If you're not getting enough fat hatred and toxic messages about marriage being the ultimate goal for all women everywhere in your romantic comedies, then here is Good Luck Chuck to fix that for you!
Remake time!
Random Female Character: You're a lucky charm! You have sex with someone, then they find their true love. Isn't that how it works?
Male Protagonist: You know, that may be so. But while I have no issue with recreational sex, whether in general because I don't judge consenting adults or specifically in my own personal life, the fact remains that I do take issue with and am personally uninterested in sex where I would be actively being used for this supposed benefit, nor am I interested in having sex with women who do not genuinely want to have sex with me as a person as opposed to wanting to have sex with me as a concept, i.e., a "good luck charm".
Male Buddy Character: Still, don't you think you should test this on a totally undesirable fat woman?
Male Protagonist: No. The experiment would be meaningless, since I reject the idea that any human being is unlovable simply because they do not conform to mainstream standards of beauty, so if she married after having sex with me, that would not be proof of anything. Nor would her not marrying be an indication of anything; it is toxic to assume that all human beings desire a sexual soul-mate, or that such a discovery should universally result in marriage.
Furthermore, I am completely contemptuous of the idea that I should use her sexually in order to test something about myself. Even if she consents to the sex itself, my decision to use her as a litmus test would be deeply dehumanizing to another person, and would make me profoundly grody. I would rather live my life choosing to respect others and expect respect from them in return, than to use others and to encourage them to use me in turn -- a choice that I think more profoundly affects my worth as a human being and my chances of finding a soul-mate (if that is, indeed, what I desire) than anything else.
39 comments:
UGH. I'm sort of relieved I only watched the trailer.
I have never watched this, but I was in or near a room where someone was watching it and I'm afraid some of it got on me. Apparently JA's character likes penguins, which seems like it could be good, but probably isn't.
I have never watched this, but I was in or near a room where someone was watching it and I'm afraid some of it got on me. Apparently JA's character likes penguins, which seems like it could be good, but probably isn't.
Your memory is not faulty; I remember Preview #2 as well. There are bits of it in this one, with Jessica Alba spilling a drink on him, electrocuting him with the car battery, and losing her skirt, but I remember the preview you describe where that was presented as the entire plot. I agree that there were marketing shenanigans involved.
And, yes, speaking as a member of a religion that acknowledges the existence and practice of magic, I am SO TIRED of it being a plot device wielded by truly terrible female characters who think nothing of fucking with peoples' lives because womenamitight?? Note from the wikipedia that not only did she curse him at 11 -- she MAINTAINED the curse for the entirety of his adulthood until the end of the movie.
I think it does have things to offer, just less and less as time goes on.
And, also, what it has to offer might not always be what they're selling. I personally enjoyed Avatar* more than a bit, but even for someone who hated the plot and (understandably) Jake Sully I feel like the visuals were something well worth partaking in, so if you put headphones on and listened to music while watching the movie in a theater, or put it on mute while watching it at home, I think you'd still get something worthwhile out of it.
Unfortunately I recommend it in Imax, which it isn't in at the moment, and failing that on bluray (which I don't have but did see a little bit of it in) because in standard DVD definition too much is lost of those visuals. The movie becomes completely different and far less engaging since it is, so much, a visual experience. (And it suddenly occurs to me that the movie probably sucks if you're blind. Even if you've got some kind of description to make it so you know what's going on on screen, without the visuals I think it'd be mediocre at absolute best.)
Avatar is the only thing I've seen where resolution makes that much of a difference for me. I know for other people it can be a big fracking deal for a lot of things, but only for Avatar have I had the experience, "In theaters it was awesome, on my TV screen via DVD it really, really isn't." And then later, "On someone else's TV screen via bluray it's a lot closer to capturing the awesomeness it had in the theater than the DVD was."
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* The movie, not the wholly unrelated series which I've been told is very good but never seen myself. I'm in a similar situation with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Heard it's very good, seen maybe two episodes.
I think it does have things to offer, just less and less as time goes on.
