On Sunday, I watched "2 Fast 2 Furious" on USA, which I had never seen. Everyone I know who's seen the movie advised me not to watch it, but because "The Fast and the Furious" was such a good guilty pleasure movie (nearly every line causes me to crack up in hysterics), I figured I'd give "2 Fast 2 Furious" a chance. Tyrese made a valiant effort to save the film ("[surveys beach] Man, it's a ho-asis in here, breh" and "Like I said, we hungry") but he wasn't able to replicate the moronic brilliance of Vin Diesel ("Ask any racer, any real racer. It doesn't matter if you win by an inch or a mile; winning's winning.")I figured I'd do an entry with some of my favorite guilty pleasure movies - to do research, I googled what other people listed as theirs, and found that most people have no concept of what a guilty pleasure movie is. People are listing things like "Zoolander" and "The Fifth Element". Just because a movie doesn't aspire to win Academy Awards doesn't make it a guilty pleasure. I'm not at all embarrassed to tell people I like "Zoolander" - a guilty pleasure movie is something you like, would watch if it was on TV, but would be a little bit wary of saying you liked it to someone you just met. By default, if a movie is widely popular, it's not a guilty pleasure, even if the movie is stupid.
Anyways, this is not a ranking by any means - guilty pleasure movies are a very individual thing, and your lists are likely very different from mine.
D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994) - This is considered a good movie by enough people that I thought hard about not including it, but it's 4.7/10 on imdb, which is pretty crappy. I first watched this movie on an airplane, but didn't pay for a headset, so I watched it completely without sound. Still had a great time, and understood everything that was happening. I finally saw it with sound a couple years later - suffice it so say, sound is completely unnecessary for this movie, except I finally learned why Dave kept joking about his "knuckle puck" that time we tried to play street hockey. Who can forget Adam Banks trying to play with a hurt wrist to impress the scouts, or the completely unnecessary Asian figure skater? The best line of this movie comes when the Iceland coach blames his star for the loss: [Wolf] "Gunnar, you lost it for me." [Gunnar, spitefully] "You lost it for yourself." 
Volcano (1997) - Sometimes I think I'm the only person alive who even remembers this movie. Anytime I tell someone I like it, they go, "Oh yeah! I saw that, with Pierce Brosnan!" No, people. Pierce Brosnan is the star of "Dante's Peak", also released in 1997. (Apparently in the late-1990s, Hollywood studios saw nothing wrong with releasing duplicate movies at the same time - other examples include 1998 summer asteroid flicks "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" and the dueling Steve Prefontaine films "Prefontaine" and "Without Limits".) Volcano is about a volcano emerging from underground in the center of Los Angeles and spewing lava! Then they have to divert the lava using a series of canals! How no one can remember such a brilliant plot is beyond me. It's an idiotic storyline, but the acting is better than you'd think for a movie like this (Tommy Lee Jones, Don Cheadle) and the movie ended with a stroke of genius. Being set in LA, there's a lot of racial conflict throughout the movie, but when the volcano starts spewing ash, everyone becomes the same gray color, as they hug and rejoice. The hilariously bad "we're all people" visual symbolism had me both cracking up in my seat and heartwarmed. A master stroke by an underappreciated bad movie.
Drumline (2002) - TBS first aired this a couple years ago - I turned on the TV and spent the first 15 minutes wondering what movie it was, finally realizing that it was "Drumline". Then I didn't have anything else to do or watch, so I watched another 20 minutes. I missed the first 15, so now I was 50 minutes into "Drumline". I started reasoning, "you're already 50 minutes into the movie, you can't stop now". Before I knew it, I had watched all of "Drumline". And TBS literally won't stop airing this movie - it's been on like 300 times since. I can't explain it - I know it sucks, yet I can't not watch for some reason. I need to petition TBS to stop airing it, I think I have some kind of problem.
Tango & Cash (1989) - Sly Stallone. Kurt Russell. One guy is supposed to be a smooth, Armani-suit wearing cop, and the other is supposed to be a dirty, disheveled, long-haired cop from the streets. Who would you have play which role? It's a tough question, because either way it's ridiculous, but this movie went with Stallone as the smooth guy. I love the sheer ridiculousness of seeing these two guys interact with each other - especially because Stallone seems to be really trying to act, while Russell knows this is a stupid movie and is phoning it in from the start. Best part: the evil villain has a rat maze, and he manipulates the rats into traps, symbolic of what he will do to Stallone and Russell. Genius.
The Big Hit (1998) - I just looked at his imdb page - Mark Wahlberg has been in a ton of decent or good movies (The Departed, I Heart Huckabees, The Italian Job, The Perfect Storm, Three Kings, The Basketball Diaries), but this isn't one of them. The story revolves around Wahlberg being a hitman but pretending to lead a normal life with a Jewish fiancée, and then he and other hitmen kidnap this daughter of a rich guy who actually went bankrupt but is also the god-daughter of the hitmen's boss, who now is trying to kill Wahlberg and the other hitmen, and then the other hitmen turn on Wahlberg and try to kill him so there is a lot of killing to be done but in the meantime Wahlberg is under pressure to cook a Kosher dinner and happens to be falling in love with the girl he kidnaps. And this guy from the video store calls him a lot to return a movie he forgot to return (seriously, there's like 8 scenes devoted to this "subplot"). Why do I watch it? Because I think China Chow is really cute/hot in it. Yep. That's all there is to it.
