Fifteen years after the outbreak, the mining mega-corporation responsible is sending a small squadron of mercenaries in with a handful of scientists on an exploratory mission.

The mission is led by Col. Rainoff (Cristian Ramos), a thoughtful cynic who narrates the film in voice-over. A mercenary who claims to specialize in “cleaning up the assholes of others”, he seems to understand that his own archetype – the grounded paycheck laborer – is one that his bosses have been getting fat off of for generations. His attitude about his lot in life and the role his bosses have played in destroying his country simmers underneath the incidents on-screen, acting as a plot structure of their own.

His mission, once revealed, seems like a most improbable and impractical gamble, until you adjust the equation for how staggeringly cheap are the lives of these soldiers and scientists when set against the possible reward. Behind the quarantine fence they find a few unpleasant surprises, the potential for very evil deeds within themselves, and those imperturbable zombies.

We don’t get any information about how these particular zombies operate, the movie assumes basic knowledge on the part of its audience and dispenses with explanations. The creatures (the crew is small enough that the end credits list every single extra) behave like the inconsistent bastards of zombie master texts like George Romero’s oeuvre, 28 Days/Weeks Later, and the Resident Evil film adaptations. It is not exactly important that they adhere to strict rules in this case, they exist simply as a fact that keeps death hovering just outside the camera frame.

As I have said, you need to grit your way through Zombie Dawn’s technical shortcomings. This is homebrewed digital effects, a non-professional cast, found locations, very few close-ups, and a low-grade camera whose image cannot handle the blow up to big-screen dimensions. Sound leveling is wildly-inconsistent, and scenes set in low light feature so much correction “noise” that they could be put in a textbook as an example of how to know when you’ve done something wrong. The English subtitles (the dialogue is all in Spanish) are so poorly-timed that you can lose track of who is saying what in heated arguments, and occasionally they seem to give up entirely and skip important lines in order to get on to the next scene. You don’t want a movie to have you thinking about how good subtitles are often taken for granted while said movie is still playing.

But, they have cut together what they have pretty cleanly (co-director Toledo was the editor), and I found myself appreciating surprising virtues that can emerge in this context. Their rubble-filled locations have an ironic authority because no artist was around to try and make them attractive. And actors who don’t know how to act also don’t know how to act badly – the default posture for this cast is a kind of wary dullness. If you think about it, that’s rather believable for uneducated soldiers marching through an ugly countryside where nothing happens for days at a time. Ramos’s performance achieves moments of very effective stillness, while Guillermo Alfaro, as Sgt. Mondaca, creates an unexpectedly multi-dimensional character who combines frighteningly-restless aggression with a kind of painful devotion to his squadron-mate Dag (Maximo Yanez).

This is a movie that simply lacks the resources to provide us with the clichés a more expensive bad movie might. Combat is messy and clumsy, fought in inconvenient locations, but part of the nature of a zombie outbreak is its inconvenience. There are no moodily-lit command centers, no fancy lab equipment, no master thespians around to provide exposition. One scene shows a type of assault which has been shown in other films, but either through squeamishness or an unpleasant impulse to increase its impact, is rarely shown straight on. Here, with no equipment or technique available to make it look like anything else, the act takes on a brutal, pitiful banality that instantly sets the warped impulses of the perpetrator in stark and inescapable relief.

Great swaths of the population – people who prefer movies in English, people who have technical standards, people who want their zombie movies to have a lot of action and close-up makeup effects – will have good reason not to want to give 80 minutes of their lives to Zombie Dawn. I’m not going to try to argue them out of that position. But I am glad that I saw it, because whatever else I can say about the filmmakers, I think they had more than a girl and a gun. They had an idea. And if I learned they were making another film, I’d be interested to know what it was about.

P.S. I don’t know if this will be true for all engagements, but our showing not only included a free mini-comic book, which serves as a quasi prologue to the feature, it also included a short cartoon called Hambuster – a gleefully-gruesome digitally-animated nightmare prank that shows fast food turning the tables on its consumers. The cartoon, ragged in look but audacious in its humor and gore, can be viewed in its entirety here.

