This Year's Juno

A quick jog of your memory: I HATED the movie Juno. A lot.

For a long time, I wondered if I would ever want to leave a theater more than I wanted to leave when I saw Juno. It was almost like a masochistic desire to be able to top that miserable experience with an even worse one. Last week, I saw Anvil and it was like the anti-Juno. I didn’t want the movie to end. I didn’t want the experience to be over which is pretty monumental considering how much I hate the movie-going experience.

But then yesterday, I finally got to match, if not top, my Juno-watching misery. I went to see The Hangover yesterday. It’s taken me over 18 hours to regain the ability to express my distaste for this movie outside of angry growls and exasperated sighs. What you need to keep in mind is a) my love and admiration for Zach Galifinakis has been very well documented here and b) Old School, also directed by Todd Phillips, is one of my Top 20 funny movies.

It’s easier for me to point out what I liked about The Hangover. I thought the Zach Galifinakis’s line about “Do you know if Haley’s Comet is tonight?” was pretty funny. I thought that Ed Helms’s “BOOM!” line towards the end was fairly amusing. That’s really kind of the sum total of high points from the entire movie for me. And those weren’t nearly high enough to redeem the staggeringly low points that took up 90% of the film’s running time.

The rest of the movie was made up of pratfalls, dumb physical comedy, “look at that hairy/fat guy’s bare ass!” shots and scenarios that manage (miraculously) to be both predictable and nearly impossible.

Congrats, Juno. You’ve been released from Joke Jail for time served. We’re gonna need your cell for The Hangover.