I sort of loved it actually. But we'll get to that in a moment.
I don't know if it was just a coincidence that I laughed the hardest I've laughed in years on the first night in Australia after Joe Biden was inaugurated. I didn't consciously feel the sense of relief I imagined I'd feel. Given that his inauguration had recently become a fait accompli, I had an underwhelming actual response to it, even with waking up at 4 a.m. to watch it -- and realizing only then I probably needed to wake up about 15 minutes earlier, as he was already mid-speech.
But Thursday night our time was indeed a cause for celebration. The kids pushed for a special dinner, so we went up to Errol Street and got fish and chips, and beers for the adults. Later when we came home, I told my wife I was going to watch something really silly. I didn't know what, but I wanted a cinematic balm for my celebratory mind.
That thing ended up being Vacation, the fifth movie in the series that started out as a National Lampoon property before shedding that affiliation (at least as far as the titles were concerned) with Vegas Vacation in 1997. I had before now considered it safe to avoid this movie, as Ed Helms already felt like a dud at the movies way back in 2015, and the only previous movies in this series I actually like are the original and the aforementioned Vegas Vacation. That's right, I don't like the Christmas one.
In fact, if I'd felt for the whole movie like I did in its first 15 minutes, I'd have written a post on The Audient with this title: "I like Ed Helms, I just don't like Ed Helms movies." I was already planning what I'd write about The Clapper when this happened:
I started laughing.
And laughing. And laughing.
And just never stopped laughing throughout the rest of the movie.
That might be a slight exaggeration. But three or four hysterically funny scenes put me in this film's good graces, and I never saw any reason to leave them. And most of the remaining scenes were solid doubles if not actual homers.
It all started with the introduction of the Albanian minivan that the grown Rusty Griswold (Helms) rents for his family to make another ill-fated trip to Wally World. The vehicle is this incredibly odd shade of blue and has kind of a bubble butt at the back, for no good reason. It has multiple gas tanks and multiple charging cables flopping out of it like spaghetti, which have connector prongs that don't go to any outlet you've ever seen, complete with protruding springs and other doohickeys. The remote for the car has about 17 buttons, most of which have completely unclear meanings, including one with a swastika on it.
Here, have a look:
Anything related to this vehicle had me in stitches, including its GPS and the steady reveal of what the various buttons do, but they weren't the only moments that made me laugh out loud during Vacation. In fact, in one moment involving a highway chase, I was so doubled over with hysterical laughter that my wife had to come check on me to make sure I was okay. (Actually, that did involve the minivan.)
As unpredictable as all this was, it led to something highly predictable: I went to Metacritic and saw that Vacation has a 34 metascore. That's an improvement on its 27 on Rotten Tomatoes. I'd remembered it hadn't been well received, but in those few minutes between when I finished the movie and when I checked on these scores, I convinced myself I'd remembered it wrong. After all, how could I find those scenes so much funnier than anyone else did? But nope. I read the review of the guy who liked it the most on Metacritic -- Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri -- who also admitted to "laughing [his] ass off." But he spent about every other sentence of the review apologizing for his reaction.
Why do we need to apologize for laughing?
It occurred to me after watching Vacation that if something is funny, it's funny. If it's racist or sexist or homophobic and you find it funny, that's a you problem. But Vacation is none of those things (very much) so I don't know why I can't feel pure about the laughter it inspired in me.
And it's not like this movie has no bonafides. We may not have known who they were then, but Vacation was written and directed by Jonathan M. Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who may not be household names, but sure got a lot of kudos when they made Game Night a couple years later. I laughed a lot harder at this than I laughed at Game Night.
If I put myself in my wife's shoes, seeing me on Thursday night -- or rather, hearing my guffaws from the other room and coming in after they'd ended -- would only be comparable to the time she saw me lose my shit at the drive-in while watching Step Brothers for the first time. I was like a crazy person to her with how much I was laughing at that movie. Have I laughed that hard another time since then? Surely, but the fact that Step Brothers was what immediately came to mind as a point of comparison is a good indication how hard I laughed during that one particular scene in Vacation. That's got to be worth something, right?
It's worth four stars, I decided.
Yep. I snubbed that 34 metascore and 27 RT score and logged a four-star (out of five) entry on Letterboxd.
I did feel a little funny about it -- who's going to see that rating on Letterboxd and think less of me for it? -- but not as funny as Vacation was.
Is this as good as other movies I typically give four stars? Surely not. But I am going to remember that laughter for a long time. Maybe someday I will see another really funny movie and compare it to those times I saw Step Brothers and Vacation.
There's probably no reliable way to translate laughs into stars. And surely, one funny scene in a movie is not going to be enough to push it even into positive three-star territory. I've seen movies that were total duds outside of one brilliantly conceived comedy bit.
But again, that wasn't the only time I emitted guffaws during Vacation. The sheer quantity of laughter forced me to realize that star-ratings are a measure of a subjective experience of watching a movie. Opinions cannot be "right" or "wrong," though of course, the more opinions someone gets "wrong," the less likely you are to believe them when they recommend a movie to you.
Well, I hope you'll still believe me when I tell you that Vacation might bring you the same laughs it brought me.
If we are grading only the laughter, and grading it on a curve, and grading it subjectively, it may have even been worth five stars.
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