One of my cast-mates in Dracula was a bonafide learned smart person, with books published and everything. It prepared him well for the role of Van Helsing. Naturally we and some of the other actors spent a good bit of time discussing horror films, and it was through those conversations that he lent me Imprint. In the over six months since it has sat on my TV stand, and several times I set out to watch it but hesitated, because I had heard of its reputation. But I’m seeing him tonight and he wants it back as research for his new book, so the time had to be now.

Imprint isn’t even a full horror movie, it’s a one-hour story that was made for cable. Showtime did an anthology series called Masters of Horror in which some of the leading lights in the horror genre were given – in theory – carte blanche to scare people for an hour provided they kept the budget under $2 million and the shooting schedule at ten days or less. I thought this was a gem of an idea from the start, but for various reasons the series ended up very scattershot. Whether it was the subpar crews they were forced to use, or uninspired scripts, or the fact that some of them were a couple of decades removed from whatever mad inspiration led to their famous horror achievements, many episodes just flat didn’t work. Among the best are Incident on and off a Mountain Road, directed by Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep), an ingeniously-ruthless serial killer story about a damsel less-in-distress than you think; and Jenifer, directed by Dario Argento (Suspiria), in which a strange and feral woman plays on the lust and protective instincts of men.

But Imprint, directed by the Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike, was the one episode of the series that even Showtime refused to air. The series producer Mick Garris, who directed the TV miniseries versions of Steven King’s The Shining and The Stand, said it may be the most disturbing movie he had ever seen. You can see why I would have a mixture of curiosity and concern about it.

I don’t know that I can even describe what makes Imprint so audaciously fucked-up. This is not some punky “look what we can do” gross-out, or nihilism chic like American torture porn. This is a dread fairy tale about the mad cruelty and perversion in the world we’ve made, and how Hell is all around us because of our own deeds. It is a journey that starts on a river, and goes places beyond what you thought you could imagine, but you are so mesmerized you simply believe that you cannot quit the journey.

The story starts with a 19th century American journalist, played by the already deeply-strange actor Billy Drago, on his way to a small island in Japan that serves as a brothel – a Pleasure Island for depraved men. He is in search of a whore named Kimomo; he fell in love with her long ago, swore to find her and rescue her from her life, and then lost track of her. He asks if she is here and is told no. But when he asks for the girl sitting in the shadows to be sent to his room, she confesses to him that Kimomo was here, and was her friend, and that she is now dead.

The journalist rages. He drinks sake. He sees things in the shadows. But he asks this girl – this strange woman with blue hair and a scarred face, to tell him what happened to Kimomo.

This is the first 20 minutes of the hour. Until now, there have been a few gruesome images, a shock or two, but Miike is holding back. You are just carried along by the unrelentingly-weird atmosphere he creates on this island, and the sense that this man should never have come here, but was always going to.

The girl tells her story, both about her own sad and bloody life and the awful fate that befell the innocent Kimomo. It is hideous, almost excruciating to watch. The man refuses to believe it. He demands the truth. And so the girl tells the story again, and this time confesses more, and the story you thought was unbearable becomes even worse.

And now the man believes, but doesn’t understand. There is still something missing that will explain it all. Again, he demands the truth – all of it. And now something is revealed that nothing has prepared you for, and sends your imagination to places you never wanted it to go. The thing about Imprint is, up until its final images it is still torturing your mind. There isn’t any peak gross-out moment followed by release and some nice resolution. It is…and this is its point…perpetual.

It mentions Hell, and demons. It talks about torment. But it doesn’t allow us to expel its greatest evils onto demons. Its supernatural touches are mere feints beyond our reality. We are the offenders, for our ability to imagine doing such things to other people.

Understand, I am not recommending this to just anyone. Miike is an exceptional filmmaker (his 13 Assassins may be the greatest action epic of this generation), and this is an exceptionally well-made film despite the eccentricity of Drago’s performance. But not everybody needs to see this, and certainly not everybody wants to see this. And for good reason. What makes Imprint rank as an all-time great piece of horror filmmaking is that, no matter what you go through while you are watching it (be ready for a lot of cringing and jaw-dropping), what is much worse is that the movie will not leave you after.

