Against The Crowd Blogathon 2017: A Guest Post by Joel

The notion of good things or bad things coming in threes is merely superstition influenced by our perception of good and bad and our awareness of the things happening around us. However, four is different. The number four takes us back to our roots, to nature. Each year, there are four seasons. We travel in four primary directions. Four major elements sustain us. And now, this is our fourth Against the Crowd Blogathon.

I'm no fool, though. I don't want to abandon the guys who has brought me luck the third time around. See what I did there? Anyhoo, that means KG and Joel are back with me.

For the second year in a row, KG of KG's Movie Rants serves as my co-host. Please check out his blog this week, and going forward. He is a very insightful writer whom I enjoy reading.

As for Joel, or as I like to call him Super Reader Joel, this is his eighth guest post on this site. And he has brought me lots of eyeballs with all of them. Of his previous seven guest posts, three are among the top 10 most viewed posts on this blog. His great comments have sustained numerous conversations here over the last few years, but as a provider of content, he's been even better. That tells me I should just shut my mouth and get out the way. Before I do here's a quick reminder that if you want to play along, just click here to find out how.

Take it away, Joel.

What a Way to Go! (1964)

I really don’t understand critics sometimes. They seem to forget that while movies are meant to be enlightening at times they should always be entertaining. Sometimes you want to unload the weight of the world and watch something fluffy, pleasant and disarming and not feel bad about it. Which brings me to this film that I love but somehow has managed an inexplicable zero score.

What a Way to Go! stars a very young Shirley MacLaine as Louisa May Foster a female Jonah who, despite her rapacious mother’s harping about marrying a rich man, just wants a simple life. Problems arise when despite her best efforts she ends up fabulously wealthy because the seeming failures she marries (and marries) become successes owing to innocent suggestions she makes and then bite the dust soon after leaving her bereft but dripping in clothes and jewelry. (The movie cost $20 million in 1964 dollars-that would be over 480 mil today!). She decides she wants to give her $200 million fortune to the government and thinking that she’s nuts they send her to their psychiatrist where she tells her tale in flashback.

So off we go on a crazy ride where Louisa falls for a series of misfits and lives with them in contentment until they either decide they want to do more for her despite her protestations to the contrary or some felicitations of fortune befall them and the next thing you know they’re pushing up daisies!

Simple and silly enough but what makes this so much fun is that as we work through Louisa’s marriages each one is interpreted in a spoof of a different movie genre (silent, foreign, movie musical, etc.) each more elaborate than the one before. My personal favorite is the Lush Budgett production which culminates with Shirley and her present husband on a fur bedspread in an enormous champagne glass!

In a role originally slated for Marilyn Monroe before her untimely death Shirley, an expert comedienne gives it all she has and the role gives her ample opportunity to display her abundant talents and charm the audience. Another big plus is that all the husbands and an ardent suitor are played by a raft of superstar men, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Dean Martin, Gene Kelly and Dick Van Dyke all enjoying their chance to play extreme physical comedy.

So what if it’s not Chekov or an O’Neill play and it doesn’t “mean” anything it’s an engaging little comedy that goes down easy with enough star power to drive ten movies. There are plenty of days when that’s enough.

The Spectacular Now (2013)

How fervently I hate this movie! For about 95 eye gouging minutes we watch a total douchebag mistreat just about everyone who has the misfortune to cross his path and a dull simp of a girl let him treat her like dirt and yet the movie expects us to find it compelling and romantic. That would be a NO!

He gets her drunk, he uses her both for her brain and sexually, he whines and vomits. What a keeper! He has a bad home life with two wastrels for parents so he’s angry and bitter…blah, blah, blah. Not only is that unimaginative it’s trite. I spent the entire movie yelling at the screen “Dump him and find a better guy!”

I mean Aimee is a washed out doormat but she seemed like a nice enough girl and certainly more intelligent than to tolerate the odious behavior that this tool puts her through. Then after treating her like leftover lunch the entire movie he almost gets her killed and she still pines for him. WHAT!!!!! That just made me both sad and mad and I fail to see how the audience is supposed to be charmed. It doesn’t help that the lead actor and actress are two of the most vapid, personality free so called performers around. I actually had a headache at the conclusion (why I watched it to that point I can’t tell ya) from my frustration at wasting so much time on such a worthless pile of glop. The Spectacularly Awful would be a more appropriate title!