Don't We, As A Society, Have A Moral Obligation To Not See THE HANGOVER PART II?

I've had invitations to go see THE HANGOVER PART II every night of this weekend, including last night's 10pm "(Try Not To Feel Ridiculous When You Say) Wolfpack" screenings (you know, the ones that made $10.4 million). Unfortunately, I was (and will be) unavoidably busy doing laundry every single one of those nights.

This poster makes me wonder if

a) I would think The Hangover was "delightfully Italian" if I saw a foreign subtitled print of it and

b) where the fuck is Tea Leoni?

It's not that I live in piles of dirty laundry, my floor littered with socks doomed to never again be matched, or that I have as few outfits as Bradley Cooper has varied acting roles (potentially fun drinking game: for every scene in a Bradley Cooper movie, decide if he is playing "charming", "asshole", or "charming asshole". Then drink whatever you feel is an appropriate measure to get you through the rest of the movie.)

No, I'm not boycotting THE HANGOVER PART II because of these once-true nightmare laundry scenarios. It's because, seriously, we have to start making a stand.

My greatest fear following the success of THE HANGOVER was that it would unleash a wave of imitators that would plunge the "stupid men" comedy genre into the type of creative stagnancy and according derision normally reserved for Katherine Heigl flicks. If I want to see a decade of comedies based on unrepentant asshole men-children, I'll just look back at the last ten years of my life, thank you very much. However, I fear that the success of THE HANGOVER has engendered something far more sinister than a bunch of movies about uninteresting, unsympathetic men who learn nothing.

I'd like to say that it just didn't speak to my sophisticated, mature tastes, but if you've ever read this blog before, you know how silly that would sound. It's tempting to say that this was a movie for bros, with the excessive drinking, hooking up, and wink-wink nudge-nudge bachelor party shenanigans. But this wasn't a movie for bros; it was for bros-to-be, 13 year-olds who were still working up the courage to steal their dad's liquor and who looked to Channing Tatum with admiring eyes.

Somehow, though, these prepubescent fucks scared up hundreds of millions of dollars and made a sequel to THE HANGOVER a bygone conclusion. How did they get this kind of money? In my day, an allowance was $1 a week, which you promptly went out and wasted on slushees and comic books. Have allowance rates gone up like the proverbial 1923 German deutschmark? Or am I just a bitter and angry old man who doesn't understand why the kids are wearing the baggy pants and thinks the iPad is some sort of woman's sanitary product?

Let's not get into that. Let's put aside my problems with the underlying concepts and ideology of THE HANGOVER franchise, and try to ignore the taste of ash in my mouth when I say the phrase "THE HANGOVER franchise". What's my real problem with THE HANGOVER PART II? It's the fact that it's called THE HANGOVER PART II.

Really, Todd Phillips? PART II? With the numerals and everything? I don't know you or anything, but who the hell do you think you are?

You know which films deserve a "Part II"? THE GODFATHER PART II. BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II. RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD - PART II (if only for the sheer ridiculousness of having the word "first" right next to the words "part two", and for steadfastly ignoring the potential of an equally-ridiculous title like RAMBO: SECOND BLOOD).

So maybe you're not the first hack to try to class up his popcorn entertainment by adding some Roman numerals to his title (hell, even Tony Scott did it). But Part II indicates that your film is the next chapter in an ongoing story, and THE HANGOVER PART II is no such thing. You are, if I may, an impliar, sir.

At least have the decency to come up with a subtitle, like last week's blatant cash grab PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES, so we can all ignore your movie in a few years and pretend like it didn't blemish whatever we might have enjoyed of the first film (thanks for that, Brothers Wachowski).

Your movie, Mr. Phillips, is a return to the cynicism of the movie business of the '80s, where the rules of the game were to franchise any movie that showed any kind of financial return. This is the reason we have such revered classics as PORKY'S II: THE NEXT DAY, CANNONBALL RUN II, and MEATBALLS PART II (a title so bad it somehow manages to make the word "meatballs" sound disgusting). Some day, your new movie will join this hall of legends, and when it does, I hope the money men who bribed you to make this movie laugh you all the way to the creative poorhouse. You don't have a larger story you want to tell, so why are you pretending you do? I guarantee you no one went into the first HANGOVER pitching it as a trilogy, and I cannot wait for the day when one of you gets in front of an EPK crew for THE HANGOVER PART III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK (with a hilarious cameo from Leonard Nimoy!) and tries to tell me that it was always meant to be a trilogy and a series of anime shorts (fuck you for that, Brothers Wachowski).