And, also, what it has to offer might not always be what they're selling. I personally enjoyed Avatar* more than a bit, but even for someone who hated the plot and (understandably) Jake Sully I feel like the visuals were something well worth partaking in, so if you put headphones on and listened to music while watching the movie in a theater, or put it on mute while watching it at home, I think you'd still get something worthwhile out of it.
Unfortunately I recommend it in Imax, which it isn't in at the moment, and failing that on bluray (which I don't have but did see a little bit of it in) because in standard DVD definition too much is lost of those visuals. The movie becomes completely different and far less engaging since it is, so much, a visual experience. (And it suddenly occurs to me that the movie probably sucks if you're blind. Even if you've got some kind of description to make it so you know what's going on on screen, without the visuals I think it'd be mediocre at absolute best.)
Avatar is the only thing I've seen where resolution makes that much of a difference for me. I know for other people it can be a big fracking deal for a lot of things, but only for Avatar have I had the experience, "In theaters it was awesome, on my TV screen via DVD it really, really isn't." And then later, "On someone else's TV screen via bluray it's a lot closer to capturing the awesomeness it had in the theater than the DVD was."
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* The movie, not the wholly unrelated series which I've been told is very good but never seen myself. I'm in a similar situation with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Heard it's very good, seen maybe two episodes.
Or is she supposed to be just so desperate for sex that she doesn't care?
That's the implication that I come away with, and it's massively offensive.
It ties in with the idea that she is un-marriable and un-lovable; if NO ONE wants to have sex with her, then clearly she'll be so relieved and ecstatic at an offer for sex that she won't notice or care that the guy making the offer is experiencing visible distress at the thought.
It's such a bullshit premise and so contemptible.
Or is she supposed to be just so desperate for sex that she doesn't care?
That's the implication that I come away with, and it's massively offensive.
It ties in with the idea that she is un-marriable and un-lovable; if NO ONE wants to have sex with her, then clearly she'll be so relieved and ecstatic at an offer for sex that she won't notice or care that the guy making the offer is experiencing visible distress at the thought.
It's such a bullshit premise and so contemptible.
CN: Misogyny, Racial othering
Well useful isn't as easily entertaining.
Yeah, the whole thing with curses can go under the supernatural femme fatale umbrella. Though generally women placing curses tend to be dying Romani women (not sure if the more general/common term is acceptable just not gonna use it to be safe.)
There is dividing line where you have the sexualized and irrational, white femme fatale versus the elderly, vengeful and foreign woman. Just looking at tvtropes, it seems like the Romani Curse is a lot more common than the Femme fatale version, though the Romani Curse is almost unilaterally horror based.
Also worth noting that apparently Jessica Alba did not like making this movie. She was quoted as saying, "It's porn. There were all these actresses who got conned into being completely naked." Which is sad but not surprising.
CN: Misogyny, Racial othering
Well useful isn't as easily entertaining.
Yeah, the whole thing with curses can go under the supernatural femme fatale umbrella. Though generally women placing curses tend to be dying Romani women (not sure if the more general/common term is acceptable just not gonna use it to be safe.)
There is dividing line where you have the sexualized and irrational, white femme fatale versus the elderly, vengeful and foreign woman. Just looking at tvtropes, it seems like the Romani Curse is a lot more common than the Femme fatale version, though the Romani Curse is almost unilaterally horror based.
Also worth noting that apparently Jessica Alba did not like making this movie. She was quoted as saying, "It's porn. There were all these actresses who got conned into being completely naked." Which is sad but not surprising.
Speaking of which, have you every noticed how many more people there are who can magically impart curses than people who can use magic to do something useful?
Speaking of which, have you every noticed how many more people there are who can magically impart curses than people who can use magic to do something useful?
Oh, and to be clear, the previews I saw back in the day didn't have Chuck enjoying his good luckness before he met The One and suddenly couldn't have sex with her lest his bizarre ability cause her to move on to someone else. The movies presented were:
1 Man is for some mystical reason in this position: He has sex with a woman, she dumps him, she meets her true love. He never has a relationship that lasts longer than one sexual encounter. He meets his Twu Wuv but is terrified that if they have sex she'll dump him and move on to someone else just like everyone else has before. How will he ever deal with this conundrum?
