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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The tireless Ben Stiller is like a kid acting in a show at summer camp, cutting up for his relatives and friends. This boy-man wants the camera. Once he gets its attention, he hesitates and stumbles, playing out for us the eternal war between his ambitions and his good-guy restraints. In his male-ingenue roles (including the hapless Greg Focker in the current smash hit "Meet the Fockers," a sequel to "Meet the Parents"), lust and the danger of humiliation tangle him up. His eyes may suggest outrage, but his character is that of a sweet, caring, rather simple-natured fellow who, like some baffled knight, has to undergo the most awful trials as he pursues his goal--a tall, slender blonde. In "There's Something About Mary" (1998), his first chasing-the-blonde movie, he's so jittery he catches his genitals in a zipper, and, later in the picture, a little dog attacks his crotch. Robert De Niro keeps bursting in on Stiller and his girl in "Meet the Parents" as they are about to make love, and, in the sequel, it's only Stiller's parents, the older Fockers--Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand, as tanned love babies--who make out. Stiller has bulges he can't do anything with. He's a walking mass of libido, and frustration is his lot.
A contender in so many of his roles, Stiller is the latest, and crudest, version of the urban Jewish male on...
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