THe hangover

I’m so excited. I just can’t hide it. I have a computer that does not have Microsoft office. I found a copy of MS office at home. I got it at an old job. I just threw it in and now I have Microsoft word on my computer. I love MS word.

Well if you live long enough, you will do a lot of things. Today I did a first. I went to a movie alone. I don’t think I’ve ever gone to a movie theater and paid to see a movie all by myself. I’ve seen movies alone in college, for classes, but never gone to the theater and paid. Today I did.

Now let’s get to the nitty gritty. I just saw the Hangover. Overall, I liked it. Please don’t read any further if you don’t want anything spoiled. I’ve said it in the past, I like art that takes me somewhere and shows me something. It has to make me feel something or empathize with someone. It has to move me. It can be Hilarious, like Borat, but it has to work. The characters have to work. The situations have to work, the whole thing has to be a cohesive unit, or cohesive enough to make me buy into the story. The Hangover didn’t do that for me. I just didn’t buy it. The Allen character played by Zach Galifaniakis, was funny, he was classic like belushi, but he just wasn’t believable. It was annoying how they messed him up. Was a he a savant? Was he intelligent? I didn’t buy that he didn’t know that Caesars palace in Vegas was not really Caesar’s Palace. Little things just threw me off. Maybe it was the other actors. I didn’t buy the relationship between the 3 friends. All 4 main characters might as well have been strangers before the beginning of the movie; the movie just didn’t sell me that they were lifelong buddies. If you don’t get the 3 versus 1 thing right, then it kinda messes up the chemistry of the movie. They didn’t play up Allen as the foil to the three and it would’ve been difficult because the 3 weren’t properly developed enough to do it. Am I really supposed to believe that it was possible that the 3 of them took a cop car and checked it in at the hotel? Without being caught? Would the hotel really not look into it if 3 or 4 or whatever guys showed up annihilated and tried to check a cop car? How did they get the tiger up to the room? That tiger would’ve killed them. Am I supposed to believe that a guy would walk into a bathroom, with a tiger in it, holding a steak? He’d be ripped to ribbons. I mean, I might be an old fuddy duddy, but I just didn’t buy into this shit.

Ok, I know it’s a movie, I know that movies push the realm of believability, but what about the pacing of the flick? I don’t know if the looking back in time element helped the plot or hurt it. It might’ve been a better movie if it was done in real time and we saw all the things that we didn’t see. They needed to really draw us into caring about what happened, I didn’t get drawn in. If there were more characters, especially scantily clad women, that would’ve been better. More sex, more intrigue, more drugs, more rock and roll. I just didn’t get sucked in like I could have. I give the movie credit, it was clever, and it tried to pull something off that was very difficult. I think the character development was a flaw, and the pacing. It was fun, it was just too difficult to believe some of the situations. I kept thinking about Sideways and how this film should’ve tried to be more like Sideways. If I believed in the character’s friendship, then if they played up the contrast between them and Allen, it would’ve been better. Maybe cut the tiger out, it was just unnecessary and it took the film from outrageous to ridiculous. How did Mike Tyson not end up on the cutting room floor? He was horrible. It’s easy to go back and see what worked and then suggest how to improve it, but Allen was intriguing. What was his deal? He’s like a trust fund baby, did he go to school? I didn’t think he was dumb, and if he comes from money, then his parents must be intelligent, why did they make him dumb? That bothered me. Eccentric is ok. Borderline mentally deficient, that’s ok. They should’ve given him a quantifiable disorder, make him a character, not a punchline. I dunno. Maybe I need to see it again.

SLFTD: Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head.

VFTD: http://www.mtvmusic.com/wolfmother/videos/83414/woman.jhtml