Bad Movies

Hello, hungry people.

My friend, the acclaimed magician/author, Jim Swain, is responsible for this joke:

A guy comes home from work and his wife greets him at the door wearing sexy lingerie and a come-hither look.

“I want you to make love to me like they do in the movies,” she tells him.

So the guy goes for it. He rips off her clothes and they make love all over the house — in the shower, the bedrooms, on the kitchen counters — until he collapses, exhausted.

Next morning, he wakes up and sees that her closet is empty. She has packed her bags and is gone.

The guy is beside himself. He calls a friend and tells him what happened, that his wife asked him to make love like they do in the movies. And then she left.

“Why would she do that?” the friend asks.

“Well,” the guy says, “I guess we don’t like the same movies.”

***

Which is exactly the situation around our place.

No, my wife hasn’t left me. Nor has she ever greeted me at the door wearing next to nothing when I came home from work. That we both work from home might explain it, although probably not.

But when it comes to movies or TV shows? We are vast solar systems apart.

“You like the sick, weird, dark stuff,” Debbie accused me, rightly, the other day.

“And you like the upbeat, happy-ending, Hallmark stuff,” I countered, to no objection.

Case in point: “Pluribus,” a recent series about a disgruntled writer who is immune to a “happiness virus” that has left most of the people on Earth in a state of mindless bliss. It checks all the boxes for me — sick, weird, dark. Also, the disgruntled writer, a redundant term if ever there was one, is played by Rhea Seehorn, who was terrific in “Better Call Saul” (more sick, weird, dark) and eminently watchable in anything.

Rhea Seehorn channeling my wife watching “Pluribus”

We were about halfway through the first episode — people going into convulsions and dying, bodies getting hauled away, the plot growing delightfully more absurd — when Debbie began fidgeting and sighing the kind of exasperated sighs that can’t be ignored until I finally said: “You don’t like this, do you?”

“No,” she said. “I hate it.”

Which brings us to Today’s Poll.

Debbie and I have been married for 47 years. This means we’ve both made concessions in the terms of our ongoing peace negotiations, especially when it comes to what we watch. I’m not saying that she is Putin to my Zelensky, but the fact that I’ve yielded vast territory over the years speaks for itself.

In this particular instance, I chose Option #3. Because there are more important issues for married folks to argue about than what movies to watch, such as the proper way to load a dishwasher and who left the car-key fob in their pocket and it went through the wash and now it will cost $400 to replace. Also, it would be wrong to stalk off to another room to watch what you want to watch because watching movies should be a communal spousal activity. Like arguing.

***

So we flipped the channel to a frothy little number called “Champagne Problems.”

Spoller: Happy ending ahead.

Allow me to summarize the plot: A young woman (Minka Kelly) who works for a venture capital firm goes to Paris to negotiate the purchase of a winery that has been in the same family for generations. The night before the big meeting she meets a handsome young Frenchman (Tom Wozniczka) in a bookstore who offers to show her around the city. They hit it off and wind up sleeping together. So, yeah, this is more like a Hallmark movie with sex.

The next morning, the young woman wakes up, discovers she’s overslept and rushes off without saying goodbye to the young Frenchman. She makes it to the meeting where the winery owner apologizes that his son and heir to the business is running a little late. And who should walk in the door but, you guessed it … the young Frenchman.

Because this is what happens in upbeat movies with happy endings. Coincidences of preposterous proportions. Such coincidences also happen in sick, weird, dark movies, but at least with all the sickness and weirdness and darkness going on you have a better chance of staying awake.

Meaning, I can’t tell you how “Champagne Problems” ends because I fell asleep. So did my wife. Which is what almost always happens when we watch anything. Granted, we do most all of our watching in bed. And that leads to other things, but mostly sleeping.

***

So we have a lot of unfinished movies in the queue.

Like “F1.” This is the Brad Pitt vehicle about, well, vehicles. In this case, gazillion-dollar Formula 1 racing cars. They called it “F1” because “Movie Made Using the Exact Same Formula as ‘Top Gun: Maverick But With Cars’ ” was too long for the marquee.

“F1,” a movie in which Brad Pitt’s eyes do most of the acting.

I don’t know much about Formula 1 racing, but I’m told it gets its name from a complex set of rules, the “formula,” that all participants must follow. Apparently that formula is: 1 part clichés + 1 part Brad Pitt looking concerned + 1 part audiences waking up confused about what lap they’re on.

The main plot line, as far as I can tell, revolves around how much air should be in the tires.

They should have called it Formula ZZZ because my wife and I fell asleep watching it on three consecutive nights. We still don’t know how it ends. Does Brad Pitt die in a fiery crash? I won’t say I hope so, but he does owe us something for those three nights we’ll never get back in our lives.

***

“F1” was a bad movie. Meaning, it was a movie for which we had high expectations and which turned out to be a total waste of time.

But it’s not a Bad Movie. There’s a big difference.

A Bad Movie is a movie for which you have extremely low expectations, you watch it because you just stumbled across it, there’s nothing else to watch, and it turns out to be not nearly as bad as you thought it would be, although it’s still pretty bad.

Bad Movies are far superior to bad movies. They are the kinds of movies that my wife and I can both agree upon. Indeed, we sometimes observe what we call “Bad Movie Saturday,” which starts with my wife greeting me in sexy lingerie and a come-hither look picking out a stupid-looking movie at random, a movie we know nothing about, a movie that would seem to have no redeeming qualities, and then delighting in the fact that it turns out to be better than we thought it would be.

Our all-time favorite Bad Movie, the one that sets the standard, is “Drillbit Taylor,” featured at the top of this post. It got lousy reviews when it came out in 2008, an average two out of five stars on all those rating sites, which is our sweet spot for Bad Movies.

The plot: A homeless guy living in a Santa Monica park (Owen Wilson) answers an ad for a bodyguard placed by three high school freshmen who are getting bullied by upperclassmen. He fakes his credentials (“I protected Sylvester Stallone. Not as tough as he looks.”) and succeeds not only in giving the three young guys confidence to take on their tormentors, but wins the heart of the beautiful high-school English teacher (Leslie Mann.)

Yes, a happy ending. So rather than taking your chances on highly rated movies that are bound to let you down, I suggest you watch “Drillbit Taylor” right now.

Meanwhile, I’m going in the other room to finish “Pluribus.”

***

Thanks for dropping by Bob’s Diner. In order for me to waste more of my valuable time watching Bad Movies, I ask that you consider becoming a paid subscriber. Based on my current productivity, or lack thereof, it works out on a yearly basis to about 40 cents a post, compared to the $300 million it cost to make “F1.” You’d be a fool not to jump on this bargain.