Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Farrelly Brothers' love story about conjoined twins, May 2, 2004
"Stuck On You" is a movie where half of the funniest parts are in the trailer. But as is almost always the case in a Farrelly Brothers comedy, you come for the outrageous comedy and then get a healthy helping of heart because underneath all the "hair gel" and fat suits these guys are trying to make love stories. The Farrelly Brothers might be two of the biggest romantics making movies today. This is not one of their best films, but it does have its moments.In case you somehow missed the trailer "Stuck On You" is about Bo (Matt Damon) and Walter (Greg Kinnear) are a conjoined twins, what someone indelicately calls Siamese twins in the film despite the fact that the boys are American. The fundamental gag here is that they being joined together like this makes them twice as good as anybody else. You might be able to outrun a one legged man, but these guys have four legs so forget about it. They run a burger joint at Martha's Vineyard, work crossword puzzles together, and play goalie for their amateur team. About the only thing they do not do together is that Walter likes to act while Bo, who gets stage fright, has been e-mailing a girl in California for three years. Walt wants to be an actor and talks Bo into heading for California, where people are not as accommodating towards the strange pair as they are back in Massachusetts. Once again the Farrelly Brothers are dealing with a subject that would not be considered politically correct, but after dealing with other personal afflictions and handicaps in their earlier films, this is hardly a surprise. But they have such affection for their characters that you end up thinking that there is something wrong with people who do not find this humor funny. Bo and Walter do not consider themselves handicapped and they are so proficient at everything they do it is hard to fault them for their sense of self-assuredness. The funniest bits in this film, as the trailer indicated, are when the boys play sports. Baseball, football, hockey, or boxing, you do not want to mess with these boys, and when Walter wants to be an actor the stars align so that he gets to co-star with Cher in a television series. The joke actually ends up being on Cher, who thought that acting with a conjoined twin would get her out of her contract. Meanwhile, Bo finally gets to meet his online pen pal, May (Wen Yann Shih), but he is too shy to tell her that there is a reason Walter is always there on his left. Helping the boys keep their secret is April (Eva Mendes), who knows how things work in Southern California and who takes one look at the bridge of flesh joining the brothers and wants to know where they got it done. But eventually the truth comes out and the boys are seriously considering having the surgery that will allow them to live separate lives. Of course, we already know that not even surgery can really separate these two. Cher is not the only Oscar winning actress who shows she is a good sport in this film, because Meryl Streep is also along for the ride. As is usually the case in a Farrelly Brothers film, they work in people they have met who are not stars like Jack Nicholson. This time around it is Ray "Rocket" Valliere, a mentally challenged friend of the brothers who plays a waiter in the burger joint. Be sure to watch the credits where he thanks everybody for getting to make film. Critics keep wanting to take the Farrellys to task for making jokes about handicapped people, but they are never making fun of them and in the end "Stuck On You" is just another one of their love stories.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Greg Kinnear's version of "Summertime', February 9, 2005
Apparently a lot of people are talking about the version of 'Summertime' that Greg Kinnear sings at the end of the movie. There is a discussion about this on musicsearch.com and a Google search on '"Stuck On You" AND Summertime AND Greg Kinnear' turns up several references. According to the extras on the DVD, Greg Kinnear DOES sing, although he's probably lip synching to his own studio version. The song is a pretty close rendition of Billy Stewart's version of 'Summertime' by George Gershwin from his musical 'Porgy & Bess'. Awesome rendition!
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Surprisingly Funny & Touching, May 3, 2004
The Farrelly brothers must be going soft in their middle age. Despite the fact that they've never replicated the near-perfection of "Kingpin" and "There's Something About Mary", they don't seem to mind. Their last two films, "Shallow Hal" and now "Stuck On You", both deal with issues of family, love, and what we consider "wierd" in a person in honest and occasionally touching ways. "Stuck on You", however is much better than "Shallow Hal".The film is about two conjoined twins, Walt(Greg Kinnear) and Bob(Matt Damon), who live in Martha's Vineyard where everyone sees them as normal. They are conjoined at the waist, sharing a liver. They could have been sperated with Walt being perfectly normal, but Walt would only of had a 50/50 chance at living. Bob refused to let his brother take that chance. They run a burger joint in town, and while Bob is the athelete, Walt is an aspiring actor. Bob can't act and suffers from panic attacks. What's great about this setup is that everyone knows Bob and Walt and knows that they're perfectly normal. They're sensitive about being called "freaks" of course, but they are fiercely independent. Walt, however, has a dream of being a real actor, and since they promised each other they would never hold the other back, they head to Hollywood to look for fame. Obviously, things don't come easy for the pair, and the film followd their various failures. They have an agent who last worked in real Hollywood perhaps 30 years ago, hilariously played by Seymoure Cassell. The first job he gets them is on a porn film. Then, after a run-in with Cher, who wants out of a TV deal she has to make, Walt gets a break as her costar in "Honey and the Beaze". Walt really is a good actor, and as usual the brothers charm everyone they meet, and the show is a surprise hit, which infuriates Cher. The film is buoyed by the inherent humanity in all of the characters. Hardly any one of them is portrayed in a put-down way. Eva Mendes plays a silcone filled wannabe actress, and while she's kinda dumb, she's also sweet and never used by the Faralley's in the ovbious way other directors would. Bob is in love with May, an internet sweerheart who doesn't know about his attachment to his brother. She is played with some skill by Wen Yann Shih, and she strikes the perfect balance needed in the twisted world of teh Faralleys. Walt and Bob are also very real. They're human, they love each other, they just happen to share a liver. The acting from Damon and Kinnear here is absurd. The previews for this film seem to imply the two are dumb, which they aren't. They're about as complex a pair that you'd find in a screwball comedy. The Faralley's have come a long way from the out and out grossness of "Dumb & Dumber" which was just a gross-out comedy. After a rocky start in "Shallow Hal", they've successfully transitioned from full gross-out humor to a more PG-13 sensibility. While sometimes their message of accepting those different from us is pounded a little to hard, "Stuck on You" manages to be both very funny and touching at the same time. All this from the guys who gave us the zipper scene in "Something About Mary". What range. I never would have guessed. "Stuck on You" is mightily enterianing, endearing, and hilarious.
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