01. I heart Vince Vaughn with the vast majority of the fibres of my being, I really do.
02. I like Jennifer Aniston more than I’m willing to admit.
03. My father is fond of saying that Chicago is the second largest Polish city in the world (after Warsaw, obviously), and this movie proves him right. Vince Vaughn’s character Gary Grobowski is Polish and makes no attempt to hide it, what with his vast array of shirts emblazoned with a variety of pro-Poland slogans and such. His office at work has a gigantic Polish flag on it, and it killed us even more because there was actually a Polish eagle on it*. Even his calendar had an eagle on it. Then he threatened to invite a whole bunch of big Polish guys over as revenge on Jennifer Aniston’s character Brooke.
*When we were kids, my father used to always add a silver eagle onto the Polish flag whenever he had occasion to draw it. Naturally, we grew up believing the Polish flag actually had an eagle on it and I recall getting into an argument with a kid in my Grade 3 class when he tried to convince me that the flag was simply one red and one white horizontal stripe.
04. This movie is billed as a romantic comedy, but it’s more of a romantic tragedy. It’s not that it wasn’t funny — it was, hysterically so — it’s just that the fighting that went on was disarmingly real. We’re not entirely sure what did it, whether it was the fact that the screaming matches went on as long as they did or that the reactions were actual real life reactions or that they looked and sounded genuinely pissed, but it was unsettling. In a good way.
05. Gary’s got this skeezy younger brother named Lupus* and when Gary tells him he’s going to get arrested for being so slimy, Lupus responds “Arrested for what? Being AWESOME?!” Which was kind of awesome in and of itself.
*Is Lupus a common Polish name, or were they just having some fun?
06. Anyone who has seen Wedding Crashers will appreciate this, but the guy who played Todd made an appearance as Brooke’s lets-make-Gary-jealous date, which made his and Gary’s awkward small talk exponentially more hilarious because, of course, all you sort of wanted the date to say was “LET’S PLAY TUMMY STICKS!” I mean really. DEATH, YOU ARE MY BITCH LOVER! You tell that mean ocean!
07. Vincent D’Onofrio looked like he was going to have a heart attack throughout the entire film. Is shortness of breath a new style of acting I haven’t heard about? A character with anxiety is one thing, but come on.
08. I don’t really love romantic comedies because they usually depress the hell out of me, but luckily this one didn’t because they broke up and didn’t get back together at the end. Which is GREAT. Although their last scene together was sort of annoyingly vague because Theresa wanted to know what was in his shopping bags and I wanted to know where she had gone on her trip.
09. I have this love for Vince Vaughn playing video games in movies. So basically this one and Swingers, but their love for NHL 97 or whatever it is is pretty awesome in that movie.