Saturday, August 15, 2015

Trainwreck more like PRETTY OKAY

Trainwreck was pretty okay.  I'm kind of angry that a combination of laziness and having a full-time job, which compliment one another surprisingly well, has made it the only movie I've actually seen in theaters this summer.  There was a movie with Charlize Theron as a post-apocalyptic feminist in the Australian outback fighting car armies and a guy with a guitar that shot fire and I'm going to have to wait for the blu ray.  But Amy Schumer making dick jokes, that I couldn't wait on!


Granted, they're pretty good dick jokes.  And very filthy.  Pretty uncomfortably so.  It's probably what I like most about the movie--it does not shy away from how frank and disgusting it is.  More cowardly films would show an awkward sex scene with a thirty second clip and a walk of shame afterwards, but Amy Schumer has the tact to know that doing so would be disrespectful.  Instead, she forces us to watch a character who looks like he'd be named Deltoids McHams awkwardly thrusting as he talks about protein shakes, and not only is the result much more accurate to what awkward sex is actually like (he talks about the same brand of protein shake that I do!) but it's way funnier.  Gross humor gets a bad rep in movies these days, mostly because in most movies it means Adam Sandler throwing up on dog poop while farting on someone's crotch causing them to throw up, but Schumer knows how to do it well, and refuses to pull any punches.

Except when it comes to the third act.  The third act is the reason that this movie is only "pretty okay" instead of "great," and it's the reason why I haven't talked about the plot at all yet, because it's The Plot.  It's The Rom-Com Plot.  "Oh wow, this person is straight-laced! This person is a wild partier! Can they make it work!??! Yes they can.  Just stop drinking and switch over to monogamy and blam! Happy!" This movie has a slightly more interesting variation on The Plot in that the girl is the wild crazy one and the guy is the conservative monogamous one, but the closer the movie gets to the part of The Plot where the characters have The Falling Out that they totally won't recover from and will ruin things forever and the tension is real and not tedious, the less it matters.  Then The Falling Out happens and just like with every rom-com I instantly lose all interest because the movie is telling me in no uncertain terms that it is taking the time I could be using to laugh at more rad dick jokes and replacing it with fucking nothing.  After The Falling Out comes The Reconciliation, at which point you could put in the ending to any rom-com and it would fit perfectly because they're all the same.  No amount of LeBron James will change that fact, or change how frustrating it is to constantly see movies that are 80% great and 20% the most boring, predictable garbage ever.  Why does the movie about two people raising a kid together have to end with them getting married and starting a family?  Why does the movie about two friends having casual sex have to end with them getting married and starting a family? Why do we need EIGHTY OF THE SAME MOVIE ABOUT THE SAME WHITE PEOPLE?!?

So Trainwreck, a movie that's mostly awesome, winds up only being pretty okay.  And that's a darn Shame...y Schumer BOOM I SAVED IT

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