Tag Archives: Feminism

Wednesday Review: Sucker Punch

Posted on April 6, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Geoff:
Have studios just given up on telling a good story? Do screenwriters see all the CGI and whiz-bang going across the screen and just no longer care? I wish I could be there for the conversations studio execs and filmmakers had about Sucker Punch and other effects-driven films like it because for the life of me I can’t conceive what sort of narrative merit they might attribute to them. It creates films that are neither distinctive in story nor even distinctive in the way they tell a familiar story, which I could also have fun with and enjoy.

Sucker Punch itself is structured less with a plot and more with a bulleted list, but here’s the rundown: The film starts out with a confusingly shot/edited/acted scene in which (apparently) the female lead (Emily Browning) shoots her younger sister while trying to take out her abusive stepfather (I think? None of this is confirmed through dialogue because the whole scene’s cut to music–in fact, probably nine-tenths of the film are cut to music) who was waiting for the mother of the main character and her sister to die so that he could inherit her money. Enraged over the attempted murder and after being left out of the mother’s will, the stepfather sends the main character to an all-female mental asylum, where the guy who at first seems to be the caretaker (Oscar Isaac) finally at least gives the main character a moniker: Baby Doll (an appropriately and creepily infantile name because bleached, pig-tailed Emily Browning really pretty much does look and sound like a borderline minor made of porcelain). Just as she’s about to be lobotomized, Baby Doll lapses into some kind of fantasy version of the asylum in which it’s actually a gentleman’s club where the confined women are now confined dancers (as if this would somehow be preferable to anyone but someone looking to be titillated by the situation), and here we meet the other women: sisters Rocket (Jena Malone) and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), the ironically brown-haired Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), and Amber (Jamie Chung), who for some reason gets a regular name. Within this fantasy, the seeming caretaker is the vicious club manager, and the asylum’s psychologist (Carla Gugino, whom I normally love, but who here gets shit to do) is a kindly but obedient trainer for the dancers, so the girl’s scheme to make an escape, which plan they come to thanks to Babydoll’s steampunk battle fantasies that she goes into while dancing some sort of amazing trance-dance (that we never see, probably because it would only look lame by comparison to the reactions from other characters). In these fantasies within the main fantasy, some guy who’s supposed to seem wise tells Babydoll she’ll need a map, fire, a knife, a key, and … wait for it … a mystery item to escape. The wise man actually just says, “It’s a mystery.” The writers don’t even try to be coy or offer any intrigue by having him say something like, “You’ll know it when you see it.” The dancers thus set about getting these items one by one while defeating monsters and defusing bombs in the steampunk fantasy scenes that really have pretty much no dramatic tension except ever so slightly for the procurement of the knife.

Do you know some of the dancers will die? Yes. Does it feel perfunctory when they do? Yes. Will the mystery item be found? Yes. Will it feel perfunctory and lame when it is? Dear God, yes. I know we’re trying to not give away the endings here so much these days, but it, too, feels perfunctory despite a surprise cameo by Jon Hamm. The film is just an autopilot protostory with neat effects and lots of scantily clad women. It’s clearly catering to a specific audience but I feel like even the 14-to-34-year-old male crowd might lose interest with this one.

Susan:
THIS IS FASCINATING.  I actually found myself leaving the theater COMPLETELY AMBIVALENT.  I assumed you would love the thing, since you suggested we watch it, and I could talk about how terrible it was.  BUT YOU THOUGHT IT WAS TERRIBLE!!  Now I don’t know what to do, because I’m way too ambivalent to argue that is was unequivocally good.

In the spirit of the film, let’s do some moral algebra via bulleted lists.

Pros:
–The action sequences were pretty good, except for when the CGI was bad.
–The layered plot was actually more interesting than the plot I expected going into it.  True, none of the layers really made sense, and the reasons for there being layers were never really explained, but the movie also didn’t seem to want me to care.  I feel like the movie intended to be a live-action video game, and so I can’t really fault it for being just that.
–Jon Hamm.  I mean, not to abuse the sandwich-eating thing, but seriously, give the man a sandwich and I will buy my ticket.

