BEFORE: I've been so busy (or so distracted) by Valentine's Day and movie romances that I forgot all about TCM's annual "31 Days of Oscar" programming. This was probably easier for me when the Oscars were in February and the channel worked off a different schedule, now the Oscars air in March and they started their Oscar programming on February 9, who starts something mid-month? That's crazy. Anyway, I'm like 10 days behind now and I have to decide if I want to go back and add the stats to my last 10 reviews, it's a lot of work, for a little payoff.
BUT, I have to start getting ready for Oscar season somehow - I did add "Oppenheimer" to my list and I think I can watch that movie RIGHT after my St. Patrick's Day programming, fortunately there are like 87 big stars in that movie so I can probably fit it in just about anywhere, I just have to make sure I can watch it on, say, March 19 without ruining my chances of getting to some Mother's Day films. But I'm crafty, I can probably adapt - now as for the other Best Picture nominees, liike "American Fiction", "Poor Things", "The Holdovers" and "KIllers of the Flower Moon", I suppose I'm waiting for them all to air on cable or streaming before I add them to my watchlist. I'll have to try to get to "Barbie" this summer, that kind of feels like a summer film, right?
Anyway, here's todays' line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", it looks like this year they've broken down everything by Oscar category, which I have to respect, that makes more sense to me then grouping by decade or by theme - I also do like it when they program like I do, with one actor or actress shared between all adjoining films.
Best Supporting Actor Nominees:
7:00 am "Romeo and Juliet" (1936)
9:30 am "Friendly Persuasion" (1956)
12:00 pm "Quo Vadis" (1955)
3:00 pm "Cool Hand Luke" (1967)
5:15 pm "The DIrty Dozen" (1967)
Best Supporting Actor Winners:
8:00 pm "Topkapi" (1964)
10:15 pm "Adaptation" (2002)
12:30 am "Cabaret" (1972)
2:45 am "Come and Get It" (1936)
4:30 am "Lust for Life" (1956)
Well, I've seen "Cool Hand Luke", "The Dirty Dozen", "Adaptation", "Cabaret" and "Lust for Life", so I'm starting off with a 50% seen-to-not-seen ratio, and for me that's very good! Last year I ended up on Day 31 with 45.7% seen. I'll take a solid 50%, but now I need to go back over the last 10 days and figure out what I missed, which could bring my score down a bit. So after reviewing what I missed and adding 5 out of these 10, my cumulative score is now 41 seen out of 112, or 36.6%. Up a tiny bit today, but still down from the initial 50% - so we'll see what happens in the coming weeks, maybe I can still hit the high 40's.
David Koechner carries over again from "Sex Drive", so that's three in a row for him, and he makes my year-end countdown. So far this month only Jason Biggs, Kevin Hart, Regina Hall, Jenifer Lewis and La La Anthony have qualified, but there's still time.
THE PLOT: A soon-to-be husband wakes up on the morning after his bachelor party in bed with another woman.
AFTER: Well, now I'm cursed because I know the formula, I've seen it again and again. When a rom-com starts with a planned wedding, you can be almost sure that THOSE two people are not going to end up married, because where's the fun/drama/excitement in that? Let's see, "Over Her Dead Body" started with a wedding set-up, so did "The Wedding Ringer", were there others? By contrast, there have been some successful weddings this month, like in "You People", "Think Like a Man Too", and "A Walk to Remember", but the difference there is that the wedding plans started about halfway through the film, and there were obstacles to overcome. Buf if two people are already at the bachelor/bachelorette party stage at the START of the film, statistically speaking, things aren't looking good. They've got a few days to reconsider things and/or encounter someone else in a situationship, and that's going to set things in motion and lead to a dramatic non-wedding scene. But hey, statistically we're 50% on wedding success this month, so maybe that seems about right.
And I called it correctly, not just because Paul, the groom, wakes up with a woman from the bachelor party next to him in bed. There's also his brother, Pete, who expresses his feelings for his future sister-in-law quite clearly at the start, and these affirmations get more prominent as the film goes on, Pete's always talking about how lucky Paul is to be marrying Karen, how nice and sweet and beautiful she is, it really couldn't BE more obvious that Pete's been carrying a torch for Karen for a long time, and they're really the ones who are destined to be together, if you believe in that destiny sort of thing. It's just as likely that Pete married someone else, and was happy for a time, but then after getting divorced he looked back on the paths he took in life, and convinced himself that he made a wrong turn and should have been with Karen from the jump.
As for Paul, of course when he realizes that he's slept with another woman, his first inclination is to get that woman out of his apartment ASAP, and then start lying about it. Of course, that's what you do, it's "a guy thing" after all. But since this is a moral fable, one lie leads to another and he lies to his fiancée and he lies to his parents and he basically lies to everyone, and he has to keep telling more lies to cover the lies that fell through, and this gets carried to its most illogical degree, of course - but most importantly, hasn't he been lying to himself? It eventually dawns on Paul that "we're just not right for each other", but can we explore that a little bit? Whatever he had with Karen shouldn't just be dismissed because he likes her cousin a little better, or his brother likes Karen a little more.
