i will tell you what happened at -my- theatre, full of young folks apparently on dates and so forth, packed to the gills, in flyover America.<br /><br />people laughed. there were some very funny moments in this movie. i did not know there was a 'butter of the month club'. this is a line that could be found in any of the ben stiller, or Judd apatow, or will Ferrel, or Seinfeld or Larry David shows. and here, i find it just as funny.<br /><br />Kate Hudson does a very good job of playing her role, and this whole 'overeating' thing is a perfect example... in the theatre i was in, it worked, the audience did, in fact, laugh out loud.<br /><br />Anne Hathaway is a great movie star, because she can play the buddy thing... i mean to say that she is not trying to take over the movie, even though she could, and i loved that.<br /><br />people will say she is 'wasting' herself playing these types of movies. well, maybe she should go shoot people or blow things up and make big bucks, but maybe she doesn't want to. the parts she is playing are very hard to do well, she brings so much to them. it is hard to play this ordinary life stuff.<br /><br />the characters around the main are good as well. i especially liked the devious little assistant to Kate Hudson's character, he played that perfectly and it was written well, and got a good number of laughs for his antics. the crazy school colleague had several good lines, talking about "i do so much for you". very funny. and unusual. i liked seeing this type of psychology in a movie role because we all know people who act like that sometimes, but you don't see a lot of it in the movies.<br /><br />why do people, then, hate this movie so much? well, i personally found the ending rather unsatisfying... it 'shocked' me out of my "suspension of disbelief"... i didn't see how things could be so 'resolved' after 10 years of courtship, to dump it all out in a few minutes. it seemed a little silly to me. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but the way it was written did not hit home with me, the way the rest of the movie did.<br /><br />i can only surmise that people who hated it, found the entire thing to be what i found the last minute or two to be... a little bit too trite and neatly wrapped up.<br /><br />but, i am willing to let all that slide... because at the core of the movie is a good story about relationships... which is what all movies are really, even Star Wars. OK, i don't know about Hostel because i didn't see it. but Im just saying, this movie might look superficial but it is not really.<br /><br />i know they talk about dress designers and shoes and crap like that, but to some people, that stuff is the equivalent of the Rambo 'strapping on his weapons' scenes, or scenes in other movies where they go on and on about types of weaponry, or guns or techno babble on star trek episodes or whatever. or... sports. you all know the person who plays fantasy football and can go on for hours about it, well thats how these people are with weddings and everything that goes around weddings. but i think that is kind of the point..... the movie is not about weddings, its about the relationships between people.<br /><br />anyways, if you are into stuff like 27 dresses, or that movie with the t-mobile lady and the dude from 'thank you for smoking', or nanny diaries, or other stuff like that... you will probably dig it, or at least parts of it. i would even go so far as to say fans of "meet the fockers" might find something in this film worthwhile.<br /><br />now the other problem i had with the movie was envy, i envied these people with all their lifelong friendships and so forth and so on. but eventually it all breaks down and they find themselves just as lost as the rest of us... what can i say. i don't understand why people hate this movie so much, just like i don't understand why people hated the nanny diaries. oh well.