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.

When Harry Met Sally doesn’t rely on these coincidences.  The two characters involved meet three times over the course of ten years and it feels natural.  Sure, we think, they both live in New York.  It’s a big city but everyone has crossed paths with a casual acquaintance unexpectedly.  Why couldn’t it happen to them?

In How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, we are expected to believe that two people who are perfect for each other would make what amounts to conflicting bets on the same day and they would end up in the same restaurant when they were trying to pick their victims.

The movie wants us to identify with them and sympathize with them but they are both engaged in cruel head games that make it pretty hard for us to feel anything but contempt.  If the filmmakers didn’t include several shots showing us how guilty the two of them feel, we wouldn’t know we were supposed to like them at all.

Even with those scenes, I don’t like them at all.  Both of them are toying with the others emotions for the benefit of their job and they don’t give a flying fuck who they hurt.  Maybe people like that really exist.  Why would I want to watch a movie about that kind of person?  Why would I care if they hook up with one another?

Near the end of the film, the whole thing culminates in a scene so painful, I can’t even watch it.

See, they both discover how much of a jackass the other one has been at a public event and have an enormous public fight while singing a duet on stage!  Ha ha ha!

They are both so busy being angry at each other, it doesn’t occur to them that they are both complete jackasses and they freakin’ deserve each other.

The first time I watched the scene, I  tried to imagine myself writing it and thinking it was funny.  I was completely unable to do either.   Nobody watching has a horse in the race.  I don’t think ladies can identify with the woman and I hope guys can’t identify with the man.

The film reaches that point and goes from merely dislikable to contemptable.  I’m supposed to feel sorry for them?  They just got called out on their bullshit in front of a couple hundred people.  I feel sorry for the people who had to watch.  I sure as hell didn’t want to watch.

Having watched the scene once, I skipped over it when I watched it for Alphabetical movie purposes because the mere memory that the scene existed was enough for me.  I had absolutely no need to subject myself to their narcissistic rants about how much they had been wronged by the person they were screwing over.

I’m supposed to feel bad because I know that deep down they both love each other.

Which is good because I wouldn’t want them to end up with anyone else.