It makes me happy that a movie like Stealth is turning out to be such a flop while a movie like Wedding Crashers is raking in the dough.

Neither is particularly original, but, let’s be honest, movies generally aren’t so much about originality as they are about telling a familiar story in a new and entertaining way. Stealth just looks like a mutant mash-up of every Frankenstein-meets-military technology movie to come down the pike with a heavy dose of the Top Gun bravado thrown in for spice. And I’m willing to bet that people are staying away for one simple reason: we’re willing to accept the familiar (Armageddon wasn’t original, but it was damned sure fun) as long as it isn’t, brutally put, lame.

The first time I saw the trailer for Stealth, I found myself wondering why the military didn’t just wait for the damned, evil, rogue artificially intelligent machine to run out of gas. Sure enough, as soon as the thought started forming in my head, someone in the theater whispered the very same thing loudly enough for everyone to hear. There was much snickering.

Fact is, the movie might have invented some very good reasons for its conceits, but the premise is just lame. Might as well have thrown up a big sign saying, “It’s Big! It’s Dumb! But Summer Audiences are Too Stupid to Notice!”

For these reasons, I’m glad it’s failing.

Wedding Crashers, on the other hand, is a worthy success.

Through the first two-thirds of the movie, it is riotously funny, horribly crass, and even a little bit ridiculous. Even better, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson have great screen chemistry for a buddy movie. It is quite possible that I will never see a funnier (or more realistic) non-drunken “I love you” scene between two guys in my life. And if that last third drags a little, ending as predictably as you could imagine, then at least we get to see Will Ferrell in a role that had to be played by Will Ferrell.

In Wedding Crashers, we get a movie that both revels in its badness and, yet, finds a way to steer itself toward reasonably moral ground--quite a trick. As for the Purple Heart controversy--well, suffice it to say that I didn’t see anything particularly offensive about it.

And, most importantly, Wedding Crashers brings back what used to be a staple of Summer Hollywood comedy fare: gratuitous nudity. It used to be that when a kid went to see raunchy comedies, they were damned near guaranteed at least one gratuitous glance of breasts. Airplane! had them. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (thank you, Lord) had them.

Recently, though, the comedy had grown raunchier and the gratuitous nudity had grown far less reliable. Wedding Crashers revives the tradition with gusto, and let’s hope that more movies follow suit.