August (Web-only) 2003

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What do American Weddingand Masked and Anonymous have in common? Both films are getting bad reviews and both are in some way related to Bob Dylan. Masked stars the legendary singer-songwriter, who also co-wrote the movie. Film Forum covered the negative reviews of the film last week.

This week, Bob's son Jesse Dylan, a director, delivers a movie that has drawn even worse reviews—the third installment in the crass American Pie series.

This popular comedy series has been a hit with adolescents (young and old) across America, so another sequel was sadly inevitable. But instead of improving a bad thing, the situation just gets worse.

Critics argue that anything admirable about what the movie has to say about love and marriage gets lost under the tide of locker room humor. Stars Jason Biggs, Eugene Levy, and the gang seem content to wallow in the muck of shock-value "comedy" that, being the norm of the series, is hardly shocking.

Michael Medved says, "Writer-producer Adam Herz might have connected to any number of issues and emotions: the mixed feelings of parents at their early-twenties offspring making a fateful decision, the sense of abandonment by free-spirited friends at one of their number tying the knot, the inevitable worries of an already nervous young man about building his career as a married man, or over the very notion of kinky, uninhibited sex as the sole basis for a lifetime commitment. Unfortunately, this new movie explores none of these potentially intriguing areas and instead expends its feeble energy on predictably 'shocking' gags."

Anne Navarro (Catholic News Service) says it "scrapes the bottom of the proverbial barrel for laughs, and what it comes up with is much of the same gunk found in the first two American ...