Row M Seat 30 Meet the Fockers

Interesting David Dale article from the Herald....
My take is that the angst driven humour of the excellent 'Meet the Parents' gives way to a warmth and farce which Aussies who've been through the experience can still relate to...
The lead characters are in the hands of accomplished actors. Robert De Niro's humiliation and ageing alongside Babs Streisands warm kookiness are good fun!!
I just laughed a lot... and that was only last week at Sydney's Openair Cinema with the vista of the Bridge and Opera House in the background at Mrs Macquarie's Chair.

The Tribal Mind By David DaleFebruary 23, 2005
smh.com.au
This was supposed to be a month of adult sophistication in the cinemas of Australia, when the kidflicks of summer gave way to the Oscar nominees of autumn.
But Australians are not showing much enthusiasm for doomed boxers, jailed abortionists, manic-depressive entrepreneurs, blocked playwrights, and wanky wine buffs. They persist in revisiting a slapstick sex comedy in which three icons of the cinema have a gorgeous time humiliating each other and themselves.
With takings of $34 million, Meet the Fockers has just become the 12th biggest moneymaking movie of all time in this country, passing such box office behemoths as Attack of the Clones, Matrix Reloaded and Jurassic Park.
It's a monument to the power of word-of-mouth. And evidence that, for the moment, Australians would rather laugh than think.
The movie distributors thought Fockers would be fleeting fun for a January without blockbusters. The eyebrows shot up when it was still around in late February with $13 million more than its predecessor, Meet the Parents, and $7 million more than the anointed summer kidflick, The Incredibles.
Apparently a lot of adults were taking their children. Some might have been taken aback to hear Ben Stiller deliver this speech about his fiancee: "I still masturbate to Pam. What? She's hot. Check out those boobs. I could take a vacation in there." Nevertheless they recommended it to their friends.
What does it say about us when Fockers does better here than in any other country? That we are more relaxed with humour based on sex? That we love how screen legends Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro don't take themselves seriously? That we identify with the problem of parents who embarrass their grown-up children? Sociologists could learn more about Australians by studying our Focker-fetish than from a thousand attitude surveys.