Film Review: Movie 43 (2013)

Halle Berry (pictured) discovers that Catwoman is no longer the biggest mistake she's ever made.

There are many different kinds of bad film, with no single genre being immune from producing absolute crap, but far and away the worse kind of bad movie is a bad comedy. This is for the simple reason that if a drama or a horror film is bad, you can at least laugh at how badly it fails to function on even its most basic level. Mystery Science Theater 3000 spent a decade demonstrating that fact by turning bad horror, science fiction and drama into comedy. On the other hand, if a comedy doesn't make you laugh, then there's really no good way to respond to it. All you can do is sit there and pray that it ends soon.

Things I Learned From Movie X: The Ugly Truth

To commemorate Valentine's Day, I decided to use this edition of Things I Learned From Movie X to write about one of the most rancid, repugnant and wretched "romantic" "comedies" of recent years, The Ugly Truth, whose title is at least half-right considering that the film itself is a very ugly thing indeed. A weird mixture of traditional rom-com and crass, misogynist tract, it finds Katherine Heigl at her most icy and removed and Gerard Butler at his most boorish. Needless to say, sparks do not fly.

I wrote this column after listing to the audiobook of Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great pretty solidly for about a week, and I think that has had a definite impact in shaping the rhythm and tone of the piece. I'm not saying that I ripped Hitchens off, but I definitely feel that the column would have been very different had I not been immersed in his work so completely in the lead up to writing it.

Incidentally, God Is Not Great is a phenomenal book, full of wit and insight. It really made me realise just how wonderfully articulate and passionate a man Hitchens was, and made me wish that I had investigated his writing sooner. A great man, sadly missed.