BEFORE: I'm not even at the halfway point of the romance chain yet, but already there's a very obvious need to break things up a bit. Too much of the same thing isn't good, and that goes for all of my annual theme months, romance and documentary and horror. At least with documentaries if I watch too many movies about athletes, I just need to hang in there, because movies about rock stars are probably coming up in just a few days - and with horror, not all films are about demons or ghosts, if I just hang on then I can switch to aliens or serial killers, and that helps keep things interesting. With the romance films I have to drop in a teen sex film or maybe a film about love gone wrong, like "Swimfan", or else I'll go completely mad. Maybe this was the year I should have watched all of the "American Pie" films just to shake things up. But I didn't need them this time, I had a working chain all figured out, so maybe next year, we'll see.
David Koechner carries over from "Whatever It Takes".
EDIT: I forgot that Turner Classic Movies was starting their "31 Days of Oscar" programming on February 9, so I'm going back and dropping them in post facto. They're dividing up the movies by category this year, so today is Day 8, devoted to:
Best Supporting Actor Nominees:
6:30 am "Four Daughters" (1938)
8:15 am "Sayonara" (1957)
11:00 am "Crossfire" (1947)
12:30 pm "The Asphalt Jungle" (1950)
2:30 pm "The Barefoot Contessa" (1954)
5:00 pm "The Big Country" (1962)
Best Supporting Actor Winners:
8:00 pm "How Green Was My Valley" (1941)
10:15 pm "The More the Merrier" (1943)
12:15 am "The Fortune Cookie" (1966)
2:30 am "Being There" (1979)
4:45 am "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1962)
Again, I've seen just TWO out of these 11, "The Fortune Cookie" and "Being There" - I'm out of contention unless I can catch up by having seen almost EVERY Best Picture winner. Falling to 36 seen out of 102, or 35.2%.
THE PLOT: A high-school senior drives cross-country with his best friends to hook up with a babe he met online.
AFTER: Well, right off I can peg this one as a combination of three notable rom-com tropes - there's the nerdy teen trying to lose his virginity, there's the theme of two people who can't quite get on the same page until JUST before the end of the film, and the common motif of a boy pursuing the hot girl who's a terrible person while failing to recognize the more down-to-earth girl he's placed in the friend zone as a more viable love partner (all of these are depicted in "Loser", "Boys and Girls" and "Whatever It Takes", among others). Why, it's almost like there's some kind of formula or something in Hollywood films about love and sex...
So, yeah, right off the bat it's not hard to figure out where all this is going to end up, with Ian and Felicia together, but we're going to go through the motions, nevertheless. Ian's also been in an online chat with Ms. Tasty, who promises to go "all the way" with him if he just drives from Chicago to come see her in Knoxville. Now of course nobody smart would do this, only a desperate teen who can't get laid and believes the lies told by someone in an anonymous chat room - there are several ways they could have gone with this, like maybe Ms. Tasty is a dude, maybe he's being catfished, or he's being led into a cult of cannibals, we don't really know for sure, but the one thing you can count on is that there's NOT a genuine hot chick in Knoxville who will turn out to be the love of his life. (Actually, if the movie went in that direction, it would be kind of original, although also very boring.)
It's a comedy, so really, expect nothing to go right - it's just a short 9-hour drive from Chicago to Knoxville, although why they choose to stick to country roads and not drive through Indianapolis is beyond me. With his friends Lance and Felicia along for the ride in the GTO stolen from his brother, this 9-hour trip takes a solid three or four days, though. Lance comforts a despondent cashier in a service station mini-mart, and that leads to a sexual encounter, and that leads to him being chased naked through a cornfield by her jealous redneck ex-boyfriend. The car breaks down near a shifty-looking hitchhiker, who then just assumes they've stopped to pick him up (awkward) and then they have to pee in the radiator to get the car going again, then the hitchhiker pees all over the car when they don't want to give him a ride (even more awkward).
They're saved by an Amish guy who somehow knows advanced car repair, and they witness a bunch of younger Amish on rumspringa, which I'm sure doesn't work in real life the way it works in the movies, here it's like a mass drunken orgy and rock concert, which is basically everything counter to the Amish lifestyle, so of course Lance has to try and sleep with one of the Amish girls. Amish are probably one of the last ethnic or religious groups that a movie can get away with poking fun at, like they'll never see the movie so there's little chance they'll complain about it. Basically things are so P.C. now movies can really only make fun of the Amish and blind people.
(This movie is NOT that old, it was released just 15 years ago, but I don't think a film today could make the same jokes about gay people, we have come a long way since then, and you just can't have a macho guy walking around calling people "faggots" any more, it's not cool. Even with the reveal at the end about this character, it's still no bueno, it wouldn't fly in 2024.)
There are still more bumps in the road, more flies in the ointment, but really, most of them just feel like time-killers. Felicia tosses her shoes into a tree full of discarded shoes, only then she has to walk barefoot when the car breaks down, this is really dumb, doesn't she realize that people only throw their shoes in a tree when the shoes are worn out, and they've already bought another pair? The trio race against a mysterious green car, twice, but really, it's just another diversion that goes nowhere. They stop at a carnival (another carryover from yesterdays' film) but nothing constructive happens there, but at least they got some corn dogs. There's another stop for DENTAL SURGERY, really? Then they hit a possum, and Ian feels bad about it, but mercy-killing the possum goes on for too long, and it stopped being funny before it even started. But this leads to them being put in jail for the night, which helps extend the road-trip to three days and the length of the movie to 110 minutes.
Eventually everyone meets up in Knoxville, our three travelers, Ian's older brother, Ms. Tasty, carjackers, that jealous redneck boyfriend, and for some reason, those two horndog teens from the same Chicago suburb, like what ARE the odds? And the real motivation of the hot online chick is revealed - but by then Ian's already figured out that his future will be brighter by strengthening the connection with his female best friend, sure, there's some risk involved when you fall in love with a friend, because you might ultimately lose the friendship if the relationship fails, but at least he's got a better chance with Felicia than with some random troller he met on the internet, right?
Also starring Josh Zuckerman (last seen in "CBGB"), Amanda Crew (last seen in "Table 19"), Clark Duke (last heard in "The Croods: A New Age"), James Marsden (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Seth Green (last heard in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), Alice Greczyn (last seen in "The Dukes of Hazzard"), Katrina Bowden (last seen in "Senior Moment"), Andrea Anders (last seen in "Instant Family"), Charlie McDermott (ditto), Mark L. Young (last seen in "Movie 43"), Cole Petersen, Dave Sheridan (last seen in "Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie"), Michael Cudlitz (last seen in "Driven"), Allison Weissman (last seen in "Fun Size"), Kim Ostrenko, Brett Rice (last seen in "Fled"), Caley Hayes, Shay Roman, Bella Salinas, John Ross Bowie (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Keith Hudson (last seen in "Baby Driver"), Marianne Muellerleile (last seen in "Some Kind of Beautiful"), Jessica Just, Brian Posehn (last seen in "Eulogy"), Scott Klace (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Allen Zwolle (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Cleo King (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Josh Duarte, Marcia Koch, Ken Clement, Susie Abromeit (last seen in "King Richard"), Victoria Mallow, Sasha Ramos, Sam E. Goldberg, Dwayne Alexander Smith, Jeremy McGuire, Fall Out Boy (Pete Wentz (last seen in "Escape Plan 2: Hades"), Joe Trohman, Patrick Stump, Andrew Hurley)
RATING: 4 out of 10 Abstinence Xtreme dancers
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