Cons:
–It is exhausting as a real live woman living in the world to watch any film where the female characters are under the constant threat of sexual violence.  The movie kept doing this thing where the club boss dude would say threatening things, and you would think maybe they were about murder, but then you would realize they were about rape or sexual assault or something.  And then at the end you find out that duder’s been raping the girls at the nuthouse the whole time or something.  And also at the beginning Baby Doll gets almost raped and then her sister gets almost raped (or maybe raped? It’s unclear), and at some point you just think, Jesus.  This is walking a fine line between sad story about oppressed girls and rape-porn. I mean, if there is even a line between those two things.
–The movie said that BabyDoll was 20 but she’s wearing little girl pajamas and her sister is like 6 so…what?  Let’s stop blurring the line between women and girls, what say.
–ALL THE GIRLS WERE CRYING ALL THE FUCKING TIME.  It was like Country Strong, where we are asked to believe that we are looking at really powerful, strong female characters, but they are just crying every time anything happens.  Sometimes when it’s appropriate, but sometimes just like…because.  I don’t know.  Yes, strong women can cry, as can men, but I didn’t like the oscillation between kicking everyone’s ass all over the place in dream world and crying their eyes out backstage in the OTHER dream world.  Also Vanessa Hudgens: Go away.

So I mean, I thought it was a fun movie to watch, but I also couldn’t decide whether I should hate it or not.  I think overall I probably should have.  But it’s a movie, and I want to give it a little extra space anyway.

The hemming and hawing continues after the cut…

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Sunday Review: The Switch

Posted on August 30, 2010 by | Leave a comment

Geoff:
At least a month before The Switch came out, I was already pretty tired of it. Oversold (with a thirty-second preview making its way into seemingly every commercial break and also into any number of pre-video commercial slots on Hulu), played up even more in the media once Bill O’Reilly began railing against the intentional single-parenting of the female lead, the movie itself became an afterthought by the time I went to see it. Despite the media fatigue though, the film managed to charm me.

You might know the basics from previews, but here’s the plot: Wally (Jason Bateman) is a pessimistic nice guy (yeah, it’s possible) who wears sweaters and who’s become dear friends with his ex-girlfriend, Kassie (Jennifer Aniston), who meets him for lunch one day to declare that she’s going to have a baby by herself. Wally immediately thinks this is a bad idea, mostly likely because it’ll make it harder for him to try to win her back (his blatant over-protectiveness might be one of the most annoying aspects of the film), but she goes through with it, finding herself the high-quality, athletic seed of a married donor dad named Roland. Depressed, Wally gets blackout drunk at the insemination party, inadvertently finds the medical cup containing Roland’s stuff, and ends up replacing it with his own. (There’s a pretty good Diane Sawyer joke here that’s carried through the rest of the movie). Fast forward seven years, and Roland’s divorced and on the market, and Wally only begins to remember what he might have done when he meets Kassie’s son, Sebastian, and notices similarities.

The film has its moments and take-away messages that make you narrow your eyes, including the fact that Kassie seems to plan only for a boy and not a girl and the fact that she and Wally get happily married in the end despite his pretty hefty and invasive transgression. But at the same time there are so many smaller things to enjoy, including Sebastian’s picture frame collection and his sponsorship of canine kill shelters on his birthdays and every scene stolen by Jeff Goldblum as Wally’s thrice-divorced friend and the look on Juliette Lewis’ (she plays Kassie’s lewd friend) face when she enters the room after everyone’s learned of Wally’s actions. There were enough small, inspired chuckles to even out the irksome bits, and I wound up pretty content by the roll of the credits.

Susan:
I will see your content and raise you a really pleased.  Maybe because I don’t have cable or maybe because I just don’t pay attention, I had not heard almost anything about this film before seeing it.  When Sebastian is first introduced, I remembered that I had seen a trailer for it long ago, but I didn’t remember much about the plot.  All I knew was that the movie starred the love of my life Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston, whom I still root for, despite the fact that the media wants to paint her as some kind of insane person.

My lack of exposure to the film’s content before seeing it might account for our difference in opinion here, but man, I really really liked this flick.  Outside of the last line of the movie (“I’m beginning to think this human race isn’t actually a race at all” or some such bullshit — VOMIT, amiriteladies?), I thought it was honest, well-executed, and well-acted.  It had just enough predictable rom-com tripe to settle me in without exposing me to so much that I felt like I’d seen the movie before.  Batemen and Aniston are both consummate actors, and the boy who played young Sebastian reminded me of a Jerry-Maguire-era Lipnicki.  DID YOU KNOW SHARKS DON’T HAVE BONES??