Turner and Hooch (1989) - Tom Hanks fights crime with a slobbering dog named Hooch! Hooch even like, wears sunglasses during stakeouts. If you don't like this movie, you must be some kind of weird animal-hater. I love the name Hooch, but the name is also a problem - hard to say you're a fan of "Turner and Hooch" and keep a straight face. Anyways, the movie also stars Carl Winslow (playing a cop of course) and Craig T. Nelson of "Coach". This movie was sort of a launching pad to greatness for everyone involved. It really showcased Hanks, who has lots of scenes of "dialogue" where he's the only guy talking ("Don't eat the car! Not the car! Oh, what am I yelling at you for? You're a dog!"). If you can do scenes like that, Forrest Gump is a walk in the park.We'll end with my favorite quote from "The Fast and the Furious":
Johnny Tran: [Dom walks away] "TORETTO! TORETTO! SWAT came into my HOUSE, disreSPECTEed my whole family because somebody narc'd me out! And you know what? IT...WAS YOU!"
[Dom punches Tran and a brawl ensues]
Dom: "I never narc’d on NOBODY! I never narc’d on NO-BODY!"
[Dom punches Tran and a brawl ensues]
Dom: "I never narc’d on NOBODY! I never narc’d on NO-BODY!"
14 comments:
i was so impressed by the first two fast and the furious movies that i gave tokyo drift a chance. i was not happy. it wasn't laughably bad like the first two--it was just plain bad. the only redeeming factor was the cute japanese girl who was part of the main character's crew. i kept my eyes locked on that one, even when she was shoved way off to the side of the screen in most of the scenes. and the highlight of the movie was definitely her only speaking line, which consisted of: "Hey!" just awesome.
still, if they come out with a fourth one, i'll probably watch it. do you have any movies like that, where you know you should just walk away, but you just can't?
My pick is Freddie Prinze Jr and Jessica Biel's master performance in Summer Catch
the best part of Volcano is when one guy saves another in the subway and has to leap off the subway into molten lava to get the guy to safety. Then, since he jumps into lava, his legs melt and he dies. This is funny because L.A. has no subway.
also, what's up with don cheadle and single-word movies involving racial tension in los angeles? volcano, crash, traffic? and i even think he was in a movie that was actually called "colors" that was also set in L.A. and featured racial issues.
Isn't the red line a subway in LA?
please, guilty pleasures are things that you should be absolutely embarassed to admit. your movies don't qualify. in fact, the only true guilty pleasures are chick flicks. my picks: legally blonde and the cutting edge.
I'm not that embarrassed to like a chick flick - there's some that are good, like Cutting Edge.
Yeah, Don Cheadle was in "Colors" - pretty good movie.
I don't think these movies are guilty pleasures. They seem like guilty pleasures b/c Fx and TBS show these movies over and over and over. I think that repetition results in us thinking the movies are crap b/c they're shown so often. The act of watching Fx, TBS is the real guilty pleasure.
I thought the Big Hit was a great movie btw. All star cast with mark and lou diamond phillips...christina applegate. Plus there's the black dude from star trek deep space 9...and a japanese guy that created a movie called "The Golden Shower" or some crazy thing. And that half asian girl which Shawn brought up when we talked about this movie back in '03. 4 stars out of 5 for movies shown on Fx, TBS
For those of you who claim these are universally regarded as good movies, I encourage you to check user ratings of these films on yahoo, or rottentomatoes, or imdb. For perspective, rottentomatoes.com has Spiderman at 90%, Zoolander at 63%, Blue Crush at 62% - The Big Hit gets 38%, Volcano checks in at 35% and Tango & Cash gets 33%.
So it's not like if you walked around talking about how awesome you thought these movies were, everyone would light up in unison and agree. If any of you don't agree these are guilty pleasures, it's possibly because you also enjoy these movies (whether intentionally or not), but you are in a small minority. Most people don't like these movies, and telling those people you do marks you as someone with poor taste.
As for the question of movies I should walk away from, but just can't - pretty much any sports movie. You can get me to watch any sports movie ever made, no matter how bad. Like the Marlon Wayans basketball movie "The 6th Man", or Stallone's "Driven", or "Rookie of the Year". Just about the only one I wouldn't watch is "Juwanna Mann", but otherwise, I can't stay away from sports movies.
this is fun, you should do this with other categories like music.
if you've got beef, you better grill it up and eat it.
orlando jones is so clever with that line
drumline is great (wait I wasnt supposed to say that out loud)
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