Owen Wilson is first met with a no and the question of what his apex is; a self-described controversial opinion offers Marley and Me, and Life Aquatic is floated and called ludicrous.
The case for yes: Wilson has never been more famous or had more movie options than after this, probably his biggest movie even against Zoolander, in the middle of the rated-R comedy boom and setting up Cars in 2006; the doubter concedes it is his apex.
Vince Vaughn's apex is not this film: Swingers is one answer, The Breakup another, a big hit while he was dating Aniston and in Us Weekly every week, playing basically himself, with the tweak that filming The Breakup was the apex.
Rachel McAdams is a yes after Mean Girls, The Notebook and this, never more famous; Red Eye with Killian Murphy (as transcribed) and The Family Stone followed an amazing first five movies, though she wound up on True Detective, where movie stars are now.
Nobody else is worthy, not Walken, unless David Dobkin, who has had a successful career but for whom this is the biggest hit.
Later, closing Who Won the Movie, this performance is called Vaughn's Apex Mountain slash best movie, at odds with the earlier placement of his apex at The Breakup.
David Dobkin directed two Tupac videos; Owen Wilson found the script corny and he, Vaughn and the writers rewrote most of it; John McCain and James Carville cameo in the first Cleary wedding and McCain gave his $700 to charity; the website sold fake Purple Hearts until the military intervened; The Real Wedding Crashers ran four episodes on NBC in 2007; Will Ferrell shot for one day; Dobkin, Vaughn and Wilson once came up with an idea for a sequel with Daniel Craig as a superior crasher; Isla Fisher announced a sequel in 2017, used a body double and talked producers down from five nude scenes to one; Vince Vaughn did not keep the painting
Burned early: David Dobkin directed two Tupac videos, I Get Around and Keep Your Head Up, two of his first jobs and two classics.
Per a 2005 Owen Wilson quote, the script was not comfortable on first read, a funny concept but partly corny, so Wilson, Vaughn and the writers changed most of the movie, including the arc of Jeremy's romance, and dropped a Graduate-like wedding scene; that prompts the Wayne's World 2 parody and a wish for a Mike Myers episode, with So I Married an Axe Murderer called his best.
John McCain and James Carville appear briefly in the first Cleary wedding; McCain donated his $700 salary to charity and got shit for the fake Purple Hearts the crashers use for free drinks; the movie website sold fake Purple Hearts until the military intervened, which the hosts mock as a 2005 way to spend 11 minutes online.
The creators made a reality show, The Real Wedding Crashers, which ran four episodes on NBC in 2007; a host wonders whether it would seem reprehensible now, and Kevin Clark's Ringer story on Jerry Rice as a real-life wedding crasher is recalled.
Will Ferrell's two scenes were shot in one day; according to David Dobkin, he, Vaughn and Wilson came up with a sequel in which John and Jeremy compete with a superior wedding crasher played by Daniel Craig; Isla Fisher announced on Andy Cohen's show in November 2017 that the sequel was a go, but nothing has been heard since the Me Too era.
Isla Fisher used a body double for her nude scene and told Entertainment Weekly she talked the producers down from five nude scenes to one; she watched Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle before her audition, and De Mornay is in the movie; it is not true that Vince Vaughn kept the painting Todd gave Jeremy.
Keir O'Donnell won Todd, but Vince Vaughn really pushed for Justin Long, whose interpretation of the character was Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs and who thought he had the job; the hosts call it a phenomenal what-if that would have made the character more acceptable by being so ridiculous, instead of a gay art school kid who is also a psycho and is mocked homophobically by his grandmother.
The black sheep character can be awesome, with Spalding in Caddyshack (as transcribed) the greatest example, and Christopher Walken himself played one as the brother in the Minnesota scene of Annie Hall.
Asked whether he would rather have had Raquel Welch, the answer is that it is hard to see anybody but Jane Seymour in the role now, and he loves her. — Chris Ryan
Seymour was great stunt casting after Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman; Nicolas Cage was the next call after Ferrell's no, which the hosts would like to see, though Cage reportedly gets called for parts like this and it never quite comes off, as in a Seth Rogen story, because he still thinks it is 1999 and must be the star, with tax liens against his Scottish castles.
The depiction of the forcible rape of Vince Vaughn's character in a humorless light; the homophobia; the Todd character; the racist grandmother; the central plot of lying to women; the ethnic code-switching aliases
The hosts feel they already did this in the first 30 minutes of the show; the film was criticized even in the moment, before Twitter could mobilize, for depicting the forcible rape of Vince Vaughn's character in a humorless light, and it took heat for homophobia then too.
The whole character of Todd is an error that does not work in 2018, and the racist grandmother did not age well either.
Earlier the central plot of pretending to be other people to have sex was judged not to have aged well and would launch a torrent of hate pieces today; the racial and cultural code switching of the aliases, like a yarmulke and the name Lou Epstein, is in good fun but pretty inappropriate now, as is the funeral scene.