I could go on, but I can't spend all this time whining about this movie. I've got to head to the laundromat.

Why Won't THOR Tell You It's THOR?

There were several questions I had while watching THOR, Marvel's latest venture away from the printed page, but the one you see above in big bold type was the key one. Or, more specifically, what happened to THOR's title card?


THOR starts with the Paramount and Marvel Studios logos (logi? logos), but plunges us right into a cold open introducing Natalie Portman's Jane Foster (if somewhat elliptically, in what feels like a weird compromise between making a fast-paced, exciting intro about turning on your laptop and not seeing Natalie Portman's face, neither of which works and/or was a good idea to begin with) and her dream team of the sassy Kat Dennings and stellar Scandinavian Stellan Skarsgard. This is followed by a somewhat exciting TWISTER-type sequence about chasing a storm, which ends when Portman runs over a mysterious stranger and looks to the sky, asking, "where did he come from?"

BAM. Cut to black. Great pre-titles sequence, intriguing and to the point, setting up the characters and basic hook of the story. The title card "Marvel Studios and Paramount Pictures Present" comes up, and I'm starting to settle into my seat, waiting for the inevitable THOR title card, perhaps with some nice lightning effects and CG rain.

But that's where THOR switches it up on you. You're all set for the credits sequence, when the film drops you into tenth-century Norway with only the disembodied voice of Anthony Hopkins as your guide. "Huh," you're thinking, "kinda weird. I guess we're going to do the whole Norse mythology thing before we get the titles." And that's exactly what you get, complete with some pretty obvious lifts from THE LORD OF THE RINGS, which initially feels cheap and repetitive. But this is a film from Sir Kenneth Branagh, and that's when it hits you: this may be a hacky use of shots and effects from THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, but it must also be a reflexive moment, where Branagh is reminding you of that's film's epic pre-titles sequence, and asking you to cut him a little slack while he lays out his admittedly dense story.

"OK, Kenny B," you say to yourself. "I'll give you some time." So as THOR progresses, you're worrying less and less about the title. It's coming, you're sure, but it's a subconscious thing at this point, while you're asked to focus on more important things, like remembering that the Ice Giants' source of power is a kinda-silly-looking glowing blue chest that looks like Mr. Freeze's Arc of the Covenant, and that Loki is Thor's used car salesman of a brother (I bet he's the good guy).

But all of a sudden, it's thirty minutes into the film, and although you've seen an eyepatched Anthony Hopkins issue a blanket pardon for state-sponsored terrorism, Thor get his Operation Iraqi Freedom on, and a disturbing look into Stringer Bell's cosplay habits, you suddenly realize that you still haven't seen the title of the movie you're seeing.

You quell the rising panic inside of you. The title is coming. It has to be. I mean, why else would that "Marvel Studios and Paramount Pictures Present" card have been on screen twenty-five minutes ago? It just sets up an expectation about what they're presenting. They wouldn't leave us hanging like that. Would they?

Ah, wait. Thor's getting banished. It's all starting to make sense. I bet the film's gonna do one of those "here's where we started" things and then hit us with the title. That makes sense, even if it's gone on a bit long. Natalie hits him with the car, looks up, "where did he come from?" and then...

Next scene.

WHAT IS THE NAME OF YOU, MOVIE? WHAT IS IT?

Of course, I know what the name of the movie is. But why won't the movie tell me? Does the movie itself not know its name?

Things continue to play out on the screen in front of me, including an absolutely gratuitous Jeremy Renner (as Hawkeye!) cameo that adds literally nothing to the story, but I'm not even paying attention anymore. The missing title has become a splinter in my mind, a mystery that needs to be solved. The clues are bewildering, but it's the motive that has me really stumped.

It's not until the entirety of THOR's 114 minutes have played out that I finally put all the pieces together. Oh, I've finally seen the title of the movie, by the way. It was there in the credits, big and shiny and everything it should have been ninety minutes or so ago, but it didn't really click until I saw the post-credits scene.

