HBO Max has been pushing this movie on be for a few weeks and I finally decided to watch it. It has MIchael Douglas and Robert Downey Jr in it, two actors I like, so I figure it is worth watching. Plot is a college instructor-writer has a series of mishaps due to bad decisions over one fateful weekend. Ok cool.
So before I watched it, I decided to google it to get a sense of how well received the movie was. I went to Wikipedia, and the Wikipedia page told me two things:
1 - The movie was 'critically acclaimed'. Movie critics loved it.
2 - It was a box office bomb. The budget was $55M and it made $33M worldwide in theaters.
Odd to see a movie that the critics loved, but the audience hated.
So I started watching it. 15 mins in I could already see why audiences hated it.
Micheal Douglas' character pulls double-duty; He is the film's protagonist, but also pseudo narrator, explaining who the main characters are in the film, his character's relationship to them, etc.
Douglas is a writer. Robert Downey Jr plays his agent. There is a big writer's conference in town that weekend, and Downey is flying in to visit Douglas and to try to get him to finish his latest book.
Downey arrives in town with a transvestite he picked up on the plane. Later, Downey seduces a male student of Douglas', after Douglas asks him to leave him alone, because the kid is 'confused enough as it is'. So the next morning, Douglas goes to his guest room in his house, and there is his agent and his male student in bed together, giggling. Douglas says good morning to both, and walks off as if this is perfectly normal and acceptable behavior.
Sidenote: Remember when @Mdfgator told us that all gays are born that way? The movie paints the male student as not only choosing to be gay, but being 'emotionally confused' before he made that choice. The movie basically said you had to have mental problems in order to choose to be gay.
And there's drug use throughout the film. And adultery, and killing animals, etc etc.
Basically, the film is a love letter to liberal values and morality. And all the while, Micheal Douglas' character is there to ensure us that all this debauchery and perversion is.....perfectly normal. Douglas encounters all this, and simply shrugs it off as 'just another day'.
Which is why the audience hated the film. Douglas as narrator is also supposed to be the stand-in for the audience. We need Douglas' character to have the same reaction to his environment that we would have if we were there.
The average person would be absolutely disgusted by what they saw happening in this film. They would not want to associate with these people.
But liberals would love it. This is why critics loved the film. Because most critics are raving liberals, and to them, normalizing such perversion is a wonderful thing.
So I tapped out after about 45 mins. I kept waiting for someone to point out how horribly immoral everyone in the film was being, but it never happened.
That's why it was a bomb. America's values are not Hollywood's values.
So before I watched it, I decided to google it to get a sense of how well received the movie was. I went to Wikipedia, and the Wikipedia page told me two things:
1 - The movie was 'critically acclaimed'. Movie critics loved it.
2 - It was a box office bomb. The budget was $55M and it made $33M worldwide in theaters.
Odd to see a movie that the critics loved, but the audience hated.
So I started watching it. 15 mins in I could already see why audiences hated it.
Micheal Douglas' character pulls double-duty; He is the film's protagonist, but also pseudo narrator, explaining who the main characters are in the film, his character's relationship to them, etc.
Douglas is a writer. Robert Downey Jr plays his agent. There is a big writer's conference in town that weekend, and Downey is flying in to visit Douglas and to try to get him to finish his latest book.
Downey arrives in town with a transvestite he picked up on the plane. Later, Downey seduces a male student of Douglas', after Douglas asks him to leave him alone, because the kid is 'confused enough as it is'. So the next morning, Douglas goes to his guest room in his house, and there is his agent and his male student in bed together, giggling. Douglas says good morning to both, and walks off as if this is perfectly normal and acceptable behavior.
Sidenote: Remember when @Mdfgator told us that all gays are born that way? The movie paints the male student as not only choosing to be gay, but being 'emotionally confused' before he made that choice. The movie basically said you had to have mental problems in order to choose to be gay.
And there's drug use throughout the film. And adultery, and killing animals, etc etc.
Basically, the film is a love letter to liberal values and morality. And all the while, Micheal Douglas' character is there to ensure us that all this debauchery and perversion is.....perfectly normal. Douglas encounters all this, and simply shrugs it off as 'just another day'.
Which is why the audience hated the film. Douglas as narrator is also supposed to be the stand-in for the audience. We need Douglas' character to have the same reaction to his environment that we would have if we were there.
The average person would be absolutely disgusted by what they saw happening in this film. They would not want to associate with these people.
But liberals would love it. This is why critics loved the film. Because most critics are raving liberals, and to them, normalizing such perversion is a wonderful thing.
So I tapped out after about 45 mins. I kept waiting for someone to point out how horribly immoral everyone in the film was being, but it never happened.
That's why it was a bomb. America's values are not Hollywood's values.
