Matthew McConaughey

Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew McConaughey in Failure to Launch
Photo curtesy of http://www.allmoviephoto.com/photo/2006_failure_to_launch_002.html

Happy 42^nd birthday to Matthew McConaughey.  This week I picked McConaughey's movie Failure to Launch from 2006.  This movie is about Tripp (McConaughey) who doesn't want to move out of his parents's house (played by Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw).  So his rents hire Paula (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) to pretend to be Tripp's girlfriend in order to boost his confidence and get him to move out of their house.  Bradley Cooper, Justin Bartha, and Zooey Deschanel also star in this movie.

On with the movie.  I'm going to be honest, I didn't really have high hopes for this movie.  I feel that having very low expectations for this movie, made it a decent and funny movie.  I know that the combination of McConaughey and SJP doesn't sound like a very promising pairing, but I guess it was ok...  I don't know that I would have chose them to star together, but then again I'm not the casting director.  I would like to know what the casting director was thinking when putting them together...  McConaughey is playing his normal outdoorsy type guy, so there really isn't much acting involved.  I believe that there is only two scenes where McConaughey has his shirt off.  With McConaughey playing himself, I can't really bash him that much on his acting.  And with that, I raise my lighter to light the candles on Matthew's cake.

I give this movie 2 cakes out of 5.  The 2 cakes is based on going into knowing it is a bad movie, also the dead pan humor of Zooey Deschanel and the good looks of Bradley Cooper.  If those things were not a factor, this would easily be a 1 cake or even ½ a cake...