2 Woman is cursed, not just a clumsy female Romantic comedy character but that taken up to 11 and extending outward to other people (Chuck being blown across the room by the force of an electrical charge was in this trailer, for example), with bad luck on all fronts. The title seems to be dealing with the fact that Chuck, in love with this woman, is putting himself in the center of the shitstorm of bad luck she brings her way via said curse.
What one might notice in the above is that there's absolutely nothing suggesting that these two things are the same movie.
Indeed in preview 1 Woman seemed to be a perfectly ordinary love interest with the only complication being that the Man was cursed with, "If you have sex with someone they'll leave you in a real hurry. You are a stepping stone for your romantic partners whether they know it or not, not a destination," so it's hard to have the sexual relationship they both clearly want with that hanging over his head, and in preview 2 Man seemed to be a completely ordinary love interest and the only complication being that woman is cursed with bad luck be it clumsiness or electrical charges, or whatever else can go wrong usually in a physical manner that is most often painful but sometimes just painfully embarrassing.
Thus the movies presented were presented as completely different things and it actually took me a while of seeing previews over and over again to realize that the previews were in fact for a single movie.
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I'm honestly unsure that much of anyone who was sold on either of the advertised movies would like it when they found out what they were actually getting.
Movie one seems flatly contradicted by what's shown in the trailer here because it presented Chuck's mystical ability as a curse for him (his relationships always fail after sex), where the preview here seems to show him making full use of it to get plenty of otherwise meaningless sex. Thus those who saw preview 1 would be expecting a sympathetic Chuck who saw what was happening as something bad (my relationships always fail) not a way to have lots of sex. They clearly wouldn't get that.
Those expecting movie two would be expecting a relationship between a cursed woman and a man who is willing to weather the curse because true love. I'm not even sure if she's really cursed in the movie or just a standard clumsy protagonist. They certainly wouldn't expect that the movie would be focused on Chuck's "Have sex with me and you'll meet your true love," ability since they wouldn't have had an inkling that it existed.
That said, since it looks like a horrible movie, maybe marketing it as something(s) it's not was the best way to cut losses/make a profit.
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[Added:] And I wish I hadn't looked up what the movie is actually about. Chuck's ability is a curse, placed on him when he was 12 for refusing to have sex with an 11 year old (based on actress age, character age not listed in the description). The girl was a goth girl with a voodoo doll so clearly she could curse people and, since a preteen not wanting to have sex with another preteen is so very wrong, she did just that.
I hereby declare the actual movie fractally wrong.
Oh, and to be clear, the previews I saw back in the day didn't have Chuck enjoying his good luckness before he met The One and suddenly couldn't have sex with her lest his bizarre ability cause her to move on to someone else. The movies presented were:
1 Man is for some mystical reason in this position: He has sex with a woman, she dumps him, she meets her true love. He never has a relationship that lasts longer than one sexual encounter. He meets his Twu Wuv but is terrified that if they have sex she'll dump him and move on to someone else just like everyone else has before. How will he ever deal with this conundrum?
2 Woman is cursed, not just a clumsy female Romantic comedy character but that taken up to 11 and extending outward to other people (Chuck being blown across the room by the force of an electrical charge was in this trailer, for example), with bad luck on all fronts. The title seems to be dealing with the fact that Chuck, in love with this woman, is putting himself in the center of the shitstorm of bad luck she brings her way via said curse.
What one might notice in the above is that there's absolutely nothing suggesting that these two things are the same movie.
Indeed in preview 1 Woman seemed to be a perfectly ordinary love interest with the only complication being that the Man was cursed with, "If you have sex with someone they'll leave you in a real hurry. You are a stepping stone for your romantic partners whether they know it or not, not a destination," so it's hard to have the sexual relationship they both clearly want with that hanging over his head, and in preview 2 Man seemed to be a completely ordinary love interest and the only complication being that woman is cursed with bad luck be it clumsiness or electrical charges, or whatever else can go wrong usually in a physical manner that is most often painful but sometimes just painfully embarrassing.
Thus the movies presented were presented as completely different things and it actually took me a while of seeing previews over and over again to realize that the previews were in fact for a single movie.
