AMERICAN REUNION
You know that feeling you get when you receive a Facebook friend request from someone you went to high school with, and you don't quite recognize the name, and a smile slowly forms as you think, "Oh, ye-e-eah ... that guy!" That, in a nutshell, was my reaction to American Reunion, the third big-screen sequel to the beloved coming-of-age slapstick American Pie, and easily the most endearing of the lot. It took me a while to succumb to the movie's charms, but in the end I not only liked it; I would've happily "liked" it.
The first trophy handed out at the 2012 Academy Awards ceremony was for Best Cinematography, a prize that I predicted would go to The Tree of Life but that instead went to Hugo. (Seriously, after his undeserved losses for 2006's Children of Men and now the Terrence Malick film, exactly whom does Emmanuel Lubezki have to do to win an Oscar?) But that was actually my second incorrect assumption of the evening, because as soon as host Billy Crystal stepped on stage, I said to the others at my viewing party, "Here comes the standing ovation," and the audience - despite giving the man a warm reception - remained seated. Did the crowd have a collective premonition of just how spectacularly Crystal would bomb last night?
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