Isn't it more significant that he's marrying the boss's daughter, to somehow advance himself at work? That's not a solid enough reason to spend the rest of your life with somebody. Love shouldn't be tied to your career, or you shouldn't get married out of some sense of obligation, like "we're getting married because we're together" and also "we're together because we're getting married". Then there's the way that Karen treats Paul, she's constantly nagging him about booking that string quartet for the wedding, she won't even LISTEN to his request to book a band for the reception that will play songs they both like, and she's always upset with the fact that he turns up late for everything, even the family dinner in his honor. (To be fair, he IS always late for everything, but come on, he's having a week, and anyway, she should forgive him for just about all his misdeeds and accept him for the always-late person that he is.). So really, it's funny that her name is Karen because she's acting like a total Karen, and as a society we didn't even know what that meant, back in 2003. Hey, maybe this is where that started.
What if he had told Karen what happened after the bachelor party from the start? Sure, it would have been a difficult conversation, but maybe he could have spun it by saying, "Hey, funny story, but your cousin was working as a dancer at my bachelor party, and we were both drunk, and she needed a place to crash, so she spent the night at my apartment, but we didn't have sex, so we're still cool, right?" OK, maybe that would have been the wrong move to make, and maybe Karen would have broken up with Paul, but they all would have ended up in the same place, anyway, or close enough, so is honesty REALLY the best policy or not? Admittedly, that's all a bit confusing here.
Right now, it's something of a game, if I keep on watching romantic comedies, can I keep predicting within the first 10 minutes who's going to be romantically involved at the end of the film? Will they get married or won't they? Look, even though this was all very formulaic, I have to give it up for "A Guy Thing" because there's a bad tradition in Hollywood rom-coms where the bride and groom call the wedding off at the last minute, and then the best man (or someone else) steps up and proclaims his (or her) love for the jilted party, and the new couple gets married on the spot. This all goes back to "The Philadelphia Story", I think. However, those two people do NOT have a marriage license, so it's the kind of thing that can ONLY happen in a movie, you can't do this IRL. Still, the movie trope persists - however this does NOT happen in "A Guy Thing", the new couple does leave the church together, although they are NOT hitched, they're going to at least go on a few dates first. Well, try before you buy, I always say.
And people still insist on having bachelor parties and bachelorette parties, when in the movies at least, they are NEVER a good idea. They're all disasters, right? "You People", "Think Like a Man Too", "The Wedding Ringer", and tonight's film is just the latest example. Sure, get together with your friends, maybe drink a couple of beers, but once you get strippers, drugs and/or Las Vegas involved, you're just asking for trouble. I think for my first bachelor party I went bowling outside Cleveland with my future father-in-law and two of my fiancée's male friends. Well, at least there was no way that evening was going to go south, right?
NITPICK POINT: I think maybe they should have worked the title in to the film a few more times - as it stands, it comes from the conversation that Karen had with the SpendMart manager about dirty underwear. They could also have used it when Paul's boss and future father-in-law finds out that he slept with Becky, got crabs, and helped the IAB arrest her psycho cop ex-boyfriend. He could have said, "I realize you screwed up, but as long as you make my daughter happy, I'm willing to overlook it, because it's a Guy Thing. Wasted opportunity.
Also starring Jason Lee (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Julia Stiles (last seen in "Down to You"), Shawn Hatosy (ditto), Selma Blair (last seen in "Legally Blonde"), James Brolin (last heard in "Lightyear"), Lochlyn Munro (last seen in "Cosmic Sin"), Diana Scarwid (last seen in "Heat'), Julie Hagerty (last seen in "Instant Family"), Thomas Lennon (last heard in "Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again", Jackie Burroughs (last seen in "The Sentinel"), Jay Brazeau (last seen in "Antlers"), Larry Miller (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot"), Matthew Walker (last seen in "We're No Angels"), Fred Ewanuick, Lisa Calder (last seen in "Chaos Theory"), Dan Joffre, Michael Teigen (last seen in "Good Luck Chuck"), Brody Smith, Miriam Smith (last seen in "The Perfect Score"), Paul McGillion, Gina Stockdale, Michael Sunczyk, Zahf Paroo (last seen in "Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed"), Peter New (ditto), Noel Fisher (last seen in "Capone"), Keith Dallas (last seen in "Snakes on a Plane"), Donavon Stinson (last seen in "The Unforgivable"), Victor Varnado (last seen in "End of Days"), Larry Musser, Ron Selmour, Gus Lynch, Fiona Hogan (last seen in "Connie and Carla"), Xantha Radley (last seen in "Frankie & Alice"), Colin Foo (ditto), Natassia Malthe (last seen in "Alpha"), with a cameo from Leslie Jones (last seen in "Coming 2 America")
RATING: 5 out of 10 burning photographs
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