My Idiot Brother (movie)

Well, I find the trailer pretty offensive. Actor Paul Rudd plays the Idiot Brother, apparently, a bearded guy in this thirties who has apparently never grown up. (One of the scenes shown is him holding a fruit juice box between his legs and pressing it so he looks like he's urinating - and he's doing this in front of a couple of grown ups and a kid.

Rudd plays Ned, a stoner who has frizzled his neurons to the point that he has lost any ability to detect or dish out B.S. The poster child for what it means to be ingenuous, Ned is a trusting, playful, adorable stray puppy who isn't quite housebroken. So you-know-what hits the fan when his three sisters serially take him in after his release from jail. He's nothing but tsuris. It's no wonder that his most enduring relationship is with his dog, Willie Nelson.

Thanks to Rudd's everyman persona and the genial obliviousness he brings to Ned, you can't help but feel empathy. As with a suspense film where the audience knows what's going to happen but the characters are still in the dark, you want to yell out to warn Ned before he screws up again. His perfect comic timing and the made-to-order script make sure you get the most laughs from his predicament. Luckily, there's more to him than just bad luck. He's also an endearing white angel on the shoulders of his sisters, helping them fight their devils as he becomes an unwitting catalyst for change.

The old cliche...this seems to be an update of "Being There" with Peter Sellers, where the innocent teaches the knowledgeable all about life and love.

Only in this case, the "Idiot Brother" is an idiot not because he was born that way and can't help it, but because he's a "stoner" - someone who has done drugs for so long that their brain is frazzled.

In real life such a man (or woman) would be dead in a ditch somewhere - in Hollywoodlalaland, he goes about changing everyone else's lives for the better.

As usual, a very bad role model for anyone.

I can not help but be reminded of an actor named Jan-Michael Vincent. Forty years or so ago, I saw him as a very young, handsome, very buff man in a Disney movie, Nanu, King of the Jungle or some similar title.

Thirty years later, I saw him on some "What Happened to Them" show. His face was haggard and drawn...he could barely speak, he could barely walk. Apparently all throughout his series Airwolf (which I never watched) he was an alcoholic. He drank so much that he fried his brain.

And the contrast.... from what he had been to what he now was (now being the 80s), it was enough, I would have thought, to make anyone who saw what happened to him, give up drinking, or drugging.

But of course, drug and drink abuse is worse now than its ever been.