Dude Movies

Recently I have watched a couple of dude movies. Dude movies are the opposite of chick flicks, well sort of. Dude movies deal with themes applicable to guys. The characters may develop and explore their feelings, but there will be a lot of drinking, flatulence and off-color jokes along the way. Pretty much anything involving Judd Apatow will qualify as a dude movie. There have been a lot lately: Knocked Up, the 40 Year Old Virgin, the Hangover.

At the recommendation of my trainer, I watched two dude movies lately. I loved one and was totally unimpressed with the other.

I loved I Love You, Man. This is a movie about guy friendships or the lack thereof. When Peter Klaven gets engaged to Zooey Rice, she has to call all her girlfriends with the news. However, he doesn't have anyone to call, since it is past his parents' bedtime and he doesn't have any close guy friends. For reasons that I don't really remember anymore, he sets out to develop a close male friendship prior to his marriage, going on a series of man dates to try to bond with another dude. After a series of misadventures, he meets up a dude named Sydney. They bond over Rush music, despite the fact that Sydney is a total slacker compared to Peter's type A personality. Stuff happens. Hilarity ensues. Sydney makes it to the wedding.

The thing that I liked about this movie was that I could relate to Peter. Like Peter, I have gotten to the point where I haven't had close guy friends in a while. Watching him try to develop a guy friend to rival his fiancee's network of girl friends was both funny and kind of sad. However, the Rush music was cool, right up there with the Bohemian Rhapsody scene from Wayne's World.

However, I was totally unimpressed with Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I totally did not get this movie. The main character, Peter, is engaged to a TV star named Sarah Marshall, who breaks up with him. Possessing the strength of inner dudedom, Peter goes to pieces. There is a really awkward sequence where he has sex with random women because he can't bear the thought that Sarah is having sex with her new boyfriend, an English scumbag musician.

To deal with this problem, he does what any dude would do: he goes to a Hawaiian resort without a reservation. A sympathetic desk clerk books him into an expensive suite where he proceeds to get drunk and cry a lot. Meanwhile, Sarah Marshall shows up at the same resort with the English scumbag boyfriend. Eventually he hooks up with the hot desk clerk who temporarily got him the expensive suite.

Both movies involve dudes named Peter on a voyage of self discovery. Peter Klaven learns how to bond with a dude who is as laid back as he is uptight. Peter Bretter learns that a hot Hawaiian girl can fill the void left by a celebrity girlfriend. I don't want to be unsympathetic to Peter Bretter, but being able to sleep till noon while you write music for a show like CSI doesn't seem like that bad of a deal. I just can't relate to a dude who goes to pieces and cries a lot because his celebrity girlfriend decided that he was a loser and left him. If anything, I feel sorry for the hot Hawaiian girl who picks him up as a project.

Let's compare the message of the two movies. In I Love You Man, the message is that a guy can still be a guy despite having lost touch with his inner guyness. On the other hand, Forgetting Sarah Marshall tells us that it is possible to survive losing a celebrity girlfriend if you go to a resort in Hawaii and fall in love with a beautiful girl. Well, duh!