I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL: Where's Valerie Solanas when you need her?
I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELLStarring Matt Czurchry, Geoff Stults, Jesse Bradford
Directed by Bob Gosse
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Review by Louis Fowler
Even though most of I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL takes place in bars, no one, at any point in the movie, smashes a beer bottle and shoves the jagged glass in Tucker Max's neck, unleashing a well-deserved torrent of grue on the floor. He doesn't even really come into any danger for his actions. Not when he tells a woman that “fat girls aren't real people”, not when he pays an elderly Mexican woman to clean up his supposedly-comical shit and, best of all, not when his buddy tells some chick “I will gut you and grind you into pig fodder.” No one gets in his face and physically punishes him for his actions. Quite the contrary: he's rewarded with sex from numerous drunk mid-level sorority skanks to little person porn actress Bridget Powerz.
But, perhaps the worst crime Max is guilty of is his sense of humor, or total lack thereof. He's got as much comedic depth as an Axe Body-Spray ad in the middle of a copy of MAXIM, yet, by the Aryan frat-boy crowd, he's heralded as a god of hooking up, an unabashed, unashamed asshole who will always get by on his crass charm and come-hither twink-wink. He's the Ferris Bueller of date-rapists. He's today's modern man.
Today's. Modern. Man. He's who most men want to be. Hell, even writing this now, it feels like sour grapes. I look at him—and by him I mean smarmy actor Matt Czurchry, who is probably one step away from a contract as a day-player for Falcon Video—and I know that with my frame, face, whatever, that I'll never achieve what Max does, be it with women, blogging, books...fuck, multi-million dollar movies! I make a misogynistic joke and I'm strung up and beaten like a pinata full of day-old meat. He does it and they hand him a blank check.
It reminds me of that Chris Rock joke about Clarence Thomas: if Thomas looked like Denzel, it would have been nothing but coy, flirty giggles over Coca-Cola pubes. Because Max is a good—no, GREAT-looking fella, the whole would will always be his oyster and that oyster is filled with a neverending supply of pearls. If I was that guy in the bar, talking such explosive rectum-speak, I'd have that aforementioned broken bottle jabbed so far into my neck that I'd be shitting shards for a year. I guess that kinda leaves me in a quandary: who do I hate more? Max or the vapid women who think of it as some sort of conquest they can later use feminist revisionism to justify? Can I hate them both?I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL is so ultimately depressing, in that regard. It makes you hate everything about the current state of your generation. It's a manifesto for the next level of the white ruling class, the Skull and Bones secret hand-shakers of tomorrow. The WINNERS! It's enough to make you want to go Chuckie Whitman in a bar with a name like the Hynotiq Martini 360 Lounge. But then again, that's what they expect from an ugly fuck like you, right?
It makes me wonder: if I had all the opportunities laid at my feet the way he does--money, women--would I feel the same way? If I could get away with it, would I be the same way? Would all men? Honestly...probably. Oh, to be able to harness the seductive power of washboard abs and a gift card to American Apparel!
Come to think of it, if most women could get away with it, I'm sure they'd fuck him too. Don't kid yourself. We're all reprehensible people when it comes right down to it, I guess. It's all a matter of opportunity to express that reprehensibleness.
We're all eugenicists, only very few are ever granted a license to actually practice.
I guess you could say that it's a plus that BEER was a total box office disaster, making a little over a million. But this isn't a theatrical film anyway. It's a tepid, bar-lowering retelling of THE HANGOVER that will be eaten up by the Sigma Pi crowd on movie night. It will be their CITIZEN KANE. It will be their tome, passed from pledge to pledge before they even have a chance to wipe the semen from their upper lip. Keep that hand firmly over the mouth of your drinks, ladies.
It makes me tear up a little that Valerie Solanas, the writer of THE SCUM MANIFESTO, is dead. Who am I kidding: it makes me tear up a lot! She was the Anti-Max (or maybe he's the Anti-Solanas?), someone who we need more than ever right now. Someone with conviction to put her bullets where her mouth is! If drunken slobs in a bar won't confront him, maybe she would have... Wouldn't you have loved to of seen a debate between these two? Maybe on a college campus with lax conceal 'n' carry guidelines? Fuck pumping a load of buckshot into Andy Warhol--that proved nothing, Val. Here's the guy you SCUM followers should have your cross-hairs on.
Labels: celebrity douchebags, date rapists, extreme rapeover, fat people are worthless, female empowerment, fratboy douchebags, murderers as pop culture icons, whitey
posted by Louis Fowler at 2/03/2010 02:31:00 PM
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