That's where Mr. Skarsgard gets introduced to the Cosmic Cube by Samuel "the L stands for lnot even trying anymore" Jackson and Loki shows up and gets all glinty-eyed. And that's when it hit me. THOR doesn't have a pre-titles sequence because the whole movie is the pre-titles sequence. It's a tease for THE AVENGERS, through and through.

This might have been a bit harsh. I laughed several times and was genuinely entertained by quite a bit of THOR, but I'm just left wondering how they got people to pay for THE AVENGERS during it's first week of shooting. That's impressive.

Do You Need To Watch The Last 101 Minutes of Scream 4?

The short answer is, no, not really.


But SCREAM 4 is 111 minutes long, and you should absolutely see the first ten minutes of this film. That's where Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven try to bury the ghost of the reflexive horror genre they helped create, and promise a return to the scares-first type of horror that kept you awake as a child.

The reason you don't really need to see the next 101 minutes is that they never really succeed at that.

Let's back up for a moment, though. I used to find it odd that the brothers Wayans felt like SCARY MOVIE needed to exist. I mean, SCREAM was funny. It was satire. I always felt like the Wayans just pushed SCREAM a little further to the margins when they made SCARY MOVIE (what they were doing with the next 5 SCARY MOVIE films, I can't begin to guess). Looking back on it though, it makes a little more sense to me.

The great trick of the first SCREAM is, of course, how it functions as both satire and the thing it satirizes. It constantly functions as both a legitimate horror film and a critique of horror films, something that the sequels struggle with and often fluctuate between, delineating one scene as the "funny" scene, and the next as the "reflexive" scene. The signifier of this tonal shift is usually the presence of Jamie Kennedy. I'm just speculating here, but I think an enterprising individual could make a drinking game out of this thematic fluctuation that would probably make SCREAM 2 slightly more tolerable (and drown the memories of THE JAMIE KENNEDY EXPERIMENT at the same time).

All of this is to say I can now understand the existence of SCARY MOVIE. The deaths in SCREAM are truly horrific. SCARY MOVIE bypassed all that satire and aimed to make a spoof of those horrific elements. The image of Drew Barrymore gutted and tied up in the tree swing is the sort of thing that sticks with you. Ditto with Rose McGowan trapped in the garage doggy door. The sequels' uncertainty about their satirical intent dull these moments of true horror, and make everything feel removed and repetitive.

The same problems exist with SCREAM 4, although the beginning seems to promise an end to this sort of reflexive repetitiveness. Williamson pulls the rug out from underneath the audience's feet twice in the opening ten minutes, scripting a film-within-a-film-within-a-film that made me cackle with the sheer ballsiness of it all. It perfectly encapsulates both the appeal and the problems of post-modern awareness in film, and ends with a character ranting about how you don't care about any of the people in these films. It's easy to see this as a direct address from Wes Craven to the audience as he surveys the world he helped create, where the outrageousness of the kills trumps any kind of meaning or feeling.

Unfortunately, the script never really delivers on this promise to return us to that mode of filmmaking. The first half hour starts to function in this mode, but then, in what feels like an obligatory "oh, right, we're a SCREAM movie" awareness, we get the seen-it-all horror nerds who run a cinema club and give us the "new rules" speech. At this point, we're back to the let's-haul-Jamie-back-from-the-dead-via-the-miracle-of-VHS scene in SCREAM 3, where the franchise just basically admits it's out of ideas and hopes you get distracted by the combined awesomeness of Parker Posey and Princess Leia.

This is a film that laughs at the idea of "a Facebook killer", but expects you to think the idea of a kid live-webcasting his life can be used to dramatic effect. It's a film that wants to be innovative and full of fresh faces, but also wants to bring Neve, Courteney, and David back, because, shucks, wouldn't it be nice to bring them all back? And it's a film that refuses to kill a single one of those people, the only way it could have had the impact it so desperately wants to have.

There are still some worthwhile moments towards the end of the film, where Williamson and Craven take some valid shots at online and celebrity culture, but the story just kind of floats around and gets trapped in the "cool kill" mode. This is made even more disappointing given not only the promise of the film's opening, but also Williamson's story-first approach on THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, one of television's finest guilty pleasures (and before anyone gets too upset about that, let's remember Williamson's THE FACULTY, which is one of the finest alien invasion/murder your teacher films ever made). But by the end of SCREAM 4, you just kind of want to watch that opening 10 minutes again.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to write THE TWEET IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE, a horror film that will truly speak to my generation.