I liked how Year One had a sort of allegorical feel to it in terms of religion and authority, even though this allegory wasn't exactly very deep. The movie also had a sort of episodic feel to it, like a series of comics or YouTube videos; in fact it almost would have felt better if it was released as a series of YouTube videos, although I'm sure it would have made like --$84847236590 in profit, because this movie definitely looked pretty damn high budget, which is a shame considering its overall quality. Anyways, there were just little tidbits that didn't add to the movie at all and just went nowhere. Cameos were had for the sake of cameos [i.e., Paul Rudd's 5-minute appearance as Abel]. There were a few funny lines and segments scattered throughout the movie, but overall it was boring and just not very funny at all. [SCORE: +0.6
The Hangover was exactly what I expected it to be, which doesn't say much for it. In essence, it's a bro-movie.
[best urbandictionary.com definition I could find of "bro": "An alpha male idiot. This is the derogatory sense of the word (common usage in the western US): white, 16-25 years old, inarticulate, belligerent, talks about nothing but chicks and beer, drives a jacked up truck that’s plastered with stickers, has rich dad that owns a dealership or construction business and constantly tells this to chicks at parties, is into extreme sports... identifies excessively with brand names, spends an... [absurd] amount of money on clothes and obsesses over his appearance..."]
While I don't think the characters in the movie fall into this stereotype, I feel that this was most definitely the majority of the intended audience when the movie was made. I suppose as someone who doesn't drink and has never "blacked out" or had a hangover or anything of that sort, I couldn't really identify with the characters as much, but still, saving any "Anyone who would get into this situation is a moron" mentalities, I just could not get into this movie. They took every typical "Dude, what happened last night?" circumstance and magnified it to a level of Hollywood ridiculousness. Now, this ridiculousness was probably the best and funniest part of the movie. There's a tiger in their bathroom. There's a baby in the cupboard. They have a stolen police car. There's a naked Asian man in the trunk of their real car. These situations just keep piling up as the movie goes on and they realize more and more about the night before and search for their missing friend. I'm a fan of ridiculous, so these parts were, indeed, funny. Also, Zach Galifianakis' character had 90% of the hilarious lines in the movie, and his dim-witted character was very lovable. However, none of the other characters in the movie were even like-able. They weren't exactly very unique. There's the aforementioned loveable token moron. The prude guy who has to lie to his girlfriend about going to Las Vegas so she doesn't get mad. The crazy party guy who's always telling the prude guy to chill out and have fun. The mediator middle-of-the-road guy who goes missing after his Vegas bachelor party goes haywire. WOAH, UNIQUE. As the credits approached, I was informed that they were the best part of the movie. I disagreed profoundly. Alongside the credits, a slideshow was shown of the night before, consisting of typical, moronic, drunk party pictures. Of course, they're upgraded to the same level of ridiculousness of the rest of the movie, but I still didn't find it very funny. Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention. One redeeming quality of the movie, however, was the sort of hero's journey that the prude character went on, from being sheltered and controlled by his judgmental, hypocritical wife to being independent and free-thinking. In the end, the movie probably just wasn't for me, and maybe that's okay, but I just thought it was pretty lame. [SCORE: +0.5
--Jon
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