The painting; Coldplay's Sparks; Isla Fisher; Bradley Cooper as Sack Lodge; the Wilson and Vaughn banter; the soundtrack; the wealthy DC-area setting; Bradley Cooper shooting Vince Vaughn with birdshot months before Dick Cheney's hunting accident
The painting still really makes one host laugh, and Coldplay's Sparks might be the band's best song 15 years later and a perfect part of the movie; a host recalls hearing it in college and expecting a different kind of band, with Sparks here and Don't Panic in Garden State becoming part of those movies.
Isla Fisher has probably never been better; she did a karaoke version of this role in Tag this year, people thought she would be a huge movie star before she married Sasha Baron Cohen (as transcribed) and got sidetracked, and worst case she should have had a seven-year sitcom; the pronunciation of her first name is corrected.
Bradley Cooper as a preppy dick plays well against his later backstory: after Alias he worried about being typecast as a nice guy, and Sack Lodge is a Hall of Fame dick with no redeeming quality, talking about other women and sharing the private eye conversation with Trapster; if made in 2018 he would have a line about golfing with Don Jr.
It is hard to believe nobody knew Cooper would be a star; one host watched Alias religiously and found his best-friend role bland and one-note; he was only 30 here and graduated from Georgetown in 97, and unlike Vaughn and Wilson he took control of his career, from All About Steve, Valentine's Day and the A Team through Limitless, Place Beyond the Pines and Silver Linings, aiming to be Warren Beatty, Redford or Eastwood.
Limitless is when one host believed in Cooper, since a premise that stupid only works if you like the lead; he has withstood Aloha, Burnt, Joy and the barely released Serena, and a Burnt digression follows: one host's wife loves kitchen movies like Under the Tuscan Sun, Unfaithful and No Reservations, Cooper is good in Burnt even though the movie does not work, and Daniel Brühl is the maitre d'.
Cooper saved his career with voice acting: Rocket Raccoon in Guardians of the Galaxy without the green screen work Chris Pratt does, and the boyfriend's voice in 10 Cloverfield Lane; the Hangover sequels were his torn ACL, with Hangover 3 excruciating.
While researching A Star Is Born, a host read that Cooper talked to Clint Eastwood about directing while making Sniper and was told Clint did Play Misty for Me at 41; the hosts love the heat check of entering the Clint conversation, are all in on the directing career and the coming promo tour in a denim jacket, and note Clint is making The Mule.
Also aged well: the Wilson and Vaughn repartee; a pretty good soundtrack for a broad Hollywood comedy, with In the Summertime on the bicycles, Rod Stewart's Stay With Me and the Coldplay song as big set pieces; and the wealthy DC area in summertime, which was supposed to be Boston and Cape Cod around the Kennedy compound, though you cannot tell it was 130 degrees when they filmed.
A late addition: Bradley Cooper shooting Vince Vaughn in the backside with birdshot approximately eight months before Dick Cheney shot somebody in the face in a similar environment.
The first wedding crash montage, which crosses a couple of lines, took a week to shoot, and the hosts are not surprised: they went all in, with the two singing Shout at 17 different weddings, and the first 20 minutes leave one host feeling ecstatic.
The touch football scene is unbelievable and could have gone on three or four more minutes with more button hooks from Rachel McAdams; the hot route call is a joke one host will take to the grave from playing Madden with friends, the Kennedy-compound-style house in Delaware is a real estate highlight, and Cooper's rugby shirt is fantastic.
The dinner-table scene in which Vaughn's character is groped under the table is flat-out funny and one of the better Vince Vaughn three minutes, though more explicit than remembered; the unrated version is just longer versions of the same scenes, and the hosts marvel at scrolling over the running time and finding 51 minutes still left.
Other nominations are the Will Ferrell cameo, the motorboating exchange right after the Jane Seymour scene, which one host would watch on YouTube every day, and the Dwight Yoakam and Rebecca DeMornay mediation scene that throws the fastest pitch first; Vaughn's speech from it is played.
Asked for a favorite, the opening montage is picked as the best and the signature moment of the movie.
Dobkin wanted to shoot the montage for two weeks and had it in his head to start the movie on that note; one host remembers wanting to stand up and applaud in the theater when it finally ended.
The Public Garden bench is now a Robin Williams memorial; a gay sex scene was written into the script to test whether anyone read it; Williams insisted on the L Street bar and ad-libbed the wife story and 'Son of a bitch, he stole my line'; Sean was based on Damon's mother and Affleck's father; Gus Van Sant painted the painting in Sean's office; Skylar was based on Damon's Harvard ex; Damon and Minnie Driver dated through the shoot and the Oscars; Terrence Malick suggested the ending
The Boston Public Garden park bench where 3,000 people watched the scene is now a memorial to Robin Williams, after people put flowers there when he died; one host lived for ten years a six-minute walk from Bunker Hill Community College, where Sean taught.
For a while the screenplay contained a gay sex scene between Will and Sean in his office, written to see if anybody was actually reading the script during the year Castle Rock would not buy it and they feared it had become poison; nobody noticed until Harvey Weinstein, who told them to get rid of it.
