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Originally Posted by sprynkles
What sort of nasty tthings did GQ say about VV?
I don't know why, but that cracks me up!
GQ March 2008
the critic
STAND-UP GUY
TOM CARSON examines the magnetic, generation squandered comedic talent of Vince Vaughn
Stand-Up Guy
SO 'FRED CLAUS' SUCKED, AND HIS NEW DOCUMENTARY IS A CLUNKER. BUT DID YOU SEE 'INTO THE WILD'? IT'S CLEARER THAN EVER WHO'S THE ANTIDOTE TO THE AIRLESS ACTING AND PRECIOUS HA-HA ACTS CLUTTERING UP OUR MULTIPLEXES: VINCE VAUGHN, AMERICA'S FAVORITE ANGRY CLOWN
By Tom Carson Illustration by Zohar Lazar
BACK IN 1996, a lot of people came out of Doug Liman's Swingers convinced they'd just seen the second coming of Marlon Brando. But once he'd wowed us with his cocksure magnetism as the hepcat foil to Jon Favreau's horny Charlie Brown, Vince Vaughn turned out to have a simpler mission in life, not that he or we caught on until Old School made him a hero to recovering bachelors nationwide. Ever since, we've been counting on him to make us look good at our worst.
With his tank-turret swagger and insinuating gift of gab, Vaughn is a prime example of how chowderheaded comedies like Dodgeball and Talladega Nights, not dramas, are where American-guy-dom mainlines its unreconstructed daydreams nowadays. We don't have Paul Newman to teach us blue-eyed Zen cool, but that's all right—we've got Owen Wilson. If you miss Lee Marvin projecting male id, meet Lee's harmless idiot nephew: Will Ferrell. Because he's the rarest kind of laugh-getter— a virile one—Vaughn is the most engaging cartoon of the bunch.
As an actor, he has definite limitations. In parts where he can't use his humor, he's as miserable as Fred Flintstone in a tux. What he's got instead is an instinct for guy's-guy pathology at its most outrageous that lets him get away with scenes nobody else could play as well. Any Juilliard grad can make "To be or not to be" sound like the Bard's pajamas. Only Vince could have pulled off the confessional monologue in Wedding Crashers that ends with a smooch gratefully planted on Henry Gibson's startled kisser.
At this stage of his career, though, costar Owen Wilson's most plaintive line in the same flick—"We're not that young"—has started to reverberate in ways that must make him jittery. Middle age has a way of draining the charm from the testosterone-fueled high jinks he's an ace at, and while he's still a couple of years shy of 40, he's all too visibly no spring chicken.
He isn't so dumb that he doesn't know this, which is the good news. Still, his recent bids to retool his image have been on the fumbling side. Even though The Break-Up made money, I have a hard time imagining it left anyone craving more of Vaughn as a romantic lead. As for Fred Claus, the less said the better, making it slightly worrisome that his upcoming project is something called Four Christmases, opposite Reese Witherspoon—and what sounds like commercial slumming on her end amounts to going bourgeois on his. Oh well: We always knew he couldn't stay Vince Vaughn forever. His problem is that so far, he's having lousy luck transforming himself into anything else.
HIS CURRENT MOVIE isn't likely to do a lot for his rep, not only because it isn't much of a movie but because it isn't especially new. The record of a 2005 tour Vaughn mounted and emceed to promote a quartet of stand-up comics whose main qualification seems to be their awe of Vince, the unwieldily titled Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights—Hollywood to the Heartland spent two years in limbo after Harvey Weinstein first bought and then dumped it. Coming out now, this ramshackle busman's holiday looks even more like an excessive estimate of his own charisma from a dude whose grip on cool is getting a little butterfingered.
Unless you've got a high tolerance for postadolescent dickhead routines, the comedians—Bret Ernst, John Caparulo, Sebastian Maniscalco, and Ahmed Ahmed— aren't the most stellar company. What gets Vince all sentimental is their struggle to make it, reminding him of his own low-rent days. Yet he doesn't seem to understand he's turning these poor bozos into stooges for his vanity—like they're going to complain, right?—and the pretense that he's just one of the guys, not the big dog who's footing the bill, is pretty painful.
Vaughn also can't stop reminding the tour's audiences who he is, something they presumably knew going in if they were rash enough to buy tickets. Oddest of all is the appearance at the Hollywood kickoff by Vaughn's old pal Jon Favreau for some baffling onstage banter that includes Vince insisting that he, not Favreau, wrote his own part in Swingers: "I wrote it in my head." Then Justin Long gets dragooned into performing a scene from the script in Vince's place, presumably to demonstrate Vaughn did it better—um, it was tailored to his personality—as the crowd titters in bewilderment. Favreau plays along, but his genially quizzical eyes seem to be asking the only sane question: What in hell are you thinking?
