Horrible Bosses

Directed by Seth Gordon

Starring Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey, Colin Ferrell, and Jamie Foxx

*** WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD ***

If tasked to write the review in a single sentence it would be: Horrible Bosses is essentially a 98-minute version of the trailer.

You walk into the theatre having seen two minutes of film featuring Nick (Jason Bateman), Dale (Charlie Day), and Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) bitching about their bosses, making a pact to deep six them, and snooping around incompetently in effort to edge them out. You’re then treated to 96 more minutes of them doing exactly the same thing.

Nick’s boss Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey) is a narcissistic, manipulative slave-driver who makes unreasonable demands of his employees, but that’s about as far as the misery goes. Threatening Dale’s engagement is “horrible” boss Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston), a smoking hot, sexpot dentist who makes regular attempts to shag his brains out and walks around the office wearing nothing but a lab coat and the body God gave her. The newly appointed CEO of Kurt’s chemicals company is Bobby Pellitt (Colin Farrell), who sports a pot-belly and comb over, wears anime dragon shirts to work, does massive amounts of blow, and threatens to fire all the fat and crippled people in the office. In a nutshell, the most awesome boss ever.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s impossible to enjoy this movie if you’re not drunk. I remember approximately 25% of it, none of which was particularly funny, but all of the parts that I don’t remember were absolutely hysterical. In addition to providing a laugh track to a movie that sure needs one, booze is crucial in suspending your disbelief for certain glaring narrative deficiencies.

The first and most obvious being if your boss looks like Jennifer and also happens to have the sex drive of Gene Simmonds after a couple lines of cocaine laced with Mexican Viagra you’re not going to remain faithful to Lindsay Sloane. Don’t get me wrong, Lindsay is a really nice-looking Jewish girl and I would absolutely not kick her out of my bed… come to think of it I would probably even make her breakfast (like a nice omelet with Gruyère cheese, spring onions, and chives), go steady with her for a few months to a year, probably even introduce her to my mother – because let’s face it she’s a charming, successful young tsatskeh, has a cute voice, and grew up on Long Island and it takes a lot to impress my mother; she really doesn’t like most of the girls I date – and do the Sunday Times crossword with her in my gorilla t-shirt and big weekend underwear.

Hollywood sex offender

Okay, but here’s what I’m saying: Jennifer Aniston is a sexual tigress and I saw the outline of her boobs in this movie and it made my cock feel like a rocket that was about to blast off into outer space.

But that doesn’t even matter because the second humongous plot hole is that I’ve seen what female sex offenders look like and they don’t look like Jennifer Aniston. And this isn’t one of those discrepancies that you can fix with method acting or a bunch of makeup (like Colin Farrell does in this movie). Jennifer Aniston does not look like a sexual harassment lawsuit so much as someone who you’d just love to have sit on your face. They should have just gotten Charlie Sheen or Rosie O’Donnell to play this role because Charlie Day could be legit fearful of them and I could sit and drink and watch the movie without raising an eyebrow.

St. Albans, Vermont, sex offender

The second and third acts are a bit fuzzy for me except for 10-15 minutes of notes I had taken documenting the parts of the movie that Martyn missed. To his credit, this guy is a champion drinker but he has the bladder of a seven-year-old schoolgirl so usually needs to see a man about a horse during our boozy movie outings. This time he decides to have a smoke break as well (which I can only imagine compounds the hours of drinking we’ve been doing) and on his way back into the Cineplex he loses his bearings and stumbles drunkenly into the wrong movie theatre, up to another row H, falling over a few people on his way to seat 12 where he finds a pair of befuddled moviegoers (neither of whom are me) doubtless unimpressed by a 9 o’clock shadow drunk wearing an orange Samurai t-shirt I lent him earlier that afternoon. I imagine their conversation going like this:

Martyn: WHERE AM I? WHAT MOVIE IS THIS?

Moviegoer 1: This is Sarah’s Key. I think you’re in the wrong cinema, sir. Have you been drinking?

Martyn: Fuck beans. Is this the one with Jennifer Aniston and her tits?

Moviegoer 2: No. It stars Kristin Scott-Thomas but if you want to see her tits you need to refer back to Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient. Juliette Binoche gets nudie in that one too and they both look pretty bangin’ for their age.

Martyn: Niiice.

Moviegoer 3 [one row behind]: Hey! Could you guys shut the fuck up? This movie is about the goddamn Holocaust. Have some respect, please guys.