There were two other men in the steam room when I entered. One was trying to stretch and exercise – which multiple warning signs tell you not to do, but men are men and must constantly push the limits in order to prove that they are men. Similarly, the other man was pouring water on the heating element to make more steam – which multiple warning signs also tell you not to do, but men are men and must prove that their manliness demands more steam than the average man.

Eventually, water-pouring man actually exited the steam room and then re-appeared a minute later. My guess was that he had sought out the controls to turn up the heat, because it got noticeably toastier inside. He then sat back down by the heating element and proceeded to pour more water on it.

So now we were all cloaked in thick white billows and I was getting damned uncomfortable. My throat and lungs were burning each time I breathed, and even leaning forward hurt my muscles. Am I the only one who feels this? I wondered. Is my body so unaccustomed to this that I am past my tolerance while these manly men are just getting to where they are happy?

The warning signs advise you to limit yourself to 10 minutes at a time in the steam room, and I had planned to stick around that long but this didn’t feel good anymore. Since it didn’t feel good and it was quite possibly unhealthy, I did what came naturally to me and walked out.

Ten seconds after I walked out, so did the other two men. One of them was saying to the other in a joking tone: “Ahhh! Caliente chingada!”. Which doesn’t really require translation.

And I thought You god-damned idiots! You were just as uncomfortable as I was, but your stupid machismo kept you prisoner in there until I made it safe to walk out by being the wuss. They could neither admit error nor danger, and would only do the sensible thing after I had provided a vehicle for them to off-load their shame.

I guess it’s a role somebody has to play – we take mockery from fools, even as we’re keeping their dumb asses alive.

We closed out El Coyote on Beverly Boulevard, drinking margaritas and eating steamed tacos and looking at our playing pieces in every angle and configuration imaginable for well over three hours. I love evenings like this because I feel more like a screenwriter when actively-wrestling with something.

There’s a caper element to this script, which illustrates one of those hidden Golden Means we’re always trying to achieve in scripts. In Writer English: You’ve got your protagonist (the one seeking something), and the antagonist (the one who seeks something that sets them in opposition to the protagonist). In a caper, the protagonist usually has some multifaceted scheme they are trying to work, while the antagonist is either playing defense (Ocean’s 11), working a contrary scheme of their own (The Grifters), or completely-ignorant that a scheme is unfolding around them (The Sting).

Each option has its own perks and challenges – in the case of 7 Red our antagonist is making moves but they are fundamentally playing defense. So in a climax of this nature you want to throw in a variety of ingredients like:

-Moves by the protagonist that show off the clever and interlocking nature of their scheme beginning to work.
-Moves by the protagonist that show off their ability to anticipate how the antagonist will behave.
-Moves by the antagonist that throw off the protagonist’s scheme, providing suspense and forcing them to improvise
-Moves by the antagonist that SEEMINGLY throw off the protagonist’s scheme, but are actually clever feints drawing the antagonist into a trap.
-Random twists of fate and physics that make everything come harrowingly-close to spinning completely out of control.

If you think back on movies you enjoy in this genre, you’ll probably see a lot of mixtures like this. You don’t want it to be just one. Maybe someone has written all these down before – I don’t know, but I had to figure it out on my own.

Audiences are most-satisfied when, by the end of the story, they at least can work out from available evidence nearly-all, if not all, of what happened and which of the above categories most-accurately describes the happenings. You can tell them beforehand, let them experience it as it happens, or show the result and explain it afterwards. Sometimes you do all of them – any approach can work, and when it comes to which you use, it’s often going to come down to feel. And as before you ideally use a mixture of them to get across all the information you need.

There is a threshold, though, which, once crossed, leads to disaster, and I think it comes in the area of those moves and counter-moves between the protagonist and the antagonist. It’s the old “I knew you would do this, and so I did this, but knowing YOU would probably KNOW I would do this, I also did THIS! HA HA!”