Mostly though, it was just NICE.  It was funny enough and edgy enough and didn’t try to be anything it wasn’t.  Despite the potentially political nature of the single-mom plot-line, the movie doesn’t grandstand or make statements about things.  Kassie’s choice is presented as a fact, as something that happened and is, and Bateman’s reaction to that choice isn’t based on the politics of motherhood but rather on his personal feelings and neuroses.  Even the switching of the sperm, which seemed like a preposterous conceit when I first read summaries of the film, reads as pretty darn believable in the context of the movie.  Do people really have conception parties?  I don’t know, but if they did and your ex-boyfriend got too drunk at yours and started playing with the donor sperm, he totally might drop it and have to replace it with his own due to some sort of drunken logic in which he would never be found out that way.  I bought it.  (Though to be fair, I think I am likely to believe anything Jason Bateman says/does when he loosening the button on his slim-fit corduroy pants.)

I guess what I’m saying is I didn’t find my eyes narrowing much at all.  I was pleasantly surprised at how NOT cheesy and GENUINELY ENJOYABLE this movie was.  But I dunno, maybe I was just in the right kind of mood for a weird, matinee love-story.

The niceness continues after the cut…

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Tuesday Review: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Posted on June 30, 2009 by | 9 Comments

Geoff:
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen starts about two years after the original film, the Autobots now secretly helping the U.S. government to eradicate the world of Decepticon bots.  At the same time, Sam (Shia LeBeouf) is going off to college in New England and leaving behind his girlfriend Makaela (Megan Fox) to look ridiculously out of place in a mechanic’s shop.  They’re having a little trouble saying “I love you” to each other, which provides fodder for a lot of annoying scenes later in the movie.  Before Sam leaves home, though, he glances at a shard from the Allspark (that box they blew up in the first film) that got left in his shirt, and it fills his head with a bunch of knowledge vital to the survival of the Decepticons, who have been plotting the past two years to unleash a giant weapon hidden inside one of the Giza pyramids, a weapon powerful enough to destroy our sun and provide the Decepticons with lots of much needed energy.  Numerous battles between the Autobots and the Decepticons take place, and many of them are very cool and well shot, but the last scene takes for absolute fucking ever to finish, and there are so many gaping plot holes and moments of blatant racism that you’re mostly in disbelief by the time that final battle actually rolls around.  To name a few of the major holes:

Sam and his team wake up an old robot in the National Air and Space Museum, and then the robot and Sam step outside the building to find themselves in … some airplane graveyard surrounded by mountains?  Huh?  How did they get there?  They were just in Washington, D.C.!  It’s never explained.  Also, Sam finds out during his second encounter with an extremely forward and attractive college freshman that she is in fact (shocker!) an evil robot, this after Sam’s car, Bumblebee, sprayed her with fluid the first time they were together and she ended up leaving in an angry huff.  But, wait … so then if she was a robot the whole time, then why didn’t she just suck the knowledge out of his brain the first time they were together, whether she was covered in fluid or not?

I haven’t even gotten to the racism yet, which mostly manifests itself in the form of twin, gold-teeth-endowed Autobots who can’t read and have “black” accents. (Editor’s Note: Embrace the Mediocre realizes that this description of the bots is also kind of offensive but seriously there is no good way to describe how they talk because OMG Michael Bay is a total racist or something.)  Every time they were on the screen, I was almost awed by the size of Michael Bay’s balls and/or presumption.  This was written by the same guys who did Star Trek!  How did this happen?

Susan!  I am really tired of not liking movies we see, and maybe the problem is me.  When I left the theater with my friend, Andrew, we were both surprised to find everyone around us talking about how awesome the film was.  I wish I could say I felt the same.  I really wanted to have fun with this one, but I think Michael Bay got in the way.

Susan:
Geoff, let me tell you.  I thought this movie was kind of AWESOME.

Yes, it was racist.  Really, offensively, oh-my-god-did-they-seriously-just-make-the-blackface-robots-illiterate racist.  Not to mention the fact that his Latino roommate is a money grubbing, good-for-nothing coward.

It was also sexist.  Megan Fox, after seeing my boyfriend (that’s not a typo) Shia almost get killed by robots says, “I love you. I NEED you. Please come back to me,” or some such drivel.  I dunno, for me personally, when my boyfriend who won’t say he loves me drags me into battle with space robots for a second time, I think I might end it.  Especially if I was as hot as Megan Fox.  You can do better, sweetie.  You don’t need him.  He is totally messing up your game by giving you shards of space debris and what not.  I would talk here about the other women in the film but there really…weren’t any.  Except the evil whore and Shia’s harpy mother.  So moving on.