Martyn: … Are you SURE Jennifer Aniston isn’t in this movie?

Luckily he found his way back, plopped down into his seat and immediately started laughing about his 15-minute absence.

Martyn: I WALKED INTO THE WRONG THEATRE AND TRIPPED OVER A BUNCH OF PEOPLE! BAAAHAHAHAHA!

Me: Dude, Kevin Spacey just Mozambiqued someone. This guy is fucking gangster!

Anyway, during this time Nick, Dale, and Kurt break into a house, witness a murder, flee the scene at high speeds in a Prius, get picked up and interrogated by the cops, and never drink four quid Pinot Grigio again. Okay, I’m reading over my notes and that last one was probably a note to myself, not about the movie. The main characters may have sworn off a particular grape variety halfway through the film but I can’t remember; the same way I can’t remember Bob Newhart being in this entire movie even though he apparently was.

Listen, if you’re going to see this movie you have to be ready to dig deep and find the consummate booze hound within yourself. There’s unfortunately no middle ground for this one.

Damage: 8/10 (pre-movie: three measures of whiskey and one pint of Guinness; during movie: 1¼ bottle of dirty supermarket Pinot Grigio)

Boozy rating: 6/10 (even whilst drunk you understand the movie would be no good if you were sober)

Next Week: Cowbows and Aliens

Hobo With a Shotgun

Directed by Jason Eisener

Starring Rutger Hauer, Gregory Smith, Molly Dunsworth, Brian Downey, Nick Bateman, and Jeremy Akerman.

 Aside from his first effort, Pi, I’ve never been very enthusiastic about Darren Aronofsky’s films. Sure, he’s got a few award nominations under his belt, a share of healthy reviews, and a pervy ‘tache (those are “in” these days, right?), but the bottom line: I’m not a fan of movies that exist merely as stylistic exercises without delivering substance (and no, people doing boatloads of heroin and having limbs amputated is not substance, it’s just misery pornography).

Style, however, wins the battle against substance when the movie revolves around Rutger Hauer ruining people’s shit with a 12-gauge.

The only problem with this movie, really, was that I was not drunk enough during it. I made the critical error of walking into the theatre sober and sticking to 5.5% beers throughout the films, which only delivered mild inebriation when, really, about halfway through the movie I ought to have been shouting obnoxiously at the screen: “Yes! YES Batty! Shoot him in the face!” It’s that kind of movie. The only good way for it to end is with you being dragged out howling and belligerent, telling the ushers repeatedly how amazing shotguns are and how you’re surely going to go out and buy one now. Just make sure to wear trainers to the theatre in case they call the cops and you have to leg it out of there double-quick style.

For those of you who have been living under a rock, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez made a collaborative action-horror double-feature named Grindhouse (2007) after the B-movie theatres of their youths (recommended for a boozy rental). In order to fully immerse viewers in the grotty, exploitation aesthetic the picture is meant to evoke, they commissioned four fake, like-genre trailers from fellow directors and held a contest at the South by Southwest Festival challenging aspiring young filmmakers to provide a fifth for the flick’s release. Dartmouth, Nova Scotia natives Jason Eisener, John Davies, and Rob Cotterill produced two minutes of Hobo With a Shotgun for the win.

Following in the footsteps of Robert Rodriguez’s Machete (also turned into a full-length feature and also an outstanding candidate for a boozy weeknight), HWAS was brought to life by the same crew responsible for the trailer, with the addition of B-movie superhero Rutger Hauer as the lead.

The plot is simple: there is no plot. Just Rutger delivering his brand of vigilante street justice to the gangsters, low-lifes, and pederasts of “Hope Town.” There’s this bit about Rutger saving up his spare change to buy this coveted pawn shop lawnmower, which is in itself AMAZING because a) there’s no grass in this entire film and; b) even if there were, none of it would be his to mow because he’s homeless as fuck in this movie. For serious, you could have put Rutger in a homeless contest with real homeless people and he would have made the podium for sure. In fact, Rutger Hauer should give up acting and just teach homeless people how it’s done. Give lessons at the YMCA and stuff.

There’s about 10-20 minutes of him observing injustice, getting heckled and spat at, him mumbling some stuff about bears, and from that point on it’s just straight-up wreckage for the rest of the movie.

