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Tacky romantic non-four-star movies
Nov. 24th, 2014 11:17 pmI recently watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Knocked Up, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. If memory serves, I added these to my Netflix queue after an episode of At the Movies discussed them as a new genre: romantic comedies that were supposed to appeal to men as well as women. That was several years ago, and my memory of why these were recommended is blurry; it takes quite a while for things to percolate to the top of the queue.
What they all have in common is irresponsible men, a certain amount of gross-out humor, and lots and lots of F-bombs.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall is rather like the worst parts of L.A. Story. I love that movie, except for the part where the two couples are at the same resort and trying to be civilized to each other. This movie is mostly like that, plus full frontal male nudity, and not in a particularly good way. My favorite bit was where the self-absorbed rock star gives sex-ed lessons to the newlywed guy.
Knocked Up is about two people who should never have had unprotected sex dealing with the consequences. Amazingly, the guy takes responsibility and grows up enough to deal with everything -- contrary to everything we've seen about him heretofore.
I think I enjoyed The 40-Year-Old Virgin the most of the bunch. This may be in part because the main character of The 40-Year-Old Virgin is not in fact irresponsible. Most SF fans would recognize him: he has a job that he's good at and an outside life full of video games, collector action figures, and exercise. He doesn't seek romance; he had a few discouraging experiences in his teens, and just gave up on the entire thing. The event that changes his life is an after-work poker game where he wants to be one of the guys, and gives away the fact that his experience with women is pretty nonexistent by describing breasts as "bags of sand." His co-workers, mostly younger than him, take it as their life's mission to remedy this situation, while generally making things worse. In the meantime, he pursues a slow-but-steady relationship with a woman who works across the street from him. Conveniently, they are clearly made for each other, and after a few bumps along the way, they marry and he discovers that sex-with-love is a fine thing, even though casual sex was a failure every time he'd tried it.
What they all have in common is irresponsible men, a certain amount of gross-out humor, and lots and lots of F-bombs.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall is rather like the worst parts of L.A. Story. I love that movie, except for the part where the two couples are at the same resort and trying to be civilized to each other. This movie is mostly like that, plus full frontal male nudity, and not in a particularly good way. My favorite bit was where the self-absorbed rock star gives sex-ed lessons to the newlywed guy.
Knocked Up is about two people who should never have had unprotected sex dealing with the consequences. Amazingly, the guy takes responsibility and grows up enough to deal with everything -- contrary to everything we've seen about him heretofore.
I think I enjoyed The 40-Year-Old Virgin the most of the bunch. This may be in part because the main character of The 40-Year-Old Virgin is not in fact irresponsible. Most SF fans would recognize him: he has a job that he's good at and an outside life full of video games, collector action figures, and exercise. He doesn't seek romance; he had a few discouraging experiences in his teens, and just gave up on the entire thing. The event that changes his life is an after-work poker game where he wants to be one of the guys, and gives away the fact that his experience with women is pretty nonexistent by describing breasts as "bags of sand." His co-workers, mostly younger than him, take it as their life's mission to remedy this situation, while generally making things worse. In the meantime, he pursues a slow-but-steady relationship with a woman who works across the street from him. Conveniently, they are clearly made for each other, and after a few bumps along the way, they marry and he discovers that sex-with-love is a fine thing, even though casual sex was a failure every time he'd tried it.