BUT I can’t help but like the sort of old school epic-ness of the thing.  This movie didn’t have nearly as much of that sort of pride-swelling, Optimus Prime-talk stuff as the first one did.  You know, the kind of stuff that makes you feel like you are 8 years old and sort of might support the war in Iraq?  (Except then you leave the theater and you realize that the war in Iraq is not being fought by space robots.)  Regardless, the AWESOME factor in this thing was pretty high.  What can I say?  I’m a sucker for lens flare and slow motion robot fights.  Jar Jar Binks-bots aside.

The amicable disagreement continues after the cut…

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Wednesday Review: The Proposal

Posted on June 24, 2009 by | 2 Comments

The-Proposal-Poster-upcoming-movies-2792808-500-746Susan:
The Proposal, starring Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds, and Ryan Reynolds’ four-foot torso, is an incredibly disappointing romantic comedy that reads like Taming of the Shrew but without all the messy this-is-why-these-people-like-each-other stuff. The plot is fairly familiar: Bullock is a mean boss and Reynolds her hardworking but under-appreciated assistant. When the government threatens to deport Bullock, a Canadian, because of problems with her visa application, she offers Reynolds a promotion in exchange for his hand in marriage so that she can stay in the country. To avoid charges of fraud, the two head to Alaska to meet Reynolds’ family and to prepare for their immigration interview. Hijinks of various types ensue, the couple sings “It Takes Two” (the dance club one, not the soft rock one) together before bed one night, Bullock calls off the wedding, and Reynolds chases her back to New York to declare his love for her. Pretty standard-fare rom-com business. The trouble is that you never really start caring about these people in any way, and you certainly never believe they care about each other.

Now, granted, I hate both Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds (Remember Two Guys, A Girl, and A Pizza Place? What happened to you, Ryan? Where did you go?) so my feeling that these two didn’t care about each other may have been informed by the fact that I don’t know how anyone could love either of these two people. That having been said, there’s also no reason given by the film that they should fall in love. Bullock never really softens and Reynolds never really seems less than self-centered and career-driven. I don’t know if this was an acting problem or a writing problem, but either way, I give this movie a big, “OMG, seriously?? Whatever.”

Geoff:
Susan might boil me alive for saying this, but there were moments (scant moments, but they were there) when I did not hate Bullock and Reynolds on the screen together, when a few of the lines delivered actually did make me smirk. These came mostly towards the beginning when the two were engaged in banter, when Reynolds would deliver lines such as “it’s like Christmas in a cup.” I’m embarrassed to admit this because the movie on the whole is so terrible.

Now, I try and look for the redeeming things in a film because I don’t like just plain hating a movie if I can avoid it, but as this film moved forward I encountered scenes that were unredeemably unfunny. An unrealistic-looking hawk tries to take the family dog. An unidentifiably-foreign-accented male stripper/caterer/shop owner/priest keeps appearing everywhere in the small Alaskan town, is incredibly annoying in a number of ways, and yet is, for some reason, loved by every resident. The scene that takes the cake, though, is Sandra Bullock going out for some fresh air and running into grandma in the woods. What’s grandma doing? Why, standing before a fire and chanting and dancing in full indigenous garb, of course. And she invites Bullock to join her, and Bullock starts chanting the lyrics to “Get Low” by Lil’ Jon, and then she starts dancing as if she were in a club, and … man, I almost can’t describe adequately just how embarrassing the scene is for both Betty White and Sandra Bullock as actors. It’s the sort of scene I can’t even imagine could have seemed funny on paper.

For the film’s entire second half, I was mostly just shaking my head with each scene as the plot moved forward. Dad hates his son enough to fly the INS agent up from NYC? The INS agent has enough free time to fly up from NYC? Bullock stops the wedding, but Reynolds decides he loves her anyway? There’s a bare minimum of logic behind each character’s actions, and I would need to suspend every sort of belief possible before I could begin to accept the ending that’s given, and I would need to get to know the characters a lot better before I could begin to care.