I think people understand the existence of master chess players who can think twelve moves ahead, and even admire them to a certain extent. But my general feeling about movie audiences is that – as I said for this genre – they like to have a shot at understanding how it worked, and they don’t want the process of understanding it to be un-cinematic.

What do I mean by un-cinematic? The usual stuff – excessive flashbacks, idle scenes of people talking a lot about things that already happened. Stuff that is dangerous in any genre or situation. You see, it’s not that the scheme you came up with is smart that is rubbing the audience the wrong way (remember – they’re smarter than you think), it’s that sharing your work with them resulted in bad screenwriting.

Just look back at Ocean’s 11, which had surprises, reversals, seeming-accidents and real accidents, and a few mid-and post-game explanations and flashbacks, but kept it all brisk and fast and funny while mixing it up. Whereas Ocean’s 12 ended with a lot of flashbacks and talking about this one secret component to the plan which we were never shown. Not that the movie was triumphing up to then, but it made for a pretty sputtering end.

So the trick is to tie enough knots that the audience appreciates the work you did, but not tie too many that you can’t unravel the thing without resorting to bad screenwriting. How many twists are ideal? How much of the above ingredients can the stew hold? The answer is never defined enough that you can write it down, is it? But after you’ve watched enough movies you know when there’s too much or too little, don’t you?

Later I pressed myself to see 800 words as a satisfactory accomplishment, which meant I was cranking it up to 4 Decistevies. And more recently, I have noticed that without too much forcing, I am now regularly producing 900 words per working day when prose fiction is in the mix. Decistevie Factor 4.5. When people do NaNoWriMo – the challenge to produce a 50,000-word novel in a month – that’s a commitment to spending each of 30 days at over 7 Decistevies – a challenging pace for mere mortals.

This measurement is not as applicable to script-writing, blog posting, or other farting around on the internet. Goodness knows I’ve blogged well past a full Stevie at a single sitting on multiple occasions. I feel like, prose fiction being the medium of Stevie himself, it is most appropriately-applied to the customary density of that very specific medium. A lot more work goes into fewer words when screenwriting, for example.

One reason I like the Star Trek terminology is that if you try to write at too high a daily rate, not only do you risk damage to your engines, you can breach some kind of barrier beyond which nonsense and discord reign, or your characters start doing stupid sh*t like turn into salamanders like they did in that Voyager episode about Warp 10. As important as the ability to maintain productivity is the ability to shut down each day and say “I can stop here”.

Well, the rules shift a little as you get near to the end of something big, and so today I moved at a hair-raising velocity, beyond Decistevie Factor 9, all so I could announce that I have now completed Torpor – a 12,000-word novelette. First drafts are hairy, but I feel unusually-emboldened to say I am damn proud of this one. Feels like a step forward for me.

1) They are dedicated publishers of sci-fi/fantasy from new and upcoming authors. My peeps.
2) They pay. (Okay, $7. But any writer will tell you the gesture means a hell of a lot)
3) They have a strict “No Vampires” rule currently in operation.

That means that of the six short stories in the blast of submissions I made in February, five have now been accepted for publication, along with the bonus non-fiction piece that got pulled in for the ride. That is stunning to me – this piece had been rejected a few times, but frequently with personal letters from the editors expressing that they loved the concept and the writing but felt like it wasn’t quite there yet. I had actually started putting myself into the mindset to take a shot at re-writing it. I probably still will if I intend to put it in the collection I am planning.

The sixth and final story is “Bubbles”, which has been rejected a number of times even before this round, and is only still alive at three relatively-choosy outfits. I feel strongly that there’s something worthy in that piece, but either I haven’t landed it or the people I am sending it to aren’t seeing it. Nevertheless, it is a relatively minor check on what otherwise has to be considered a rather staggering run of success.

There is a strong parallel in my writing and acting lives right now, where I am becoming concerned at a pattern of unbroken success at my current level. It doesn’t mean I haven’t worked hard, and it doesn’t mean I haven’t done good work, but it means that I have potential to do more and need to risk more failure in order to test my limits. When I got into Richard III I felt like that represented me reaching the next level as an actor – stepping up to bigger leagues. We’ll see if my performance actually lives up to the opportunity this summer.

