Made of Honor

Be weary of a guy named McDreamy. I'm sure the Irish and Scottish do not have sire names as such.

Patrick Dempsey (Tom), who stars as the nicknamed Dr. McDreamy on Grey's Anatomy, stars with Michelle Monaghan (Hannah), who was born in Winthrop, Iowa, no relation to Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. How he got to be considered a sex symbol is beyond my comprehension. This is they guy who starred as the nerdy Meyer Lansky in Mobsters. If he can be a sex symbol, then I am Sex.

So anyway, Made of Honor is a romantic comedy about a young college girl who gets wooed by a misogynistic sex perv who thought he was hopping in bed with his girlfriend. Both have this attraction to one another for their brutal honesty with each other. This honesty leads to a long-lasting friendship.

However, this friendship takes its biggest challenge when Hannah flies off to Scotland for 6 weeks for her job. In her absence, Tom suddenly realizes that he has stronger feelings for her than realized. He decides to tell her when she returns, but upon her return she presents him with a fiance. To add salt to the wound, Hannah asks Tom to be her maid of honor. Her fiance, interestingly, starred in an episode of Grey's Anatomy. I this makes me wonder which came first, the chicken or the fiance?

Tom is now stricken with the fatalistic decision - help her get married and be the best maid of honor and let her be happy, or tell her his true feelings and hope to stop the marriage. I think you know where this is going.

This is a common formula for romantic comedies. Guy likes girl. Girl likes guy. Girl gets tired of waiting for guy. Girl finds another guy. First guy must now win back girl. Works like a charm.

This movie is wrought with predictability. It does have some good humor, but it does lack part of the necessary formula for a guy-appealing romantic comedy - it lacks hot girls. Michelle Monoghan is cute, but in an average girl kind of way, but not to the point where I feel partially in love with her (at least in love with her character).

This 2008 movie is 100 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for some sexual content, language, and a fat girl. I give this movie 3 stars. It's okay. It's entertaining, but not one that I'd be clamoring to see again.

Enchanted

Another movie for my daughter. You would think that with all of these pre-teen kid movies I was trying to win favor with my daughter. Not the case. She ignores me anyway.

Enchanted is a Disney movie that mixes animation with reality. The characters from the cartoon are swept into New York City and Prince Edward must find Princess Giselle. Princess Giselle meets up with Patrick Dempsey and his daughter. In typical Disney style, it's another father-led family with no mother. Think about it:

Beauty and the Beast
The Little Mermaid
Alladin
Mulan
The Goofy Movie
Tarzan
Finding Nemo
Pocahontas

Sometimes they are referred to as the Dead Mothers Club or Disney's Absent Mothers Club. Anyway, Patrick Dempsey does not have a wife, but does have a girlfriend, which you can probably predict presents an uncomfortable situation when he decides to help Princess Giselle.

Susan Sarandon plays the evil mother of Prince Edward and at one point in the movie appears as the witch from Snow White. I had always wondered what Susan Sarandon looked like without makeup.

The movie is narrated by Julie Andrews and also stars Amy Adams as Princess Giselle, and I pretty actress that I predict my daughter will look like when she gets older, James Marsden as Prince Edward, and Timothy Spall, who many nerds will recognize as Wormtail from the Harry Potter series.

Again, in the end, good prevails and evil fails. The movie is an hour and a half and is well paced. It kept my kids' interest throughout. Being another kid movie, I let my kids decide to rate this one. They have it 5 stars (are you surprised?) I was told that it was not as good as Nancy Drew, but better than Bee Movie. If the movie makes my kids happy, then it makes me happy.