Vacation

I had some pretty weird celebrity crushes back when I was a kid growing up in small town Texas, and while they did include some normal ones like Denise Huxtable (Lisa Bonet') and the Cinemax queen Shannon Tweed, there were also a few weird ones like Mona from Who's the Boss and Blanche from Golden Girls.

I'm not quite sure why I wanted to bang the older horny grandmas from the 80's, maybe it's because they looked like they could make a good sweet potato pie or could whip up a tasty and refreshing pitcher of iced tea after sex, but whatever the reason, I found myself having quite a few dreams about these lovely ladies in my formative years. But to make this relevant to today's review of the movie Vacation, somewhere in between Bonet' and Blanche also lied Ellen Griswold (Beverly D'Angelo) of National Lampoon's Vacation fame.

I think it was her typical of the 80's "I've smoked too many unfiltered cigarettes" raspy voice, mixed with her strip tease in European Vacation that had me willing to put aside the fact that she had the Chevy Chase taint on her, that I'm not 100% certain of. But what I do know is that I was not at all excited to see the new sequel starring Ed Helms, mainly because it didn't star a digital version of 1980's D'Angelo in it.

Vacation follows the now grown up version of Rusty (Helms), who like his father, is an out of touch nerd who will do anything for his family. He feels as though they are in a rut and are not as close as they should be, so he decides to try and recreate the trip he and his sister took back when they were kids to Wally World.

Along the way they experience disaster after disaster yet they never give up and turn back because Rusty is determined to make this vacation work. And tensions start to run high as deep seeded family issues begin to creep up.

About 50% of the jokes are over the top gross out scenes that will have you cringing in horror but the other half are actually pretty funny because they do involve some fairly realistic situations like: finding out your spouse was really a whore in college or realizing that you're not the first ones to try and have sex on the 4 Corners Monument.

The little kid Kevin Griswold is by far the most consistently funny character in the movie and a lot of the cameos, most notably Nick Kroll and Charlie Day, help make this movie actually watchable. There's also a nice ode to the suicide scene in Rules of Attraction that not many people will get but I certainly did.

I view this movie the same way I view Ryan Reynolds' Just Friends, I liked that movie because I watched it for the first time hungover on my couch one weekend when it came on HBO 4, as opposed to paying money to see it in the theater. That way I didn't really lose anything except a few minutes of my time by watching it and I could change the channel anytime I got bored. But had I actually paid money to see it in the theater, there is no way I would have liked it nearly as much as I did. And that's how you should approach Vacation, you will appreciate it a lot more if you wait to see it on a lazy afternoon on your couch.

I rate this movie as WEAK! Also Christina Applegate is now my new weird mom crush, just saying.