The novella I finished last month, Evan After He Got Fired, is currently with one new but esteemed literary annual. Their submission rate on duotrope already indicates a high level of exclusivity. I hadn’t planned to really shop it around yet but took a flier because their submission window was closing for a long time, and the length and tone of the story means there are less potentially-suitable outlets for it.

If I get in, that would be a major sign that I can play in bigger leagues with my prose fiction. If I don’t get in, it doesn’t mean that I can’t, it just means that I have to try more. So either reaction is one I would ultimately be okay with – just the fact that I took a shot matters. Got to finish a new batch of stories so I can take more.

Given everything I am working on, to count something else this substantial as finished (well, “drafted”, anyway) is going to feel richly-satisfying. And it carries on a highly-productive phase – I finished the full-length stage play February 6th, and the prior novelette on March 9th. I should complete this in the next 2-3 days at most. I am working on a solo stage show for my actress friend Norma Jean, building an hour-long script based on interviews with her about her life, and I have about 20% of that drafted, which means it is highly-likely I’ll have a full draft of it in May. It almost tempts one to ask what major project I’ll finish in June. There are available candidates.

These days, though, I must regularly ask myself not just what I am writing, but what am I going to do with it once it is complete. Awhile back I set the goal to have enough prose fiction to publish a decent-sized collection, offer it for sale to friends and family, and then see if I can’t sell a few to strangers on the back of that. Not to get rich, but just to build a track record. With the finish of this novelette, I will be just two or three shorter pieces away from enough to put out a collection the size of a short novel. And those two or three pieces are already in-motion.

But that raises larger questions about whether or not length is the sole worthy criteria for a collection. I think good story collections have at least some thematic consonance – I’m reading James Joyce’s Dubliners right now, and don’t think THAT doesn’t have some threads tying it all together. The music album is a simple metaphor, because we can sense an album that can bring its individual songs together to feel like a cohesive larger statement that is not just “here are twelve songs we want you to buy”.

Since this would be my first collection, a part of me does appreciate the idea of it being a grab bag. I am still developing my prose fiction voice and these stories reflect that process. I do think that is interesting. But when it comes to tone and setting these stories are so far apart – from very straight-ahead realistic storytelling to quasi-sci-fi stuff. I think reader expectations are an overlooked element of the experience, and that in a collection like this, they carry echoes of the previous story into the next one whether you want it or not. So when anything goes, that’s like saying you want them to re-set their expectations to zero every time around, and I just don’t think that’s realistic.

The in-between solution would be to group the real stuff, the semi-weird stuff, and the really-weird stuff into separate sections within the collection. That tells the reader of the real stuff to stop peering in-between sentences for the goblins or black holes, and the readers of the really-weird stuff to just hang on and trust that I am taking them somewhere interesting through all this strangeness.

I think I like that idea. But my belief is that you can’t sit and ponder that for too long when you can’t even do any of that stuff until you have written more. So, back to that novelette…

Wedding Crashers
Director: David Dobkin
Writers: Steve Faber & Bob Fisher
Producers: Peter Abrams, Robert L. Levy, Andrew Panay
Stars: Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Christopher Walken, Rachel McAdams, Isla Fisher, Jane Seymour, Bradley Cooper

Here is a movie with more ideas than it knows what to do with. Wedding Crashers is an explosion of plot strands, a comedy of spinning plates sustained for longer than you would have expected by the indefatigable efforts of its stars. While in the end they cannot close the deal and settle for a lumpy, meandering third act and a rather half-hearted climax of obligations, their commitment to the material makes this more surprising, and more winning, than your average studio romantic comedy.

It helps to have people who can talk. While too often movies seem populated by pretty people who can barely speak in coherent phrases – much less sell the idea that they understand them – Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, playing best friends John and Jeremy, speak in torrents and enjoy it. You get the impression that their job mediating divorce cases is merely a hobby that gives them the space to indulge in their favorite activity – talking to each other. In both cases we have an actor who understands that the pacing and inflection of a line can oftentimes be funnier than the words themselves, and that speaking more slowly to make sure the audience understands is not funny at all.

