Humor District

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are the stars of the latest buddy cop movie, The Other Guys, and it looks hilarious. This is the next in a long line of buddy cop movies, and The Other Guys will have a hard time living up to some of them. Of course with Mark Wahlberg playing the straight man against Will Ferrell, I don’t think we have to worry about this movie providing laughs. The only question is if it will provide as many laughs as some of the great buddy cop movies that came before, and how the comedy will be balanced with action. No buddy cop movie is complete without a bad guy meeting justice at the end of a bullet. Or fist. Or bullet fist.

Lethal Weapon

Lethal Weapon is the standard that all buddy cop movies are judged by. When this movie came out, Mel Gibson was still a lovable sort of crazy who played perfectly against Danny Glover. As Sergeant Martin Riggs and Roger Murtaugh, Gibson and Glover made the perfect team. Just picture an old bickering married couple that can kick an extreme amount of ass. While they got on each other’s nerves, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover came together to defeat the bad guys and become best friends. They don’t call them buddy cop movies for nothing after all.

Rush Hour

Before I start talking about Rush Hour, has anybody seen Chris Tucker recently? He has been getting a little chunky, he needs to start hanging out with Jackie Chan again. Speaking of hanging out with Jackie Chan, the main appeal of Rush Hour was the interaction of Chris Tucker’s Detective James Carter and Jackie Chan’s Inspector Lee. The culture clash between the two provided many laughs, and Jackie Chan used the fact that he was Jackie Chan to kung fu bad guys into oblivion. Chris Tucker helped with that a little bit too.

Bad Boys

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence bickered almost as much as Mel Gibson and Danny Glover throughout Bad Boys. Will Smith is the Mel Gibson type character, willing to break rules and take chances to get the job done. Martin Lawrence is the Danny Glover type, often complaining about being too old for this poop despite his relatively young age. Will Smith was definitely cooler. when things got down and dirty though, both Smith and Lawrence were ready to unleash a fiery hail of lead based justice. If only the chief would get off their backs and let them solve crimes their way, at a very high cost to the city!

Hot Fuzz

When it comes to pure comedy, Hot Fuzz is one of the best buddy cop movies around. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost of Shaun of the Dead fame starred as cops in a small town with an unusually high rate of accidents. Nick Frost plays the big innocent dumb guy very well, and Simon Pegg plays the top cop type, although one who doesn’t approve of the tactics often shown in buddy cop movies. Many of the other movies on this list are actually referenced throughout Hot Fuzz. In the end, Simon Pegg realizes there is no better way to rid a small town of corruption than removing the corrupt people with violence. Lots and lots of gratuitous violence. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Cop Out

Cop Out was Kevin Smith’s recent attempt at a buddy cop movie. While the story wasn’t great, the main characters Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan did a great job saving the movie. The action scenes weren’t very good, but they made up for it with a lot of comedy, which is what Kevin Smith does best. Hopefully The Other Guys takes some pages from the comedy side of Cop Out, but also greatly improves upon the action. A buddy cop movie cannot be considered complete until the amount of violent justice can be described as excessive.

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Movies are a good way to escape from reality. After a long day we can pop Caddyshack into the DVD player and all our worries just melt away. That is why most movies focus on the happier things in life, such as seeing your enemies driven before you and hearing the lamentations of their women. Some movies prefer to hit us with a heavy dose of reality that remind us that we don’t always get that raise we want, the girls of our dreams don’t know our names, and sometimes we have to get friendly with a man named Big Ted to fuel our drug habits. These movies will leave you feeling pretty low after you watch them, but they are still great movies. If you haven’t seen them before, beware. There are some spoilers ahead. Spoilers that will make you cry.

Million Dollar Baby

I think most people could have told you that a movie about a woman who wants to make a living getting punched in the face would not end well. Still, the build up throughout the movie actually made us cheer for Hilary Swank as Clint Eastwood coached her from the corner. Unfortunately our initial feelings were correct as Hilary Swank’s character ends up as a paraplegic who tries to chew through her own tongue to kill herself. That and Clint Eastwood cries. It does not get much more depressing than that.

