Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 6:6	Budget Big

It is not often that I actually watch a film that is so carefully put together as this one. Good Luck Chuck follows a very carefully laid out formula. Most of the dialog is throwaway mile-a-minute ab lib jokes which makes is pretty easy to find the important plot points. We have the standard setup for a combination buddy/chick flick; the cool but sensitive guy who is looking for true love, the incredibly hot chick love interest and the obnoxious girl-hungry best friend. Tom Hanks liked this formula so much that he did two of them in 1984, "Splash" and "Bachelor Party". Also because this is the unrated DVD version, the producers followed the formula of releasing the R rated version to the theaters and then putting the edited bits back in and releasing an unrated DVD. Wedding Crashers followed these same formulas very successfully.

Our story starts with some adolescents playing spin the bottle, we are quickly introduced to Charlie and Stu. Charlie ends up in the make out closet with the Goth Girl. It turns out that Goth Girl has a crush on Charlie but Charlie has a crush on Birthday Girl and reacts badly to Goth Girl's advances. In one of the movie's funniest bits, Goth Girl takes off her shirt to reveal a black leather bullet training bra. This is a chancy bit of humor, any time you put pre-teens on screen in sexual situations you risk all kinds of backlash, but it shows that the producers decided to not play it safe even if they are following a formula. Anyway, after her advances are spurned, she curses Charlie that he will never find true love, that the women he dates will find true love after him.

We next see Charlie having sex on the beach with Carol, who he manages to insult and piss off to the point that she breaks up with him. They meet up again at the wedding of another of Charlie's ex-girlfriends who calls Charlie her "lucky charm" noting that she was not the only girl who found true love after dating Charlie. We also are introduced to Cam (Jessica Alba). As Cam walks into the movie in slow motion with her hair blowing in the wind, she collides with a waiter sending drinks flying. Charlie is immediately attracted to her but can't get her to go out with him. After a few more women mention Charlie is a lucky charm, Stu talks him into taking advantage of the situation and having sex with a lot of women just for the fun of it. During the sex montage we see his partners get less and less interested in Chuck as a person and more as a service. Naturally as Chuck realizes this, he grows dissatisfied with the casual sex and seeks out Cam. During their initial verbal sparring two important things are said. Chuck notes that penguins are clumsy on land but graceful in their element (water) and Cam mentions that penguin males bring a pebble to woe potential mates.

During their first three dates Cam proves to be very dangerous to herself and people around her. In quick secession she chips a tooth, locks her keys in her car, accidentally sends dental instruments flying into Chuck's back, nearly electrocutes Chuck and walks into a pole. Clearly she is very ungraceful (hint, hint). Soon she decides to take a chance and falls in love with Chuck at which point, she becomes much less accident prone and graceful (yes, she is now in her element). Just in case you don't get this at the time, the last scene in the movie shows the newly-married couple watching a sunset in Antarctica. When Cam slips a little bit on the ice, Chuck casually helps her keep her balance. Chuck on the other hand becomes fearful that the curse will cause her to leave him for another man, and he becomes a stalker, however, when he realizes how badly he is behaving and being sure he has lost her, he backs off and tries to let her go. Of course, after the usually living like a bum, drinking and playing video games alone scene, Stu and his new (possibly his first) girlfriend tell Chuck to snap out of it. He eventually catches up with Cam at the airport and gives her a ring box with (surprise) a pebble in it.

The film is broken up into three segments. In the first segment the comedy is largely provided by Cam's pratfalls. The second part is situational comedy provided by Chuck's sexual escapades and his slow understanding of how the women were treating him much like he treated the past women in his life. Chuck always liked the women he dated, but always looked past them to the next girl. The third segment is fueled by Chuck's frantic efforts to keep Cam from leaving. Good editing and a fast pace keeps this from being disjointed.

Like most of my favorite movies, this one treats all the characters with respect. The ex-girlfriends all feel friendly towards Chuck. None of them are portrayed as bad, evil or even mean. When Chuck tracks down the now grown up Goth Girl, she is all smiles and after the visit releases him from his curse so that he can finally find love. I really liked that the movie let the ex-girlfriends call the curse a lucky charm and did not make a huge deal out of it. There are several examples of things looking different from different sides such as Charlie's relationships with women. It was nice to see that they felt the audience would get the reference without having to have one of the characters point it out.

Jessica Alba is incredibly cute throughout the movie and manages to spend a lot of time nude without showing her naughty bits. At first I was a little put off by her acting, but as the movie went on and her character got less flighty so did her acting and the earlier overacting made sense.

I am not sure what was taken out of the movie to get the R rating. In general you can talk about sex and swear all you want in an R rated movie and the nudity and sex were not terribly graphic or intense, it was mostly played for laughs, but then the ratings board really does not have much of a sense of humor. I don't need to detail here the ludicrous and inconsistent way that ratings are applied to movies. How a movie that is loaded with violence and death could be rated PG-13 but a movie with exposed breasts gets an R rating and genitalia warrants an NC-17 has been discussed all over the web and I have little new to add to the debate. I do, however, hope that as newspapers, radio and TV stop being the main homes for movie advertising, that unrated or NC-17 ratings will not mean as much lost revenue to filmmakers. I certainly don't object to the idea that there are children's movies, adolescent's movie and adult's movies, but movies for adults should not have restrictions. Just as I understand when I go to see a kid's movie, I will be watching pabulum, I also understand that movies intended for an adult audience could have pretty graphic sex or violence.

Despite the fact that the film is really formula and cliche filled, there are enough crude jokes and funny situations to make this worth seeing. The Aristocrats is a movie about a dirty joke that comedians have been telling each other for years. They all try to put their own vulgar spin on the joke and even though the punch line is always the same, people laugh. Good Luck Chuck is like that joke, we know how everything is going to play out, but we still enjoy the ride.

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