It can border on exhausting, since neither is a natural straight man there is little to temper any excesses. But this is a story of excess, centered around perhaps the most excessive event in our culture – the wedding.

John and Jeremy love weddings. They love the food, they love the way the band almost always gets around to playing Shout, and they really love the bottomless supply of hormonally-charged bridesmaids. Without enough legitimate wedding invites to sate their appetite, they have made an elaborate recreation (complete with as many by-laws as the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition) out of forging identities and insinuating themselves into the weddings of strangers.

Jeremy forgives these shallow pleasures by saying that they are young and foolish and therefore entitled. But it is gradually sinking in for John that, as he tells Jeremy, they are not really that young anymore.

Still, new nuptials offer new challenges, and Jeremy sells John on “crashing” the excessively tasteful wedding of Christina Cleary (Jenny Alden), one of the three very comely daughters of a Treasury Secretary and rumored Presidential candidate (Christopher Walken). These daughters are so broadly appealing they even come in blonde (Alden), brunette (Rachel MacAdams), and redhead (Isla Fisher). John fixates on brunette Claire, who is kind-hearted, cares about the environment, and is engaged to a political scion and all-around jerkoff with the fantastic name Sack Lodge (Bradley Cooper). As in many romcoms he must work overtime to prove he is an unsuitable fiancée; every scene adds one more to the list of negative attributes, like he is trying to top himself each time out – boorish, over-competitive, malicious, short-tempered, vain, sexist, unfaithful, etc.

Jeremy, meanwhile, sets his sights on the bright-eyed young redhead Gloria (Isla Fisher), who seems to embody that old adage about how when the Gods want to punish us, they give us what we want. She latches on to Jeremy and invites both crashers out to the Cleary mansion for a weekend of yachting and quail hunting and other stuffy rich New England pleasures – she sells her father on it by holding her breath and stamping her feet. John sees this as a golden opportunity to work further on Claire, Jeremy grows increasingly alarmed by the adorable, sing-songy obsession Gloria is developing.

It takes a real high-wire balancing of kittenish playfulness and maniacal devotion to knock a veteran swinger like Vince Vaughn off his stride; and Fisher, like Allyson Hannigan in the first American Pie, is this movie’s secret weapon and best asset. The evolution of their relationship is in all ways much more fun than Wilson and McAdams, who must play the square and familiar courtship where he finally gets through to her, she has doubts, his secret is revealed, and you can fill in the rest.

The movie’s long middle section cannot resist piling on the quirks. One would think having Christopher Walken as the father of the house would be obstacle enough; he is strangely underutilized, except in one laugh-out-loud scene that is too difficult to describe, but requires he studiously ignore damning details in the bedroom in which Jeremy is sleeping.

Anyway, on top of that we have the gay artist son Todd (Keir O’Donnell), who hunches up like Renfield and feels oppressed by everyone. Then there is Cleary’s salacious wife Kathleen (Jane Seymour), who really wants to get John’s opinion on her recent cosmetic enhancements. And the matriarch of the family, Grandma Mary (Ellen Albertini Dow), is, like all old women in comedies, expected to shout and cuss and say bawdy things.

And then we have a high-profile cameo that pops in near the end, part of the evolving fraternity of performers who have dominated screen comedy in the last five years. It says a lot about his rising star that all he needs to do is walk on camera in a bathrobe and the audience cheers.

Director David Dobkin (Clay Pigeons, Shanghai Knights) doesn’t always calculate his set-ups in the best way, relying too often on close-ups when delicate interaction is so key to the humor. The commitment of his actors overcomes his rather flat visual approach, though, to his credit, he proves you can still get comic mileage out of a gray and dignified man turning to you with a disgusted look on his face.

Once it comes time to try and gather up all the material it has introduced, Wedding Crashers falters and starts chucking subplots overboard in a bailing bucket. But with the state of film comedy these days it is tough to fault a movie for having too much inspiration. What survives unscathed, including its essential “R” rating, is raunchy and effective comedy, and two stars who make it possible to enjoy just hearing them speak it.