Requiem for a Dream

We recently spoke about Requiem for a Dream being the most effective drug deterrent system of all time. It is extremely depressing as all the characters suffer from drug addiction, causing their lives to go straight down the tubes. The most depressing character is Sara Goldfarb. She is the elderly mother of the main character Harry, and she is chosen to be on a game show in the beginning of the movie. Sara is a kindly lady, and decides she wants to fit into her nice dress for the game show and gets prescribed diet medicine. She becomes addicted to the medicine and begins to hallucinate, and doctors just keep giving her more pills until she is forced to undergo electroshock therapy. That’s why I never go to the doctor.

The Wrestler

Darren Aronofsky has a knack for depressing movies, as he directed Requiem for a Dream as well as The Wrestler. The Wrestler was a great movie the revamped Mickey Rourke’s career with his portrayal of Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a wrestler who used to be a big star. His career has caused him health problems due to steroid use, but, perhaps more depressingly, it has also ruined his relationship with his daughter. Just when he seems to be recapturing both his career and his daughter’s love, he screws it all up by banging a club slut instead of visiting his daughter and continuing to wrestle after a heart attack. It is a sad look into the life of a severely unhappy man.

Charly

Charly is an older movie based on the book Flowers for Algernon. The basic plot is that an experiment is performed on a mentally retarded man who can’t spell his own name that turns him into a super genius. With his increased intellect, Charlie learns his name is not spelled Charly, finds meaning in life, and also finds the love of his life. That’s when things go downhill as Charlie realizes the effects of the experiment are temporary and his IQ is dropping faster than a dead pigeon. He rejects an offer of proposal from his love and the movie ends with her watching Charlie playing on a playground, once again unable to spell his name.

12 Monkeys

In 12 Monkeys, Bruce Willis plays a convict from a virus ravaged future who is sent back in time to stop the virus from being released. He ends up in an insane asylum with Brad Pitt, who does a great job of being insane, and is also a prime suspect for releasing the virus. Will Bruce Willis be able to stop the release of the virus and save the future? No, he will not. He gets shot and killed right in front of his younger self and the future remains a virus ravaged hell hole.

I realize that reading about all these depressing movies can be somewhat depressing. That is why this post ends with an example of what is best in life. Enjoy.

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Before we start this article, you should be warned that there are a number of spoilers ahead. We will be discussing the twist endings of some movies, and these are rather vital parts of those movies. You have been warned. When it comes down to it, the ending is what makes or breaks a movie. A movie with a slow build up and an amazing end is remembered for that crescendo. A movie that has been good but has a disappointing ending will be remembered for the letdown. Directors use the twist ending to ensure there movie leaves the audience stunned and wanting more, unfortunately a good twist ending is hard to pull off. It has to be believable, but the audience can’t see it coming. Here are some examples of twist endings that made us do a double-take.

The Sixth Sense

M. Night Shyamalan is known for putting twist endings into his movies, even when a twist ending really isn’t necessary. It has even become a bit of a running joke with him. This started because of the popularity of the twist in The Sixth Sense. The movie started off alright, with Haley Joel Osment seeing dead people everywhere, and Bruce Willis shows up to help him with his problem. Things seemed to be getting better and BAM! Bruce Willis has been dead the whole time. That ending came in out of left field and took audiences by surprise, but Shyamalan left clues throughout the movie that make the ending seem obvious in repeat viewings. That’s how a twist ending is done, folks.

The Usual Suspects

Kevin Spacey plays a small time con man who is the last man standing in a crime gone wrong. The Usual Suspects details his account of what led up to the deaths of his fellow criminals as he is being interrogated by police. Spacey weaves an intricate tale of deceit and betrayal masterminded by a Mr. Kobayashi. Thinking that Spacey’s story has revealed the truth, the detective has no choice to let him go. He then notices that a surprising number of things in his office have the same names as people in Spacey’s story, including a coffee mug with a Kobayashi logo on it. Kevin Spacey was the mastermind criminal the entire time. The detective runs outside to catch him, but Spacey is long gone by then.

Scream

Scream started out as a typical slasher film. There was a guy in a costume going around killing douchey guys and shapely girls. It was entertaining, but most of the movie did very little to set it apart from other slasher films. Then we got to the ending and our world was turned upside down. We had just seen Shaggy from Scooby-Doo get chopped to pieces, but wait! He is actually the killer! He used corn syrup to fake his death. That’s not all though. It turns out there were two killers the entire time. You just can’t trust anybody these days.

