Dick in a Box
I received a rather peculiar e-mail this evening from a person who claims to be Cupid. I have no idea if he’s really drunk or really crazy. But he’s got good diction and a wicked sense of humor. Enjoy!
Valentine’s Day’s cancelled this year, kids. Sorry. I know, I know, I’m sad to see it go, too.
But what the hell else am I supposed to do? I just got back from watching the NUMBER ONE MOVIE IN AMERICA, No Strings Attached, with that Black Swan chick and That 70s Pun’k. Forgive the lapse; their names will come to me eventually, but Cupid’s a little drunk.
Anyway, yeah, the movie. What the fuck is wrong with you people that the trailers didn’t keep you away from any theatre showing this tired, tired nonsense? Sure, my auditorium was practically empty, but I at least have the excuse of passing through Chi-town on Playoff day (Go Bears!!!).
(Yeah, I wrote that last bit after the game was over. The Monsters of the Midway choked the big one and I wrote that shit anyway. Fuck football. You know that die-hard sports fans are half the reason we end up with these awful romantic comedies in the first place? This sickening “’We’re’ gonna win”, “’Let’s’ kick Green Bay’s asses” attitude—shared, mind you, by the most unathletic, alcoholic douchebags you’d ever hope to meet—drives me up a wall. The other half are these mewling girl-women whose expectations are so irreversibly low that they think the characters Katherine Heigl plays in the movies are people to be admired. Wanna know why Cupid wears the diaper, children? It’s 'cause Grampa Love-bow’s constantly shitting himself in disbelief!)
There’s a great movie that I wanna tell you about, called No Strings Attached. In it, Asshead Kupchuck plays a production assistant on a Glee-type TV show (that’ll never feel dated). He breaks up with his girlfriend and she almost immediately starts sleeping with his dad, a washed-up (but still somehow Tom-Cruise-rich) TV star, played by Kevin Kline. The movie takes place over a long weekend in which the son and the father heal decades-old wounds and dad realizes that he’s acting out his fear of aging in all the wrong ways. Yeah, there’s some madcap Viagra gags that are right out of Meet the Fockers, but all in all, it’s a decent…
Goddammit, that was the dream I had when I fell asleep during act two. No, no. This is the movie where Kelso and Princess Padme are fuck buddies who don’t want to get romantically involved, but they do want to avoid vibrators and coming in socks. So they use each other as human Real Dolls for a few weeks, before—
SPOILER ALERT!!!
One of them falls for the other. I won’t tell you who falls first (Ashton), but I will say that the people around me were very happy when, at the end---
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!
(Six ex-clams lets you know I’m serious. Do you like that? Ex-clams? I’m bringin’ punctuation to the street, bitch!)
At the end they end up together, and there was a lot of “Aaaaaawwwww”-ing in the theatre by a bunch of love-sick twats who apparently hadn’t paid a second’s attention to the preceding 100 minutes. If they had, they’d have realized that Asher should’ve ended up with his fellow production assistant, the lovely, talented, and big-hearted Lucy (Lake Bell). But, no, he convinces The Professional’s little sidekick to make a go at a relationship, even though we’re given no indication—during the entire movie—that she has any semblance of a soul. She’s a cold, humorless doctor, in the proud tradition of the Tampax-and-Haagen-Dazs-sponsored Grey’s Anatomy—which stars Katherine Heigl.
Seriously, this movie is shit.
It’s way too long and way too insulting to anyone who’s ever been in love or known a gay person (I understand the Gay Best Friend has become a staple of these awful movies, but can we at least get one who doesn’t—with every frame of their performance—send the prospect of Gay Rights directly to the back of the line?).
I’ve been in this business for centuries. I’ve seen all kinds of love between all kinds of people. And I’ve never seen this large a collection of disconnected, clueless freaks—not even at a 9/12 Project rally. You know, not even Butterfly Effect’s best friends are decent people? One’s probably a stand-up comic in real life (sorry, I don’t give enough of a shit to Google his un-funny ass), and the other one’s Ludacris—who’s given up being tough—and black, apparently—to be the polo-shirt-wearing “Hell naw” third wheel in a white-guy bromance. It’s more embarrassing than Will Smith’s performance in Hitch—and that’s fuckin’ saying something.
Believe it or not, I watch all of these movies. Really. I have to. It’s in my contract. Being Cupid means staying on top of the state of modern relationships. And a pretty good indicator of where the public’s at is the kind of mass media they support. The last truly magical, honest movie about and for adults that could be considered a romantic comedy was Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life—and that was twenty years ago!
The last two decades have brought us nothing but stories about empty, career-driven women who don’t know how to love and the emotionally-retarded man-child slackers that eventually rescue them from marrying the educated, well-to-do guy (who, of course, has to be a villain, because only squares have 9-to-5s and think bong-hits are lame).
All this is my long-winded, drunken way of telling you that Valentine’s Day is cancelled. You don’t get it back until you send all these bitches packing. And by “bitches”, I don’t just mean rom-coms, but Natalie Portman, too. I saw her on the red carpet at last week’s Golden Globes—mere minutes before Ricky Gervais called her on her home-wrecking, shucks-I’m-a-mom-now-it’s-soooooo-amazing horseshit—promoting this movie. She proudly talked about it being a sharp gender-reversal picture.
“It’s, like,” she said, “You know how guys are always the big jerks in movies? Well, now it’s the girls’ turn.”
As if giving the antagonist a vagina is enough to make someone forget that they’ve seen all of this lazy, sexist, unfunny sitcom crap a bajillion times before, for 110 minutes.
So, before I say something really inappropriate, I’ll close with a promise to you, my beloved human race. If you’ll stop lapping up this crap like it’s a fifty-nine-cent chalupa—which means no renting, no borrowing, no watching it on FX—then you can have Valentine’s Day back. You may not miss it at first: “Oh, it’s just a cheesy corporate holiday made for selling cards and candies.”
Do you know what cards and candies and the occasional (meaning regular) “I love you” actually means? It means opening up the deepest, most vulnerable part of yourself to someone who wants to share their life with you (for two weeks or sixty years, it doesn’t matter) and saying, “Baby, I know neither of us is perfect, but I think we’re perfect together—and here’s proof that I went out of my way to not take you or the million wonderful things you do for me for granted.”
Love is full of strings, and they’re always attached. The idiots who made this movie see those strings as shackles, and not as the giddy, tingly embracing arms they really are.
I’m going to puke now.