Alphabetical Movie – How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
I think it would be fair to say that I don’t enjoy a single minute of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. I did laugh at one or two jokes but the total enjoyment I credit to those jokes is no more than a few seconds.
The best thing I can say about it is that I’ll bet I like Kate Hudson more in this film than I would in Bride Wars but I’m not going to watch Bride Wars to find out.
Romantic comedies are almost always built on fantastic coincidences. We accept the fact that Return to Me ivolves a guy having an relationship with the woman who has his dead wife’s heart because it is sweet and funny and we like the characters.
Alphabetical Movie – House of Wax
My dad wasn’t a big movie buff but I remember him telling me about House of Wax long before I ever saw the film.
In the early 80’s we were in the grips of a rebirth of 3D films and our local independant station, in an effort to capitalize on such box office hits as Friday the 13th 3D and the upcoming Jaws 3D, decided they were going to screen the classic 3D film Gorilla at Large. For reasons less clear to me now, I was excited by this idea.
To be fair, how could I not be with an intro like this one?
Right?
“Cabin the Woods” vs. Bad Taste
Really America?
I’ve been waiting for Cabin in the Woods to come out for months just so I could finally talk about the film with people who have seen it. As much as I enjoyed The Hunger Games, I figured this was the week it fell out of the number one spot, replaced by one terrifically inventive horror film.
Alphabetical Movie – House of Flying Daggers
I know that it is unusual for me to spend an entire Alphabetical Movie blog entry talking about the movie that I watched, but I’m going to do it for House of Flying Daggers. Specifically, I’m going to write about one scene because I appreciate the cinematic language of that scene. If you, for some reason, care about spoilers for a film released in 2004, don’t go below the fold.
What’s in a last name?
Last week, I wrote about how the ending of Hot Tub Time Machine creeped me out. This week, I’ll write about why the ending pisses me off – and it has nothing with time travel paradoxes. Rather, it has everything to do with the misogynistic notion that everything is better because of how one guy’s last name changed.
A trend in movies lately is to explore the emasculation of men in modern society. In Hot Tub Time Machine, this emasculation is shown in several ways but none more heinous than the fact that Craig Robinson’s character (Nick) has a hyphenated last name!!
Alphabetical Movie – Hotel Rwanda
Hotel Rwanda is a mercifully sanitized account of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. I say mercifully because I can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch as many as a million men, women and children hacked to death with machetes. After some amount of time, things would start to get a little bleak.
In all the talk about how Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot were atheists, you would think that all of the senseless killing in the 20th century was perpetrated by atheists. We are the scourge of the planet, mercilessly wiping out those who would oppose us by believing in god.
Alphabetical Movie – Hot Tub Time Machine
The ending of Hot Tub Time Machine creeps the fuck out of me.
Hang on, you ask, isn’t that a wacky comedy about how some guys travel back in time to the 80’s so they can relive their mis-spent youth and possibly learn some valuable life lessons?
Yeah.
So how is that creepy?
Well, my friend, let me tell you (spoilers a-comin’):
Alphabetical Movie – Hot Shots!
With the benefit of hindsight, I can’t help but watch Hot Shots! and wonder when Charlie Sheen began his inevitable slide into Charlie Sheenness.
Here you have a kid who folks thought should have been nonminated for a freakin’ Oscar for Platoon and he turned into the best punchline for celebrity gone horribly awry since Lindsay Lohan. Even while Robert Downey, Jr. gets to celebrate a career pulled from the ashes of his own addiction, Sheen seems committed to find new ways to embarass himself.
Alphabetical Movie – Hot Fuzz
What is the difference between movies like Hot Fuzz and Young Frankenstein and the Scary Movie franchise? Aside from the fact that ten years from now, those two films will still be funny and the Scary Movie films still won’t?
I mean, the Scary Movie films come from what I would consider to be a great pedigree of screwball comedies like Airplane, Hot Shots and Top Secret. Yet they are – and I’m sorry if you like those movies – absolutely horrible. They fail at satire, they fail at comedy, they fail at titilation. Their only success is that they can be made so cheaply that they make money in spite of themselves.
Alphabetical Movie – Home Fries
The reason I own Home Fries has nothing to do with how much I enjoy the film. The first time I watched it, I enjoyed it a lot. Subsequent viewings have not been so kind.
One thing about the film does hold up and it’s the reason I keep it around. I own this film because of Catherine O’Hara.
Grail Diary 