Stephen King’s The Mist

It seems that Thomas Jane can’t be in movies without people he cares about getting killed. He was in The Punisher where his family was killed by the mob. He was in Deep Blue Sea where many of his friends and coworkers are eaten by sharks. Then came The Mist, with possibly the most depressing ending of all. The movie revolves around this other dimensional mist that has taken over a town and killed off most of the population. It seems that all is lost at the end of the movie with five survivors trapped in a truck, including Thomas Jane and his son. Jane has a gun with four bullets left and decides to kill the others so they don’t have to face the agony of the mist. After killing everyone else, Jane steps out of the truck to find the army waiting to rescue him. And that is why patience is a virtue.

The Descent

The Descent was one of the scariest movies made in quite a long time. It follows a group of female cave explorers who explore the wrong cave. The uncharted series of caverns and tunnels is the home to mutated miners who crave human flesh. The lady explorers must become animals themselves to survive as they begin to be killed one by one. Soon there is only one left, but she makes a daring escape! Oh, wait, no she didn’t. She hallucinated and is now surrounded by monsters who are going to eat her face.

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There are some movies that just make you proud to be a man. When you watch them you can’t help but feel the desire to go out and let off some testosterone fueled destruction. These are the movies that make you want to assert your dominance over the next person you see. These are the 5 manliest movies of all time.

300 is one of the greatest guy movies of all time. It involves a group of men, who have the physiques we wish we did, kicking an extraordinary amount of ass. 10,000 guys? No problem, these 300 Spartans will casually kill all of them. Even when hulking mutated monstrosities make their charge against the Spartans they are cut down like the rest. This movie can be summed up in the words Queen Gorgo gives to a departing King Leonidas: “Come back with your shield, or on it.” There is no halfway for a Spartan.

Gladiator is essentially the story of one man against all of Rome. As guys, we can appreciate this because we all have a bit of a lone wolf mentality. We all wish we could be the guy who made a difference, preferably by being muscular and killing other less manly men. Russell Crowe also shows conviction in his beliefs and loyalty to his family, despite the fact that this leads to his death. Going out in a blaze of glory like that is also extremely manly.

Batman is quite possibly the manliest man ever. He is in peak physical condition, is rakishly handsome, has oodles of money and women, and is one of the smartest men alive. That is known as the complete package of manliness. What makes The Dark Knight so manly is the fact it shows a more vulnerable side of Batman, as he struggles with his decision to not kill. While all the things I previously listed make Batman manly, it his conviction to his morals and ability to make hard decisions that make The Dark Knight a manly movie. That and the multiple thugs getting the crap beat out of them.

Yipee-ki-yay motherfucker. That’s all you need to know about the manly factor of Die Hard. For those of you who don’t feel satisfied with that quote, let me give you a basic overview of Die Hard. Bruce Willis plays New York cop John McClane, who is at an office party trying to reconcile things with his wife. A bunch of terrorists decide that this office party is the perfect place to enact their overly complicated plan. John McClane does not stand for this. He is an unstoppable engine of terrorist destruction, and is so manly that even a floor covered in glass is no match for his bare feet. Die Hard is unarguably one of the manliest movies of all time.

Yes, I realize some of you are feeling your manhood shrivel up just by reading The Notebook on this list. Relax for a second and give me a chance to explain. Is there anything manlier than getting, shall we say, intimate with a lady friend? If anything manlier than that has been invented, please let me know. For now though, I think it can be agreed that seducing women is a fairly manly activity. In that respect, no movie has done more for men seeking the entrance to lady pants than The Notebook. This movie is classified as an aphrodisiac, that’s how powerfully it affects women. It might not have enough violence and bloodshed for most guys’ liking, but it is an invaluable tool for the manliest pursuit of all.

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The Redband trailer for Kevin Smith’s Cop Out with Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan is out, and really, thank God for redband trailers. Theres swearing and Tracy Morgan punching a kid in the nuts. Looks like a damn good movie. The only problem I see it having is the Kevin Smith factor, OK fan boys settle down and hear me out. When I think “Kevin Smith” first thing that comes to mind is “Clerks” and I let out a little smile, and then I think “Jersey Girl” and I dry-heave. Zack and Miri Make a Porno — smile, Clerks II — dry heave. Here’s hoping Cop Out comes out punching with the smiles, and not lying on the canvas in a pool of last nights carrots.

What you guys think, hit or miss?

[via FSR]

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