You’d need to be still drunk to like The Hangover Part 2

This review is not going to appear in LGBT Weekly until next week, but I was so angry at the movie, I wanted to get it out there now. Also, I wanted to get out the uncut version, since it’s probably too long for the paper. Here it is:

The Hangover, Part 2
Directed by Todd Phillips
Written by Craig Mazin & Scot Armstrong & Todd Phillips
Starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Zach Galifianakis
Very, very rated R
At your local multiplex

A few weeks ago, I wrote a summer movie preview in these pages that expressed excitement about The Hangover Part 2 because The Hangover put its characters into some “pretty homosexually awkward situations” and Part 2 would probably only up the ante. And it did. Oh, boy, did it. My prescience should not be rewarded, because by upping the ante, Part 2 bypassed “more titillating” and landed squarely at “shocking and offensive.” While the casual racism, homophobia, and misogyny of the three leads in Part 1 were nearly irrelevant to a story that revolved around violent slapstick and silly sight gags, in Part 2, both the jokes and the plot are structured by a 21st century version of yellow peril, from vapid Asian stereotypes to the fear of Thai transsexuals.

The plot of Part 2 is basically the same as Part 1: Phil the ass (Bradley Cooper), Stu the nerd (Ed Helms), and Alan the nut (Zach Galifianakis) wake up from a night of pre-wedding debauchery, remember nothing, and cannot find the fourth person in their party. Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), an oddly effeminate crime lord with a thick Chinese accent and a penchant for hip-hop slang, is again at the center of the problem, and he’s again buck naked and crazy.

The main differences in Part 2 are that Las Vegas has been swapped for Bangkok, the baby Alan carried in Part 1 has been replaced with a smoking and drug-dealing monkey, and the person missing is not the groom but Teddy (Mason Lee), the brother of the bride. This time, Stu is the groom, and his bride-to-be is a beautiful Thai woman whose father thinks that Stu is the human equivalent of mushy rice. When Teddy is lost, Stu is convinced that he will lose his bride. (I’m not naming her or the actress, because like all of other women in The Hangover Part 2 and director Todd Phillips’s movies, she’s only relevant as a plot device.)

The bulk of the film focuses on Phil, Stu, and Alan’s quest to find Teddy, which takes them to a Buddhist monastery, a tattoo parlor, breakfast with Paul Giamatti, and on a physically improbable car chase. When the movie is using Jeong’s high-pitched one-liners, Galifianakis’s dead-pan non-sequiturs, and Helms’s almost acrobatic freak-outs as the sources for laughter, Part 2 earns its laughs. But too often the actors are reacting to the writers’ violent and mean-spirited plotting that is all explained by blaming Bangkok, as if the ancient, bustling Thai city and not the childish behavior of three jerks from the US caused the riot, amputation, and mistaken identity that are central to the story. I found myself laughing less at the movie’s humor than at my own nervous outrage.

SPOILER ALERT! For example, the trio ends up at a night club where, the night before, Stu had met and had sex with one of the dancers. When it is revealed that the dancer is a pre-op transsexual and had topped Stu, the dancer’s penis becomes Part 2’s equivalent of There’s Something About Mary’s hair gel. This is the centerpiece joke of the film, the one meant to be talked about the next day and the week to come. And it is based on the fear of gay sex, of transsexuals, of the mysterious, shifty Asian culture.

But wait, it gets worse. The second to last image in the film is Phil and Mr. Chow recreating, as a joke, the iconic, horrific Eddie Adams photo of a South Vietnamese officer executing a Viet Cong prisoner with a shot to the head. To say this is offensive is an understatement; it’s simply despicable.

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Everything Must Go, but you should stay at home

Most of the time, I love Will Ferrell. I think Anchorman and Talladega Nights are two of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. I want him to do well, and I wanted Everything Must Go to be good. But it was not. Here’s the opener of my review:

The world is supposed to care about Everything Must Go because it stars Will Ferrell in a dramatic role. He’s trying to be taken seriously as a serious actor, to follow the route of great comedians who became great actors, guys like Tom Hanks and Robin Williams. Jim Carey tried to do it, and while he gave two stunningly great dramatic performances, in The Truman Show and Man in the Moon, he’s nevertheless been relegated to his trademark Jerry-Lewis-on-crack shtick.

