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Like Greek tragedy, gross-out comedies rely on inevitability. You see the dog turd placed in the truffle wrapper and you know what’s going to happen, but you laugh anyway. Directed by Jesse Dylan (Bob’s son!), American Wedding is crude, offensive, gross, and stupid. I laughed from beginning to end. What would Aristotle say? Actually, Aristotle does get a mention in this, the third in the American Pie series, along with Voltaire and Scylla and Charybdis, but as one bookish character says, we’re tired of that intellectual stuff. So we move from sex with baked goods in episode one to sex with Superglue in episode two to having sex with octogenarians in wheelchairs here. We’re all getting a little older, I guess, even Jason Biggs, whose Jim Levenstein is making an honest flutist of Alyson Hannigan’s Michelle Flaherty. And, of course, it’s the kind of movie where when someone says this is the happiest moment of his life, his trousers are around his ankles, so you can see that’s no lie. But whereas the previous two films focused on the sexual humiliation of Jim, this one concerns more the taming of the Stifler. Played by Seann William Scott, who’s a kind of sawed-off Jim Carrey, this horny, foul-mouthed embodiment of adolescent id has to be subdued before the wedding can proceed. He doesn’t go quietly, and the battle is a reminder that sentimentality can turn into scatology at the drop of a pair of pants. (95 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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