-
I'm honestly unsure that much of anyone who was sold on either of the advertised movies would like it when they found out what they were actually getting.
Movie one seems flatly contradicted by what's shown in the trailer here because it presented Chuck's mystical ability as a curse for him (his relationships always fail after sex), where the preview here seems to show him making full use of it to get plenty of otherwise meaningless sex. Thus those who saw preview 1 would be expecting a sympathetic Chuck who saw what was happening as something bad (my relationships always fail) not a way to have lots of sex. They clearly wouldn't get that.
Those expecting movie two would be expecting a relationship between a cursed woman and a man who is willing to weather the curse because true love. I'm not even sure if she's really cursed in the movie or just a standard clumsy protagonist. They certainly wouldn't expect that the movie would be focused on Chuck's "Have sex with me and you'll meet your true love," ability since they wouldn't have had an inkling that it existed.
That said, since it looks like a horrible movie, maybe marketing it as something(s) it's not was the best way to cut losses/make a profit.
-
[Added:] And I wish I hadn't looked up what the movie is actually about. Chuck's ability is a curse, placed on him when he was 12 for refusing to have sex with an 11 year old (based on actress age, character age not listed in the description). The girl was a goth girl with a voodoo doll so clearly she could curse people and, since a preteen not wanting to have sex with another preteen is so very wrong, she did just that.
I hereby declare the actual movie fractally wrong.
Really the movie is a losing proposition from the words "Dane Cook" for me, since this kind of stuff is basically his comedy. He is one of those comedians that just kill funny and replaces it with a taxidermied husk full of nothing but othering tripe.
Really the movie is a losing proposition from the words "Dane Cook" for me, since this kind of stuff is basically his comedy. He is one of those comedians that just kill funny and replaces it with a taxidermied husk full of nothing but othering tripe.
CN: Rape, Rape Culture, Fat Shaming
Well unless you want to see Jessica Alba and Dane Cook role-play penguin sex, I think it does count as a bad thing.
The overweight woman is portrayed as completely lacking empathy or really social grace whatsoever. Of course Dane Cook has to seduce her using food. Finally, when the magic works on her personality does a 180 and she's playing footsie with generic NASCAR fan caricature.
This whole movie is representative of gross rape culture crap. I forgot to finish my point with that Jessica Alba quote, that it just goes to show how rape culture is so ingrained and acceptable, both in action and portrayal. In the movie, the sidekick commits rape by fraud. He pretends to be Dane Cook so he can get women to sleep with him. Then one of them ends up marrying him. I could tolerate that in a movie that makes a point, but this is a shitty comedy that rewards him for rape and makes it a joke. That is just sickening.
I've been going through the reviews for the movie, and I wish it was surprising how few of them mention any of this. One mentions some of this, but states that it is less important than the movie being boring. It's just really disappointing that boring counts for more than hateful.
Romani women (not sure if the more general/common term is acceptable just not gonna use it to be safe.)
Solid call. According to my friends who do have Romani heritage, the G-word is not their favorite.
Also worth noting that apparently Jessica Alba did not like making this movie she was quoted as saying, "It's porn. There were all these actresses who got conned into being completely naked." Which is sad but not surprising.
...Ew. Really, ew. I mean, I don't disapprove of people getting naked in general, but only if they were on-board with it from the get-go.
So... I couldn't get the trailer to play, so I went to another site to watch it, and now I'm sorry I did. Apparently being fat means you have zero table manners now? Also, I don't know which is worse: the idea that having sex with a fat woman makes him want to gag, or the idea that he's going to have sex with someone who makes him want to gag just to test this curse. Because both of those seem pretty awful. (Also-also, if a guy is visibly ill at the thought of "getting physical" with me, I... I don't think I'd want to go to bed with him. I'm just sayin', I don't think that would be a good decision for either of us.)