Ferrell refuses to succumb to Carey-itis, even after the box office failures of his dramatic turns in Stranger Than Fiction and Winter Passing. He continues to try to convince audiences that he can do more than make them laugh playing arrogant buffoons like Ron Burgundy, Ricky Bobby and George W. Bush.

I’m not convinced.

Read the rest of the review on the LGBT Weekly website or pick up a print edition anywhere gays are served.

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[30 Day Song Challenge] Day 8: A Song I Know All the Words To

I saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch at the Jane Street Theater on the last night John Cameron Mitchell performed it live on stage (until he did it again later in the run) with my roommates Liz and Jason on the 4th of July weekend of 1998. I think it is the great rock musical, and I also believe that it’s one of the greatest commentaries on gender and sexuality of the last 20 years. It changed my life, and not just because I ended up dating the show’s original producer for three and half years, and not just because I used the song “The Origin of Love” in my toast at Liz and Jason’s wedding. It’s just… amazing. I know all of the words to a bunch of the songs in the show, but “Wig in the Box” is the most fun. Here’s the song from the most excellent film version, which was directed by Mitchell.

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Kristen Wiig!!!

I forgot to post my review of Bridesmaids, which I loved. I think my review is a tad odd, but whatevs. Here’s the opener:

At the screening of Bridesmaids that I attended with my husband, during the few lulls between thunderous guffaws we could hear the young blonde woman sitting next to Rob commenting on the plot to her mother: “What a bitch!” “Aw, he’s so cute!” “That would never happen!” As we walked out, she said, “If my best girlfriend ruined my shower, she would not be invited to my wedding. That was so unrealistic!”

I wanted to say two things to this girl, but civility prevented me.

First, I would have pointed out that Bridesmaids is a broad comedy in which things that would never happen do happen all of the time. Don’t ponder the psychology or the physics; just laugh!

Second, I would have said, “Talking during a movie is rude. You’re exactly the kind of bobble-headed dingbat Kristen Wiig would have hated.”

Read the rest on the LGBT Weekly website, or, if you’re local, in the actual print edition, found at your local gay-friendly business.

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Elephants and Summer Movies

So, I reviewed Water For Elephants. It was relentlessly mediocre. Here’s the money quote:

In many ways, the film is quite old-fashioned. With a different cast and a different director, it could have been a companion piece to 1952s The Greatest Show on Earth, a circus movie considered among the weakest films to ever win the Oscar for Best Picture.

Water for Elephants suffers from the older film’s flaws. It’s too long, and the characters are two-dimensional. A few times, August is shown to feel regret, but nothing ever is explained about why he’s such a murderous bully. We’re offered back stories for Jacob and Marlena, but they don’t really explain or deepen their characters.

Worse, Pattinson and Witherspoon have less chemistry with each other than Pattinson does with the elephant playing Rosie. When she tickles him with her trunk, the glee on Pattinson’s face is the only true, the only infectious emotion in the entire movie.

I also wrote a queer summer movie preview. I’m excited about Beginners, The Perfect Host, X-Men: First Class, and Bad Teacher. Oh, and Thor. Which I saw last week. It was awesome. Not the least because of the scene from which the photo the left was taken. Here’s how the story begins:

While the actual season we call summer doesn’t begin until June 21 and the traditional kick-off for summer doesn’t happen until Memorial Day Weekend, the summer movie season starts the first weekend of May. This year it all begins with Thor, one of the half-dozen big budget superhero flicks out over the next four months.

The summer is usually when studios, big or small, do not like to distribute their more difficult movies – like the gay ones. So, as usual, queer characters and storylines are nearly absent in this summer’s deluge of movies.

Several movies, while not technically gay, feature so much same-sex tension and subtext that you have to call them, to borrow a term from our nerdy queer theorist friends, homosocial. And, of course, there is a bunch that you might want to see, if only because the actors and actresses are so damn hot.

You can read the rest here.

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