Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: What I'm Watching

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, January 17, 2010

What I'm Watching

The Hangover

My daughter was surprised when I rented this one. It didn't seem like my kind of film, she said.

Well, okay, I guess. [Feeling very old.] I mean, yeah, a lot of its humor is sexist and homophobic and a little bit racist. (The swishy Asian guy is both of the last two.) And I know I shouldn't endorse films that are all of those things because they only reinforce these attitudes in the younger generation at which such films are aimed. But sometimes you need to laugh at all those un-PC things even if you feel a little guilty for laughing at them. No need to go around clutching your pearls in indignation all the time.

So there were a lot of things I didn't like about it. But as for the things I did like:

Bradley Cooper is perfect as the kind of guy you hated in high school and college: the handsome douchebag.
It's great to see Ed Helms playing a different character from the clueless guys he played on "The Daily Show" and "The Office."
Zach Galifianakis brought an amazing sweetness to his role.
I love farce, and this one was beautifully paced, thanks to Todd Phillips' direction and Debra Neil-Fisher's editing.
They never did explain the chicken.

1 comment:

Maggie said...: Maybe they brought the chicken to feed to the Tiger. Also after I said it didn't seem like your kind of film I remembered you also rented Superbad at one time.; January 19, 2010 at 10:13 PM