The scene where a man has to have sex with a woman he finds distasteful is one that crops up more often than I'm really comfortable with in these types of comedies, and it always bothers me. Because a) 99% of the time, he doesn't actually have to. He's deciding to do so for reasons of his own, and he needs to stop acting like the fucking victim. b) if he IS in fact being forced into this with no way out, there's a word for that, and it's not a word that lends itself to lighthearted comedy, and the movies need to recognize that. c) I honestly cannot understand why the "unattractive" woman in these scenarios doesn't just call it off - are we to believe she doesn't notice the guy's distress? Or is she supposed to be just so desperate for sex that she doesn't care? Again, I personally find it, uh, unsexy when my potential partner finds the thought of sex with me to be scary or disgusting, and even if he was willing to soldier on, I don't think I would be.
...wow. That is a much worse trailer than the one I remember seeing (which may have been Chris's #2, or may have been a fourth version). I got the impression that Good Luck Chuck was about a woman cursed with bad luck and a man who was a Ringworld-style* passive probability manipulator who decide to get together, hoping that being with each other will cause their abilities to cancel out and allow them to lead normal lives. I am disappointed to find this is not the case.
*If I remember Ringworld right. I read it/them in a somewhat patchwork manner long ago.
...wow. That is a much worse trailer than the one I remember seeing (which may have been Chris's #2, or may have been a fourth version). I got the impression that Good Luck Chuck was about a woman cursed with bad luck and a man who was a Ringworld-style* passive probability manipulator who decide to get together, hoping that being with each other will cause their abilities to cancel out and allow them to lead normal lives. I am disappointed to find this is not the case.
*If I remember Ringworld right. I read it/them in a somewhat patchwork manner long ago.
I'm so glad I said, "Hollywood's got nothing to offer me. Why bother with it?" years ago.
I'm so glad I said, "Hollywood's got nothing to offer me. Why bother with it?" years ago.
I remember this movie, which I have not seen, for seeing two trailers that advertised completely different movies and then realizing that they were both for the same movie. While this might be a good way to get people to pay money for a movie they would not actually like, a movie's success tends to live or die on word of mouth and pissing off your initial viewers by advertising for something that you're not actually going to provide seems a poor way of getting good word of mouth.
[Added:] That preview, which is truly awful (as were the others) seems to contain elements of both, so is probably more true to the actual movie.
Well, it's a much needed improvement.
Well, it's a much needed improvement.
Oh sheesh. I don't remember the ads for this movie at all and I'm glad. I think your spruced-up version is the closest I want to get to this steamy pile.
Oh sheesh. I don't remember the ads for this movie at all and I'm glad. I think your spruced-up version is the closest I want to get to this steamy pile.
Oh, and hi there, Clumsie the Female Romcom Character! Haven't seen you in a while!
Oh, and hi there, Clumsie the Female Romcom Character! Haven't seen you in a while!
LOL, yes! There's SO MUCH wrong with the trailer! We could do, like, eighteen posts on this movie alone!
I'd never heard of the original, but I'm pretty sure I still like your version better.
Ugh.
TRiG.
I'd never heard of the original, but I'm pretty sure I still like your version better.
Ugh.
TRiG.
I like your version better.
I like your version better.
Anyone want to wager that she thinks he's stalking her because he is?
That would be my guess.
It is certainly possible to mistakenly think someone is stalking you (say they've got a similar schedule and their favorite recreational bike path goes by your house) but I don't think a movie like this would pick up on such a case and it explicitly says he's seeking her out so it seems like actual stalking is almost certainly the cause for the belief he's stalking her. Having trouble of seeing a way things could work as described without actual stalking being involved.
One of my favourite headlines from the Onion was along the lines of "Real-life man acts like romantic comedy lead, ends up in jail."
Wow. The more I learn about the movie, the more the fail grows. I think we're well past linear expansion and into exponential...
cn: Stalking
Found this bit in the Wikipedia entry:
"Chuck tries desperately to get Cam's attention and asks her to marry him. His attempts, though, cause Cam to become convinced he's stalking her and she breaks up with him."
Anyone want to wager that she thinks he's stalking her because he is?
Yeah, and I'm disappointed in myself for having seen and remembered as much as I did, some crap just has a way of sticking in the brain I guess.
It was part of the rotation of movies that played on the ship I was stationed on. Unfortunately, they didn't have a viable way to complain about the stuff they showed.
At least they didn't get any money from me for it.
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