Parents' Guide to Meet the Fockers

Audiences who laugh at this movie are probably laughing more because they want to find it funny than because they actually do. The movie reprises many jokes from the first movie as well of some of its own. There is a slight but viable joke in the very beginning of the movie, when Greg has to leave a voicemail for his parents and ends up waiting through their incompetent answering machine recording, not realizing that they had not turned it off so including some very personal material. But within the next 15 minutes, the joke is repeated two more times. That still leaves time for plenty of attention to Greg's mother Roz, a sex therapist. But most of all, this is about how Greg, instead of being embarrassed about his fears of his own inadequacy, he is embarrassed about the external representation of those fears -- his parents.

Everyone tries hard. They all but climb down out of the screen. Hoffman kisses everyone, sits on the toilet while DeNiro is in the shower, moonwalks, and spreads whipped cream over Streisand's breasts. DeNiro wears a prosthetic breast called a "man-ary gland." It doesn't have whipped cream, but it does have breast milk pumped through it so his grandchild will feel that his mother is nursing him. Blythe Danner asks Streisand for sex tips. And Stiller has to stand before a trophy wall that displays his 9th place ribbons, his bar mitzvah tallit, and his high school jock strap.