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.