Time for another game of "Prime movies we think you'll like." How long will it take to discover that it's about a detective with a Dead Wife, a guy trying to win The Girl of His Dreams, or a Boy and a Girl Falling in Love?
Icon: 0 points
Plot description: 1 point
Trailer: 2 points
Internet research: 3 points
Never: 4 points
Spontaneous. About a high school where random students spontaneously explode, but life goes on. Icon of a boy and a girl hugging. Score: 0
Anthem of a Teenage Prophet: Starring hunky Cameron Monaghan (top). Icon of a boy and a girl hugging. Score: 0.
Brother Nature: Icon of three men and two women. "Roger a straight laced politician has big plans to propose to his dream girl." That's another way of saying Girl of His Dreams, and they forgot the comma. Score: 1.
High School: The soon-to-be valedictorian devises a plan to get the whole school stoned. Rather an uninspired title. Spoiler alert: he does it with brownies. Just two stoner dudes for the first 2.19 of 2.30 minutes of the trailer, very, very close to being about two guys. Then a boy-girl kiss. Also a shirtless muscle scene, but no matter. Score: 2.
Wolves: Icon of two guys being afraid of a werewolf. "A high school student wakes to find that he is turning into something vicious." No trailer, so I just start it up. First scene: he's having a heart to heart with The Girl. Score: 2
The More You Ignore Me: A Story about Love, Family, and Morrissey. I think Morrissey is a singer. "A darkly funny coming-of-age story of a dysfunctional family in the 1980s." Trailer: a lot of raggedy people in working-class England behaving oddly, and a boy and a girl Falling in Love. Score: 2
All's Faire in Love. About the cut-throat world of competitive Renaissance Fairs. Icon of a man and a woman kissing. Score 0.
Just Add Water. Icon of four men and a woman. "An offbeat romantic comedy about a decent guy with a dead-end life who finds the courage to pursue his dream." Romantic comedy doesn't sound promising, but technically it doesn't say the courage to pursue the Girl of His Dreams. You have to conduct internet research find out. Score: 3.
A Rainy Day in New York. Icon of a man and a woman kissing behind an umbrella. Score: 0.
Fired Up: Icon shows two guys gazing lustfully at a girl. High school football studs ditch football camp so they can spend the summer surrounded by "beautiful girls" at cheerleading camp. The trailer, naturally, shows lots of girl boobs, the guys naked for humiliation purposes, three boy-girl kisses, and one fist-bump. Also the two guys turn out to be better at "girls'" activity than the girls, and help the girls triumph over the snotty rival camp. That's sexist from every angle. Score: 2.
Cooties: The term technically means "head lice," but when I was a kid we used it for any contagious physical or social defect: "Stay away from him/her! If people see you together, they'll shun you!" In this case it appears that grade school kids are turning into zombies and attacking the teachers (one played by Elijah Wood!) No boy-girl romance in the trailer, but a review reveals that Elijah and one of female teachers Fall in Love. Score: 3.
The Sound of Metal: "Metal drummer Ruben begins to lose his hearing." Less than five seconds into the trailer, he's kissing his girlfriend. Score: 2.
The Map of Tiny Perfect Things: Teenager Mark (Kyle Allen) is "contentedly living the same day in an endless loop." I'm guessing that he ditches school. Then he meets The Girl. Score: 1.
John Tucker Must Die: "Three high school beauties plot to bring down the cocky campus stud." Calling them "beauties" reveals that this movie will be redolent of the heterosexual male gaze, but technically there is no mention of a boy-girl romance. The trailer shows girl boobs, basketball, volleyball, John Tucker kissing three girls, lots of John Tucker in his underwear, some cans of Diet Coke, and the revenge scheme. Also John's team mates are surprised when he's wearing ladies' underwear, but when they think it makes him play better, they all start wearing it. The plot description on Wikipedia reveals that through it all, John falls for the Girl of His Dreams. Score: 3.
The O'Briens: "Ten years after the death of his wife..." Score: 1.
Angela: Icon shows a man and a woman together. Score: 0.
Cannibals and Carpet Fitters. The icon shows two guys, probably the carpet fitters. The plot description: you get what you pay for. The trailer: surprisingly, the cannibals aren't inbred redneck hicks, but the residents of a country house in England. No boy-girl kissing. Score: 4.
Bliss: Icon of a man and a woman holding hands. Score: 0.
I Met a Girl: The icon seems to show two girls kissing, so I had to read the blurb to discover that it's a long-haired boy (Brenton Thwaites) pursuing the Girl of His Dreams. Score: 1.
Getting to Know You: Icon shows a man and a woman getting to know each other; Score:0.
Dead. Another inept title. Stoner Marbles, who can see the dead, teams up with recently deceased cop Tagg to catch a serial killer. You have to keep working after death? The trailer: the stoner is unexpectedly middle-aged and chunky. There's a boy-girl kiss at minute 1.03, and ghost and stoner dance together at minute 1.49. Score: 3.
Francis Ferguson. Icon shows a woman. Isn't Francis Ferguson the actress who was committed to a mental hospital? No, that must be someone else: this is a "bone-dry comedy" about a substitute teacher "whose crushing discontent drives her to an ill-advised transgression." Somebody take away that writer's thesaurus! The trailer consists of Francis talking to a psychiatrist, sitting in court, and walking toward a jail cell. Score: 4.
20 movies, and the only high scores go to a lady with a gun and carpet fitters fighting cannibals. Yuck
I think I'll re-watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show instead. 45 years of ab-solute pleasure!
Yeah, Morrissey, 80s punk singer who won't go away, politics basically a lot like Brigitte Bardot (i.e., animal rights type who's also a racist xenophobe and the two correlate) and very easy to trollolol, most recently by everyone's favorite nuclear family. (Geddit? Because Homer works at a power plant?) I recommend everyone do so at least once.
ReplyDeleteAmazon has very few gay films- any film that has shirtless guy on the poster they sell as gay movie
ReplyDeleteWhich is dumb. Like, 300 has a lot of shirtless guys, and they're naked in the comic, but you have to deal with Frank Miller's homophobia.
DeleteI would have given 'John Tucker Must Die' a 4. He is not the main character, and when he falls in love he is rejected. The description in Wikipedia seems to be not entirely correct. One of the attempts to break him is to spread the rumour that he is gay. So JT gives a speech in front of the whole school: Everybody should be proud of ones sexual preference, and he just happens to be hetero/straight. On the other hand, perhaps 3 is the right score: the main character is a girl, and she realises at the end of the film that the boy who helped her (Johns younger brother) is the right one for her. At the same time JT finds out that being dumped or misled hurts. So he changes his act: when he woos a girl, he is completely honest and introduces her to his other girlfriends. I do not know if all of this makes this film a 'good' one or not...
ReplyDelete