The annoyance continues after the cut …

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Saturday Review: Terminator Salvation

Posted on May 30, 2009 by | 1 Comment

Geoff:
So, it’s finally here.  For over a year now, Warner Brothers has been leaking teaser trailers and bits of gossip about the new Terminator film, Terminator Salvation, starring Christian Bale as John Connor and set for the first time in the post-apocalyptic future the past three films (and poor TV series) only ever offered glimpses of.  The idea seemed very cool.  The fact that they grabbed Christian Bale from the new Batman franchise made it seem cool.  Even the quick shots of John Connor in the ruined future made the film look cool.  So maybe it’s the fact that it seemed and looked so cool that resulted in my being disappointed.

The plot of the film is uncomplicated.  Basically, in 2003 a death row prisoner named Marcus Wright gives his body over to Cyberdyne Systems, the corporation that eventually gives rise to the A.I. system, Skynet, that decides the human race is a threat to its existence that must be taken over.  Flash forward to John Connnor and the resistance in 2018, who blow up a Skynet compound from which Marcus Wright, arises, virtually unscathed.  Why is this?  Because he’s been upgraded by Skynet into a cyborg, built to infiltrate Connor’s camp and lead Connor into a trap where both he and Kyle Reese will be killed, thus preventing Connor from ordering Reese to go back in time to become Connor’s father.

Now, we’ve been hearing about this post-apocalyptic landscape for three films and a TV series, about the human labor camps guarded by machines and the guerilla-style human resistance lead by Connor, but the world in this film just seems … wrong.  The labor camps aren’t here, and the robots make things way to easy for the humans.  If the machines are capable of hearing explosions and sensing motion miles away, then how are hundreds of humans moving about in whole airplane hanger bays without getting attacked?  Also, how are the humans still using airplanes?  Wouldn’t the robots protect all fuel supplies almost immediately?  I liked the resistance’s submarine HQ, and I was with the film through the introduction of Kyle Reese, fighting scrappily and creatively alongside one little kid (a lame, trite detail), the two of them composing the human resistance’s entire Los Angeles division.  But then they follow Marcus Wright back to a larger human headquarters where people are just moving about and curvy women fly the combat jets.  And I haven’t even gotten to the film’s end, where Skynet enables exactly one copy of its new Terminator model to destroy Connor and Reese, this instead of, say, enabling all the fucking machines on the assembly line.

I came away from this film a lot like I came away from Wolverine, or T3: Rise of the Machines, basically feeling like there was a whole lot of promise and intrigue that the film was too lazy to capitalize on.  I wanted to see humans on the edge of extinction, forced to design plans of grand ingenuity.  Instead, the smartest computer in the world turns out to be very stupid.

Susan:
Oh Geoff, you’re no fun.

This movie didn’t have the awesome factor of a Fast and Furious (which has somehow become the action film against which all others are judged for me), but it was still pretty awesome.  Especially when no one was talking.  While I see your point about the movie having a lot of promise that it didn’t fulfill, it’s nice to see Christian Bale looking like a tool for once, especially after his recent run of success.  I think he was getting cocky.  And Hollywood sayeth, “Ye shall maketh a crappy sequel.”  And it was good.

I would say the best moment of the movie actually came at the end of the opening credits when, with a swell of music, the words, “Directed by McG” appear on the screen.  OMG this was directed by the guy who did The OC?  I like TOTALZ love that show.  (Clearly, McG gravitates toward over-the-top drama and poorly written material.)  But seriously, I forgot McG was even a thing I was supposed to get excited about.  Is this 2004?  Why didn’t anyone tell me?  Since when is McG still a banner name?  Maybe I’m just out of the loop.

But the dramatic moments in the film were definitely OC-ly broad.  See Moon Bloodgood as Blair falling in love with the cyborg Marcus after he saves her from some dudes.  So as a post-apocalyptic fighter pilot, this woman still falls head over heels the minute someone helps her out of a jam?  I won’t get into the patently offensive suggestion that in a world where there are like 6 humans left women are still more interested in finding a husband than, I don’t know, SAVING THE HUMAN RACE.  I’ll just say that the falling-for-you line delivered by Blair to Marcus — “I don’t meet many nice guys anymore” — was completely ridiculous and would have been hilariously awesome if it hadn’t been for the Blair character being such a vapid, useless waste of screen time.  Another deliciously stupid dramatic moment comes when John Connor (Bale) and Marcus almost KISS when Marcus is discovered at a cyborg.  “We’ve been fighting since before either one of us even existed … AND I THINK I LOVE YOU.”  Cue smooth jazz saxophone.  But the best over-the-top moment of course comes when John Connor refuses to attack Skynet headquarters, screaming for what seems like five minutes at the captain over the phone.  I have full faith in Christian Bale’s abilities as an actor (See American Psycho and The Machinist.  No, seriously, see them.  They are really good.) but there is only so much you can do with this kind of stupid, thoughtless dramatic material.  You make choices as an actor, and he chose to just yell a lot.  Probably because he was pissed he had to even say this stupid crap.  Way to use it for your art, Christian.

