The Sweetest Thing

By Gary Schaefer

Can Hollywood please produce a comedy that doesn’t involve vomit and human excrement?

This movie era is defined by sick jokes that are drawn out and recycled like water bottles. “There’s Something About Mary” perfected it, while films like “Tomcats” and “Scary Movie 2” destroyed it.

The next contributor to the era of disgust is “The Sweetest Thing” (Columbia, R), starring Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate and Selma Blair. These three chicks are all laid-back “Sex And The City” types who find that playing the field is fun.

But their fun ends after Cristina Walters (Diaz) falls for yahoo Peter Donahue (Thomas Jane). Sparks fly from their first encounter, but Donahue leaves town the next day for a wedding. Walters is left to wallow in her own self-pity and regret.

So, why not take a road trip to crash the wedding and find the guy? Cristina is dragged out by her friend in the desperate hopes that Peter is the right man for her. Girl meets boy, girl loses boy and girl tries to overcome her fears and get the boy back. But this isn’t that important.

What is important is whether it’s funny. And for the first half, it was. But the hilarity drops like a brick off a building.

Diaz and Applegate are hilarious as they come across all sorts of hijinks on the road, including a raunchy scene in a men’s rest-stop bathroom. It’s fun, exciting and entertaining. But the film then slaps the taste out of your mouth and replaces it with tasteless jokes.

It all starts when Cristina’s friend Jane (Blair) has her boyfriend’s penis piercing stuck on her tonsils. The room fills with cops, firefighters and random passersby. In order to free her from this embarrassing circumstance, her friends and her sing Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.”

The song, played at thousands of weddings, now will be marred by the image of Blair gagging on pierced sausage.

So just when you thought the era of disgust couldn’t go any lower, you have the newest notch. From then on, the film just floats around and eventually crashes down like a blazing fire. So when the end of the film does come, is there a little water to put out the flames? No, only gasoline. By this time, all the characters are annoying and one-dimensional.

Diaz hits her marks as Cristina, but quickly becomes stale and idle. She just stops doing anything. In one instance, she sits and reads a book about love and starts crying and making useless vows that she has changed.

This went from gross-out to chick flick faster than the Roadrunner through an Acme trap.

As for the others, they were rather useless. But Applegate has matured since her stint on “Married With Children.” The only problem is that she was much funnier on that show than in this movie.

So movie meets audience, movie loses audience. Then movie tries teaching audience about love, but still loses audience.

If only this film was 45 minutes long, then it would have been a blockbuster. It just goes to show you that nobody takes a gross-out film seriously, even those making it. The audience is left wanting antacids and their two hours back.