Ever see a film called The Hangover?

My girlfriend loves that film, bless her heart.

Me?

I fucking hate it.

Like a plague they seem to manifest pretty regularly these days. Films about hapless fuckwits who are in serious contention for the Darwin Award yet through blind luck manage to prevent their own elimination from the gene pool. The Hangover, of course, features a Bachelor Party gone seriously wrong. It goes so wrong that they made a sequel which I, fortunately, did not have to suffer through.

These films usually have the same actors in them. For instance, if Kevin James is in the film, I won’t see it. The actor himself is probably smart enough but he always plays the same overweight twit on a forlorn hope trying to milk the laughs for all he can. Will Ferrell would be another, whose only redeemable film of late would be Stranger than Fiction. Then there is Sandler and a few others.

Frankly, I don’t understand the appeal of these films. I don’t understand them anymore than I understand most sitcoms whereby you sit in front of a television set and watch people engage in witless ignorance for twenty minutes while being bombarded with commercials during the other ten. Pass the pork rinds and PBR, please.

It isn’t that I don’t enjoy humor and comedy. I do. I’m not a prude about it either. I actually enjoy stand up comedy, particularly the folks of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.

My attitude about it is essentially this.

One spends their entire day dealing with screaming kids, twittering idiots and the ranks of the terminally hapless. Indecisiveness and chaos reign while the ranks of everyday society struggle to get on with their day. They are the same people who can’t decide what they want in their Starbucks mocha-frappe-whatzit even though they have ordered the same fucking drink for five years running.

You deal with that all day and probably during the night as well.

Why would you voluntarily subject yourself to more of it in your entertainment? It isn’t like there is any redemptive value in most of this crap. It isn’t like any of the characters experience any real, long lasting CHANGE from which one might learn a lesson.

I just don’t know. Color me frustrated with my entertainment choices.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
Kansas City, Missouri