I would say that the tension between the “Oh my god, this is awesome” action sequences and the “Oh my god, what the hell are they talking about?” dramatic sequences was the most disorienting and confusing aspect of this movie for me.  I suppose my feelings for this movie are like the feelings Blair had for Marcus:  I want to love this thing but I can’t quite figure out what it is.

The conversation continues after the cut…

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Wednesday Review: Observe and Report

Posted on April 16, 2009 by | 3 Comments

Geoff:observe-and-report-0225a
Right in the middle of Observe and Report, a police officer hides in a closet at a police station while Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta) tells Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) that he has failed the psychological test to join the police force.  The officer in hiding emerges about halfway through the scene, explaining “I thought this would be funny, but it’s actually really sad.”

This pretty much summarizes the film for me.  Rogen plays Ronnie, a thick-headed, hapless head of mall security with a self-inflated delusion of his own importance and stature as some sort of officer of the peace.  A flasher in the mall’s parking lot exposes himself to Brandi (Anna Faris), the mall and plot’s token fair maiden, and Ronnie and his team set about doing absolutely nothing while believing they’re doing everything.  Liotta steps in as the real police detective, who equally does nothing, and then the plot devolves into a sequence of episodes involving Ronnie’s failure in every possible facet of his life.  He cares for a mother who can’t spend time outside a bottle of alcohol, he fails to join the police academy, he fails to recognize his second-in-command is stealing from the mall, he loses his job, and he date rapes Brandi after taking her to dinner because he’s somehow too stupid to realize she’s unconscious and drunk.

Oh, and did I mention that he has bipolar disorder?  That if you wanted, you could probably argue that the filmmakers are using his mental disorder to account for his failures and stupidities?  That you could maybe even extend this argument to an examination of the fillmmakers themselves and how they view mental disorder?

There’s not one major character to like and/or cheer for in this film, and aside from individual moments (not even whole scenes, but just moments, occasional lines), almost all of what’s supposed to be funny ends up either poorly timed, poorly edited, poorly thought out, or honestly sad.  This was supposed to be a comedy, right?

Susan:
Geoff, you are speaking my language today.

I also wanted to cite the “It’s not funny, it’s sad” scene because I too left the theater feeling more depressed than laugh-y.  Hey, Jody Hill (director, also did Foot Fist Way), if I wanted to watch someone’s life fall apart, I would call my ex-boyfriend and see if he wanted to get back together.  You can’t separate a handful of funny lines with heartbreaking scenes of failure and delusion that aren’t over-the-top enough to be funny, because that business is depressing.

You know, I pride myself on being the kind of woman who can enjoy a dude movie with the best of them (see my review of Fast and Furious).  Harold and Kumar?  I’m in.  The films of Kevin Smith?  Sure, I’ll watch those.  But I got the feeling watching this film that no one involved in the writing or production of this film had ever even met a woman.  Like they hadn’t even brushed up against a woman on the subway.  Like they didn’t even have a mom or something.  I don’t know how else to explain a film that consistently mocks sexual assault (and I’m not even talking about the date rape scene yet — flashing is also pretty hugely violating) and in a Hemingway-esque move only provides three female characters:  a drunk, a drunk/slut, and a pure of heart born-again virgin.  Guess who Seth Rogen gets to keep at the end??  Hello, virgin/whore complex!  Speaking of mental disorder.

What I’m saying here is that the most obnoxious thing about this film for me wasn’t its terrible, plotless script (a series of events alone does not a plot make, Mr. Hill), its lack of funny content, or general dearth of interesting anything.  What I hated about this movie was that I like dude stuff and can put up with (and even enjoy) a LOT of misogyny in my art, but this movie made me feel uneasy and kind of offended at a number of points.  This asshole of a movie isn’t laughing WITH its characters, and it’s certainly not good enough to be allowed to laugh AT anyone.

The bash-fest continues after the jump…

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