IF THAT CLUMSY self-advertisement betrays Vaughn's suspicion that Trent Walker in Swingers will always be his signature role, he's probably not wrong. Still the best movie he's done, it's also the most influential—affecting a whole male generation's social style, with homages ranging from Entourage to beer commercials—and he owns every frame he's in. Since so few of us had seen him before, it's understandable if we thought we were watching a brilliant performance, not an acute screen distillation of how Vaughn had been keeping himself and his buds amused for years.
But great shtick has its uses in movies—and acting virtuosity is overrated. Half a century ago, studio bosses would have known how to use a performer with Vaughn's presence and style; he'd have played wisecracking sidekicks who got killed in the last reel until the cows came home. Instead, after Swingers, he dutifully did his best to measure up—above all in the 1998 shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, one of the more peculiar projects of Gus Van Sant's career. But even if Vaughn hadn't been competing with one of the most iconic (and familiar) performances in film history, he was all wrong for Norman Bates. With his natural gregariousness—he needs companionship to energize him—he's not the actor to play an isolated introvert.
Even so, just what he could do stayed murky. Wasted in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, he was D.O.A. as the FBI agent in The Cell, even though J.Lo—Gigli aside, a better actress than she gets credit for—was giving him plenty to spark off of. He's so dependent on the right vehicle that there's something defenseless about him in a way there isn't about a shrewd custodian of his own limited gifts like Will Ferrell, who no doubt raised an eyebrow at how frantically Fred Claus tried to xerox Elf and flubbed it.
If you haven't seen Old School in a while, it's surprising how unostentatious Vaughn's contribution is. Ferrell gets all the slob routines, and Luke Wilson gets the sex romps and the romance. Yet it's Vaughn who keeps the idiot premise grounded in some sort of plausibility. Thanks to his gift for instant bonding with his male costars—he's as alert to their moods as they are oblivious to his—he makes us believe that these three could be friends. Good at small things you wouldn't necessarily expect from him, like the wearily familiar way he handles his on-screen kids, he's the one who provides the farce's rueful undertone; it's not for nothing that he spends his big scene as a family man wearing a clown outfit. The trick of his performance is that everyone else is just kidding—and he isn't, not quite.
He's even better at this in Dodgeball and especially in Wedding Crashers—in which it's his job to get saddled with most of the movie's comic indignities, freeing up Owen Wilson to bring the treacle when his character finds true love. Yet Vaughn's surrender to the cuckoo charms of the heroine's nympho kid sister has miles more appeal than Wilson's conventionally romantic discovery of his one and only. His originality is that he can generate more genuineness in shallow commercial romps than he's ever shown himself capable of in movies that require it.
One proof is that Vaughn's romance in Wedding Crashers may be as close as he's come to falling in love convincingly onscreen. He's always been terrific at playing the kind of lounge iguana that can con his barroom pals into swearing he's a hell of a ladies' man, but his charm evaporates around women. When he's unnerved, he turns bullying, and man, do actresses unnerve him. Not the least of The Break-Up's, problems was that you never believed Jennifer Aniston would have fallen for this braying slab of bacon to begin with—even though, of course, she and Vaughn were tag-teaming Brangelina in the tabs around then.
Besides producing The Break-Up, Vaughn had a hand in cooking up the story and was clearly out to woo the female audience by having the hero see the error of his macho ways. Yet something sullen and resentful kept coming through. He played scenes at a level of rage the flimsy script didn't account for, and his relief at getting back into his comfort zone when Favreau popped up in a cameo was palpable; their byplay seemed to belong in a better, definitely funnier movie. Just as bad, he also looked like shit—flabby and unappetizing—and since this was his big try for solo stardom, you had to wonder what kind of self-destructive streak was at work.
You also can't help wondering even more what'll become of him it Four Christmases doesn't turn him into the innocuous family-flick guy he's angling to be. In the right part, he's as compelling as ever; the jolt of kicka-poo joy juice he gives Sean Penn's Into the Wild is the best acting he's done in years. In that Vince Vaughn way, it doesn't look as if it took him any forethought, either—it's just unfettered, rambunctious behavior, and it's mesmerizing. There's got to be a place in Hollywood for someone who can turn on loose-cannon charm so effortlessly, and it may not be in comedy at all. If Vince can just watch his weight, don't you think he might be the ideal actor to play that old-school volcano John McCain one day? •
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Actually, I wondered the same thing, because I've never seen that before. I've read harsh criticisms about an actor's performance in a particular movie, but NEVER about their acting skills as a whole. They even talked about his weight. 
Insinuating that a lot of women wouldn't find his chubbiness attractive. lol
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