Is the whole setup for "Why" they had to get married. The rest of the movie did (and does now) seem rather lame to me, but I just wanted to know how it all started.

And - a paperwork glitch? Really? That's - the dumbest reason either. I'd have bought that Larry is divorced and fighting for custody, and he's got the day shift and Chuck the night shift so someone can be home for the children, and Chuck needs a place to sleep. Maybe it's some weird inheritance thing that Larry only gets if he's married.

But - a paperwork glitch so stupid that a guy can't change his beneficiaries on his pension? What?

Well, that ruins any reason for me to even watch the first 10 minutes of the movie now. Guess that'll leave me more time for SiCKO and Potter....

Last year, the conservatives got their white sheets in a bunch over "Brokeback Mountain", a movie that showed gays the way they would like them to be shown, rejects of society treated like perverts by the outside world and one of them was killed for his "lifestyle choice". Here is a movie dealing directly with the issue of gay marraige (featuring Adam Sandler, a registered republican, if I'm not mistaken) and I haven't heard any outrage yet from any of the have-nothing-better-to-do-then-obsess-on-other-people's-sex-lives crowd.

I don't know if that is considered progress or if they just don't think the movie will do very well, but it does seem rather odd they wouldn't throw at least one protest outside the premier.

I wonder if this is part of the "cultural sea" that Mitt Romney wants to protect our children from! LOL!

Why are macho dudes the only homophobes Zacharek ever mentions? Isn't anyone not hit as hard by "faggot" as she is by "kike" just another one of the yobbos in the crowd?

For an amazingly incisive analysis of how Zacharek's review of Brokeback Mountain revealed her real feelings about homosexuality, read this article:

http://web.mac.com/robert_fuller/iWeb/Writing/Brokeback.html

To reply to an earlier poster about the paperwork glitch: it sounds only too real. I sat next to a guy who got married and didn't get his new wife on his insurance immediately. My boss had to harangue the insurance agency for months to allow him to get his wife on his policy because he had missed the narrow window that they allowed. Benefits are often governed by idiosycratic and illogical rules. Yay capitalism!

"the admittedly magnificent breasts of . . . Jessica Biel."

I couldn't agree more.

It's INCREDIBLE.

Seeing others, on-screen, as three-dimensional, real people rather than one-dimensional cartoons is preferable, right?. However, if motion pictures such as "I Now Pronounce..." manage to achieve even a few hits among the many misses, that is progress, right?

I understand the film-maker's dilemma: produce a socially-conscious motion picture that makes the case for tolerence and the Conservatives will howl and boycott the film. Make a farce that enforces stereotypes and progressives will howl and boycott the film. Basically, they're in a no-win situation.

However, any progress in film-making on the issue of same-sex marriage can be the camel's nose under the tent; hopefully, the rest of the camel will follow shortly.

Right?

They're suppose to be gay. I bet every second is a joke about them not really being gay. Is it? Is it about the madcap fun they have not really being gay? I especially like the trailer where their lawyer strips in front of them because, you know that's plausible. What with them being gay and all.

This film is a direct rip-off of Paul Hogan's latest movie called Strange Bedfellows in which two straight guys pretend to be gay so they can get domestic partner benefits. I guess the Aussie producers of that film are hopping mad that Sandler et al. ripped off their movie according to press reports from Down Under.

"I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" works hard at not being offensive.

The very premise is offensive. Two straight guys marry to create a legal loophole. This plays right into the right-wing talking point that if people of the same sex are allowed to marry, all sorts of couples will be marrying not for love, but as an end-run around contracts, to receive worker benefits they wouldn't otherwise be entitled to, to rip off insurance companies, etc.

I don't care how close these guys are, or how enlightened they are to issues facing gay people. Two straight guys getting married for convenience belittles the pain and discrimination of gay people's love not being recognized by the state, the society, and the legal system.

I am not interested in spending my money to see this thing, but I do want to know how it ends. Because in any traditional screwball comedy, the couple who are forced together by circumstance always end up falling in love (for instnace, "It Happened One Night").

My hunch from the ads (and just from who the actors are) is that they solve the pension problem some other way and go back to being friends. And that's the betrayal. If straight couples can move from bantering friction to true romance in 90 minutes of witty social commentary, why can't gay couples do the same?

If I am reading Ms. Zacharek's review correctly, "Chuck and Larry" is a boring, unfunny movie (most movies with Adam Sandler ARE, after all) with lame jokes and unbelievable characters and situations -- but that's OK because the film promotes the politically correct affirmation of gay marriage.

So now films can be poorly written and comedies completely without laughs, as long as they promote "correct social values". Ouch! This from a film critic? That's pathetic. I'd expect it from a dreary gay studies professor at a left-wing university, but a film critic is supposed to tell you if a MOVIE IS ANY GOOD. Not if the movie is "good for you".

If Right Wing Christian Conservatives have not got their panties in a twist over this lame comedy, is it possibly because it's simply not any good, and that hardly anyone will watch it (besides die-hard Sandler fans, and who can explain THEM?), and it won't have the slightest influence on any national debate over gay marriage? Because it's stupid and unfunny? Hmmm. Just wondering.

The idea that you should watch bad movies because they promote "correct social values" sounds so awfully Soviet and totalitarian. They don't even crank this stuff out in the Russian Republic or PRC anymore.

If the concept of gay marriage has merit, and wide public support (debatable), then would we have to be force-fed loud, laugh-free, PC harangues about it?

I am not offering this as a critique of the actual film, which I have not seen, but of Ms. Zacharek's review, which is pitiful and which Salon should have been too embarrassed to print. A dishonest film critic with a political agenda, who recommends bad films because they advance a political cause that she supports, is worse than having no film critic at all.