BEFORE: Jessica Alba carries over from "Some Kind of "Beautiful", and you guessed it, that's three in a row for her. Including this film, as terrible as it sounds, was key to completing this year's romance chain, however this also strands a film called "My Best Friend's Girl", which I couldn't find a place for, in order to make the connections that I'm making. Well, there's always next year, and I think I see a way I can work that in next time around, if there IS a next time around. Who knows, maybe it's all for the best, maybe two films with Dane Cook in it would have been two too many - anyway, this chain is all designed to help clear the DVR, and tomorrow's film is taking up space there, so some linking sacrifices always need to be made. I can't link everything to everything else, it's enough that there's always one link to the next day, that's all I need.
Here's the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for tomorrow, March 11:
8:45 am "Nicholas and Alexandra" (1971)
12:00 pm "Summer of '42" (1971)
2:00 pm "You Light Up My Life" (1977)
4:00 pm "The Way We Were" (1973)
6:00 pm "Julia" (1977)
8:00 pm "Kramer vs. Kramer" (1979)
10:00 pm "The Paper Chase" (1973)
12:00 am "Klute" (1971)
2:15 am "Ryan's Daughter" (1970)
Finally, some relationship films, even if one of them is about divorce, one's about a romance with a prostitute, and one's about a rocky relationship that's over - I feel you, TCM, and maybe we're sort of on the same page for once. If the Oscars were still in February then maybe this is the 1970's line-up they would have run on Valentine's Day? Anyway, I've seen 4 of these 9, which is almost half - "The Way We Were", "Julia", "Kramer vs. Kramer" and "Klute". That takes me to 46 seen out of 120, raising my percentage slightly to 38%.
THE PLOT: In order to keep the woman of his dreams from falling for another guy, Charlie Logan has to break the curse that has made him wildly popular with single women: Sleep with Charlie once and the next man you meet will be your true love.
AFTER: All movies start out as stories, and all stories start out from ideas, and most ideas come from fantasies or dreams, I get that. But every once in a while, you run into a movie that is SO easily traced back to a sex fantasy that it's impossible to imagine it coming from anywhere else. The one this reminds me of is "The Bachelor", that film with Chris O'Donnell where his character just HAD to get married in a certain time-frame in order for him to inherit a large amount of money, and it featured all these women showing up in wedding dresses, ready to get hitched, and it's really just a turned-sideways straight male fantasy where every woman on the street is throwing themselves at that man, it's only one step away from a film like "Cashback", where a teen boy gains the power to stop time and undress any woman he wants. Right?
You might have noticed a large number of crime procedural shows that film in Hawaii - like "Hawaii Five-O" and the "Magnum: PI" reboot, and now there's "NCIS: Hawaii" also. That's because if you get the chance to film a show in Hawaii, you take it, because Hawaii. It's beautiful there, the food's interesting and you don't ever have to shovel snow, so is that even working if you're making a TV show, or movie there? And if you're a headlining actor, and you're offered a chance to make a film where you pretend to have sex with a lot of women, you take that job, especially if you're Dane Cook. No, I don't know the man personally, he might be a great guy with a sparkling personality and no legal problems, but come on - most likely cancel culture or the #MeToo movement hasn't gotten around to him yet because he's JUST under the radar, he doesn't have the high profile of a Kevin Spacey or a Johnny Depp or a James Franco.
What year did this movie get released? 2007? Yeah, that seems about right - that was probaby the last year you could get away with making a movie that was just interested in getting as many women naked on-screen as it possibly could, by working so many unlikely situations into the plot. The female lead character is "clumsy" to the nth degree, which is a long way of walking around to "Hey, what if she got her skirt caught in the car door, and it ripped off, and we saw her in her underwear?" Who wrote this scenario, a 13-year old boy?
The premise here is that a man's ex-girlfriend gets married soon after they stop dating, and then he gets labeled as the "rebound" boyfriend, and then another ex gets married, and an urban legend starts to follow him, which states that everyone he's ever dated seems to find true love right after they break up with Charlie. Each woman who believes it tells her friends, and some of them date him, then marry the next guy, and then THEY tell two friends, and before you know it, Charlie's phone is ringing off the hook. Male fantasy, right? Like, if this happens to you, you'd be a FOOL not to take advantage of it, right? You'd be a terrible person, just like the lowest of the low, but at least you'd be getting sex on a regular basis. What's the harm in that?
Well, actually plenty, because it means that the women have NO CHOICE, when you parse out this scenario, they HAVE to have sex with this man if there's a chance that their life is going to get better. They try very hard to cover this up here, they show a number of women saying, "No, really, this is what I want, even if there's a 0.0001 percent chance that I'll find true love later on down the road, I will sleep with this person who is rude, crude, and who I'm not attracted to at all, just because it could benefit me later." That's very disgusting, no matter how you slice it - but all the women are portrayed as willing participants, which just reminds me of those men who videotape women reading a disclaimer or signing some kind of legal document before they have sex.