Robin Williams insisted on the L Street bar after being mobbed scouting it and loving the energy, though his scene was not filmed there; he ad-libbed the story about his wife farting, which is why Matt Damon laughed so hard, and son of a bitch, he stole my line, which was supposed to be him reading the note and nodding; Williams was a genius with a complicated reputation because of bad movies.
Robin Williams's character was based on a mix of Damon's mom and Affleck's dad; Gus Van Sant painted the painting in Sean's office; Skyler is based on Damon's ex-girlfriend from Harvard; Damon and Minnie Driver dated from halfway through the movie through the Oscars and had a bad breakup two months later, he apparently dumping her; the hosts decline to discuss the two adjudicating each other on Twitter.
One host's wife called Minnie Driver bad, the reason the movie has not aged as well, and did not believe the relationship; the hosts disagree and think she is really good, though she rightfully did not become the huge star people expected; another host's wife came in for the middle and said the two have no chemistry even after hearing they dated a year in real life.
The hosts feel they are in love at that table; on a very small sample size women may see no chemistry where men do; the knick-knack store googly glasses moment, the Magic 8 ball scene with her NBA jokes, the organic chemistry scene and the piano speech all argue they are in love or amazing performers; she has not been in many movies, unlike a Gwyneth Paltrow with a 20-year history that would color it; one host claims she won the Oscar for this (she was in fact nominated), as evidence people felt that way at the time.
One more research bit: in the original script Will and Skylar leave town together; through a friend of the Affleck family Ben and Matt met Terrence Malick, who had read it and said Will should chase her, she is gone and he has to go find her, so Malick is the reason for the ending, one of many lucky notes and ad-libs that pushed the movie up levels.
Why did Rob Reiner, William Goldman and Terrence Malick want to help two unfamous guys when people struggle in Hollywood for 25 years, and this is the only movie Harvey Weinstein did not chop up as he saw fit; they had some success already, unlike Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn, though Vaughn was in Rudy as Jamie O'Hara; the only guess is that people sensed they were headed somewhere and wanted to be thanked.
A rewatchable movie needs four or five parts you have to watch when flicking channels at the 30 or 50 minute mark, and this one has a lot: the airport shootout that leaves Nick Cage in NFL concussion protocol, the surgery face-switch scenes, the escape from a maximum security prison on Catalina Island where everybody wears magnetic boots, the Somewhere Over the Rainbow shootout with a little kid in headphones, the boat chase and the ending.
Asked for the most rewatchable scene, answers that it is absolutely the Somewhere Over the Rainbow shootout. — Chris Ryan
The shootout begins with Cage entering a trip-hop bachelor pad in an airport hangar, Tricky's Christian Sands (as transcribed) playing to date it to 1997, Castor's son present for some reason, absinthe and a hallucinatory out-of-body experience, and the child always in the line of fire with nobody thinking to put him in a bathtub under a cover; one host would rewatch the whole movie if it were only this scene.
Castor's henchman brings out a beautiful oak box holding Chiclets, prescription pills guessed to be an early Dutch version of molly, a dozen rolled joints and two gold-plated handguns, presented as if it were the Ark of the Covenant or a Kansas basketball signing; the two men then fake-laugh at each other unironically a year before the Austin Powers henchmen scene.
One host personally thought the prison escape was the most rewatchable scene, and another says they are with them on that.
Picks the Somewhere Over the Rainbow shootout as John Woo's victory lap, Woo announcing he is in Hollywood and spending money, with the kid in slow motion, a shootout kept being added to, and so many vases full of lilies blown up again. — Jason Concepcion
Two of the hosts share a love of prison movies, to the point of two-in-the-morning emails about a Vince Vaughn prison-movie trailer; the magnetic gravity boots are a good prison wrinkle every jail in America should have, and the film keeps adding: a shootout, then drugs, then a kid in the middle, then Over the Rainbow; a prison in the ocean, then super magnets, then electrocution.
The prison is like the Death Star, an impregnable super weapon undone by one trick, since all you have to do is get rid of the boots; Cage brings the four-billion-dollar prison down with one cigarette, fighting to keep it, getting sent to shock treatment, burning a guard and starting a full-scale riot.
Travolta switches faces and goes into the prison as Castor Troy, and Castor's brother Pollux is for some reason immediately suspicious; a host does the Pollux impression on request, and nobody can explain why Pollux would wonder whether they switched faces when he thought his brother was dead after the wind turbine.
Answers that if he had his college enemy Neil's face on his face, and his voice, his wife Laramie would never be convinced it was him; there is nothing he could say. — Shea Serrano
The clip of the prison fight is played, where Travolta wearing Castor's face has to convince the brother it is really him, shouting I'm Castor Troy (as transcribed Caster Joy) and crying; one host calls it their favorite scene in the whole movie, and the tears are joked about as post-concussion emotion or life without a nicotine patch, with Roger Ebert imagined comparing it to first seeing Bergman.
Did people take Cage at face value because of Leaving Las Vegas? The entire 90s came and went before anyone collectively asked whether Nick Cage is a bad actor; asked whether they want to change their minds on the scene, the hosts say no.
