I really like watching movies, but usually in the hustle & bustle of daily life, it seems I don't find time to watch them very often. Recently, also feeling the need for an influx of humour into my life, I made a pact with myself to watch one funny movie every week. That was two months ago, and thus far I've watched two movies, so I'm a little behind schedule. Not only that, but my first two picks were just....not...funny. At all.
Comedy, I suppose, is a bit of a toughie because there are so many different types of humour. Certain comedies fit only certain crowds. May I offer up the Trailer Park Boys as an example? See what I'm talking about? But the two comedies I picked seemed right up my alley. Or so I thought.
The first, last month as we approached Christmas, was Four Christmases with Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn. The storyline sounded funny, and I generally like both of these actors in the stuff I've seen them in so far. Safe bet. But boy, was I wrong. First of all I have to question the movie rating system we have. This was a movie I was going to watch with my temporary-live-in best friend (circumstance mentioned in earlier blog entries), her fourteen-year-old son, twelve-year-old daughter and my ten-year-old son. So PG seemed appropriate for our wise and mature young charges. The first scene in this movie is of Vince's character trying to pick up Reese's character in a bar. At first, she can't stand him but within less than five minutes they're doing it against the bathroom wall in the bar. PG??!?!Are you freaking kidding me? First strike. And from then on, it just kept going downhill. I'm not in the mood to get into intellectual commentaries on whether it was due to poor character development, lousy comedic timing, thin plot, blah di blah di blah, but the bottom line is that even the kids thought it was passable at best, and my friend and I could barely stand to waste precious moments of our life sitting watching this gong show. Sorry Reese, sorry Vince...you blew it with this one.
Then, last night, in a revived attempt to seek out humour, I took Sara and Ryan to BlockBuster for attempt numero due. We all came to a fairly quick consensus on All About Steve with Sandra Bullock and Bradley Cooper. I'm not sure why the kids were even interested in it, other than perhaps Sandra looked kind of funny and quirky on the cover in her red shiny boots and multi-patterned clothes. As for me, I really like Sandra Bullock and have enjoyed all of her movies thus far; and Bradley Cooper...need I say more? I do think he's a decent actor but of course the oh-so-easy-to-look at part didn't hurt the movie selection process either.
But again! The movie cover showed a rating of PG, but as soon as we hit "play", up came the big "PG-13" sign. I'll have to look that up online and find out if they are in fact supposed to be different ratings, as I have it in my head as my understanding. So already, having flashbacks of Four Christmases, I had my child-protection antennae up. We did fast-forward through the first date scene, and the rest of the movie was peppered with stuff that at least my ten-year-old could probably have done without seeing or hearing. But outside of the adult content, AGAIN this was another lame, lame comedy! Just totally not funny. Not funny at all. We suffered through an entire hour of it before we finally put out a vote that ended up unanimous that we just save ourselves the agony and shut the dang thing off. You know it's bad when you can't even stand to sit through the last half hour, because you could care less how anything turns out.
But I shan't give up my search for good comedy. The quest continues....we shall find laughter and good humour through the movies once again!
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