By the time the movie gets going I was about two beer cans deep and mostly worried about the tall black gentleman sitting next to me. Parts of this movie verge on blaxploitation and, while we both know it’s all in good fun, I don’t want to be caught laughing too loud. Because that could get a bit fucked up for me if I’m out there splitting my sides and he’s looking over at me, like: “Dude… not cool.” It happened to me when I was watching Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Double Team and got caught out laughing too hard at D-Rod’s unnecessary basketball references and general ridiculousness.

So minutes 30-45 of the movie consisted of me gauging his level of laughter (and drunkenness) and ensuring that mine never exceeded his. For a moment I contemplated offering him a beer or two to ingratiate myself with him but I was running dangerously low and figured it was worth the risk of being publicly decried a racist. It wouldn’t be the first time (but that’s a story for another posting).

After a few more beers, the range of means and weapons used to ruin people becomes downright impressive. Citizens of Hope Town are getting owned six ways from Sunday by way of cane, toaster, ice hockey skates, manhole cover, chicken wire, and grappling gun, to name a few. The titular shotgun steals the show, of course, blowing off heads and tearing holes in peoples’ chests with such uncompromisingly gritty, low-fi style that it almost becomes a character of its own. I caught myself hoping for a line in the credits that read something like: “And introducing Shotgun as ‘The Shotgun.’” That would have ruled so hard.

The general destruction and slaughter only gets more satisfying as the movie rolls on, which I honestly don’t know whether to attribute to the filmmaker’s love for action exploitation or my level of drunkenness. I don’t remember ever being the only one in the auditorium laughing (this happens plenty on Boozy Wednesday), a pretty strong indicator that the movie stands up to the sobriety test, or that everyone else in the theatre was also ripped. Neither would surprise me.

HWAS boasts enough violence, black humour, retarded cocaine usage, and Canuck cameos that you’ll want to bring your big game into the screening room. Come packing a two-day-old sandwich wrapped in cling-film (or pizza you found in a trashcan) and the dirtiest beer cans you can buy. By the end of the flick you’ll have become hobo by osmosis. Hobosmosis. Fuck I’m clever.

Damage: 4/10 (4 x 500ml cans of Stella Artois; insufficient for thorough enjoyment)

Boozy rating: 8/10 (filled with classic one-liners and wreckage, but so brutally violent that it could upset your drunk)

Up next week: Horrible Bosses

Mission Statement

I try my best to avoid seeing good movie in the theatres. Usually their scale is not grand enough to merit a trip to the cineplex, beyond which there’s always a requisite post-screening conversation with your former film student buddies or friends who just like to pontificate on what the movie means. Good movies are far too demanding a way to spend a weeknight.

If I’m to be dropping serious ducats to sit in a comfy chair for a couple hours, I want it to be as enjoyable as possible. I want to see things explode and titties and Nicolas Cage going apeshit on a bunch of people. Because those things never fail and leave a grin on your face for the rest of the week.

I love 2½ star films. They’re unambitious, unpretentious; they don’t make lofty promises and then fail to deliver. When they’re good at what they do, when they hit the nail on the head, they’re just pleasantly surprising and thoroughly enjoyable. Sort of like South Korea or Trinidad & Tobago at the FIFA World Cup.

The problem, of course, with 2½ star films, is that you often need a little push in the right direction to appreciate their merit. So I drink. Formerly in the company of my hoss James, we would buy tickets on Big Ticket Tuesday (it’s a 5-dolla holla at Montreal’s Paramount Cinemas), shotgun a couple Pabst Blue Ribbons in a nearby alleyway, and drink our way steadily through whatever The Rock or Jason Statham movie had most recently graced the silver screen.

Forget about IMAX 3D. The jokes are funnier, the punches fall harder and crunch more satisfyingly, and the car crashes are miles more entertaining when you’re drunk. And as a bonus you can shamelessly hit on girls sitting around you and it won’t be a social transgression because you’re basically at a bar. It’s win/win people. It’s the only way to watch movies.

In an effort to share my love of movie tanking and impress its power and effectiveness upon others I have created The Boozy Movie Chronicles, a journal of weekly movie nights with my friend Martyn. I will be rating my experience of each film on a Damage scale (how wrecked I feel during the screening) and a Boozy rating scale (the heights to which the movie is elevated by a solid state of inebriation).

Please enjoy it and try it with your friends. Thank you very much for visiting my blogger.