• What’s Good:Galifianakis
• What’s Not: Masturbating a baby is not funny. Just kidding, it’s hilarious!

As funny as it sounds/As funny as it looks/As funny as it isI still didn’t really go crazy with this one. I admire the hell out of it however and that’s something I rarely do with popular comedies. The tone is just right (edgy, not to soft yet not too mean) and the premise (“After Hours,” meet “Dude Where’s My Car”) is clearly on to something with audiences looking for something beat off, er, off beat. Because, really, all “The Hangover” is  is a no bull shit adult comedy, which, considering all the other shit we’ve been fed (JUDD APPATOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), this shit smells pretty good. Director Todd Phillips says that most comedies are 40% bad behavior and 60% apologizing for bad behavior. Examples of this are from the above director Apatow, whose great-ish films (“40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up”) are ruined by second half back peddling and of course “Wedding Crashers,” a film where the crashing stops and pussification starts about twenty minutes into the film. What allows for bad behavior here is that the characters don’t remember doing it (hence the title) in the past and don’t realize they’re doing it in the present and this ”Memento” like daze gives the film a truly unique comedic angle that other comedies just don’t have.

There is no apologizing here. Babies (and babes) will get abused and racial slurs will go flying without so much as a second guess as to if it’s funny. It is! But the film is not out to shock like so many post “Pie” comedies. There is also an endless supply of strangely quoteable dialogue with random lines like “Tigers lover pepper, they hate cinnamon” and “It would be so cool if I could breast feed” spoken by man child Zach Galifianakis. So, yeah, I admire it and yet my Hangover was a mostly passive experience with a constant thought of “hum, that there’s really funny” occurring without so much as cracking a teehee. I am proud to say that I, along with a lot of moviegoers, knew this was going to be something special for months but somehow that didn’t translate into rushing out to see it. From months before to a full month after “THE EVENT” –and after everybody told me this film is exactly as good as I figured it would be– I saw it and of course felt like I had already seen it and already liked it. The effect, contrived as it seems, is that of having seen something really cool while under the influence and forgetting you saw it only to see it again and go “Oh, yeah–that.”

Grade: B