What might even be worse is the portrayal of all women as desperate - REALLY desperate, to the point where they will, every single one of them, go against their better judgement, all form of reason and their very natures in order to MAYBE find their soulmate. It's as if this is the single driving force in every woman's life - what about career, what about hobbies, what about finding personal fulfillment within and learning to be happy with the hand that life has dealt them, what about all that? Nope, it's true love, marriage, kids, the whole package, and somehow they're all incomplete failures without that - that really sells the whole gender quite short, doesn't it? Even the traffic cop, the lesbian traffic cop, is willing to have sex with our hero here - that shouldn't even be an option for her, she doesn't even like men as sex partners, but she's going to take one for the team, assuming that this leads to her finding true happiness with a woman in the future. That's not how ANY of this crazy relationship stuff works.
Pitching this scenario as "helping" women is insane, it's like if you found out that some slacker teen that you know took a job as a lifeguard, but knowing everything you know about him, it doesn't take long for you to figure out that he's only doing it so that he can watch girls in bikinis all summer long, he doesn't have any interest in saving lives EXCEPT for the fact that he might get to rescue a girl, hold her in his arms and maybe give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which is kind of close to kissing her, only it's not. Plus from his high vantage point on his guard station he can probably look right into the changing rooms - and then suddenly it all makes sense.
You can practically see the gears turning in some screenwriter's head - "Hey, umm, we'll have to make the lead character's best friend twice as disgusting as him, so it will make him seem better by comparison, and then maybe the audience won't notice how disgusting he is for sleeping with all these women by dangling the promise of true, pure love with the next guy, just to get his rocks off." So the best friend here, the foil character, is a plastic surgeon who only does boob jobs, he jerks off to mammograms and has sex with large citrus fruits (which, umm, according to the movie "Girls Trip", and all rational thought, is a big no-no, because of a little thing called citric acid). If you just think about this plot for ONE SECOND it becomes irrational nonsense, as well as morally disgusting, so why didn't anybody see it that way during the production process?
I know, I know, it's a comedy, but that's a poor excuse. Comedies can still make sense, and comedies should find a way to be funny without doing that at the expense of an entire gender, or fat people, or clumsy people, or people who have maybe too many penguin decorations in their bedrooms. Because those people are all people with feelings and they deserve respect - and they're just NOT going to find that within "Good Luck Chuck". Again, this was made during a different time, kind of like the movie "Kingpin", which wasn't kind to the Amish, old people, people with disabilities, or that other Farrelly brothers comedy that made fun of fat people and people with disabilities (do I mean "Shallow Hal" or "There's Something About Mary"? Take your pick...)
It might have been easier, and for sure classier, to just examine "luck" as a concept - like, there's not ONE thing here about how much "bad luck" Cam has, if you extrapolate her clumsiness a bit and call it "bad luck". From there, it's easy - her bad luck cancels out his good luck charm thing, or something along those lines. But honestly, there's a much easier explanation for the situation that Chuck finds himself in, and I don't know why anybody else didn't point this out. Maybe it's all because he's such a super horndog a-hole that he makes every other man on the planet better by comparison. So, naturally, all of his ex-girlfriends would find the NEXT guy to be so much better than him in every way, and therefore they would perceive that next guy as their soulmate, and they would marry him, thinking that they dodged a big bullet. Married life with the next guy would leave them thinking, "Geez, it could have been a lot worse, I could have married that loser Charlie!" See, it's simple, and it doesn't have to be so complicated, after all.
It's kind of like how the next film I watch, whatever it is, is likely to look like the "Citizen Kane" of rom-coms after watching this one.
Also starring Dane Cook (last seen in "Employee of the Month"), Dan Fogler (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Chelan Simmons (last seen in "Tucker and Dale vs Evil"), Lonny Ross (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Ellia English (last seen in "Semi-Pro"), Annie Wood, Jodie Stewart, Michelle Harrison (last seen in "Love Happens"), Jodelle Micah Ferland (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Lindsay Maxwell, Crystal Lowe (last seen in "Wonder"), Steve Bacic (last seen in "Killing Gunther"), Connor Price, Troy Gentile (last seen in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny"), Sasha Pieterse, Natalie Morris, Carrie Anne Fleming (last seen in "Rememory"), Kari-Ann Wood, Victoria Bidewell, Camille Atebe (last seen in "Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters"), Simone Bailly, Ian Farthing, Aaron Dudley, Georgia Craig (last seen in "Catch and Release"), Robert Kelly, Uldouz Wallace, Michael Teigen, Steve Glenn, Yasmine Vox.
RATING: 3 out of 10 rounds of spin-the-bottle
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