Hangover

Watched “Hangover”. I suppose I remember why it got rated so highly. Some people will see some kind of a stoopid comedy, they will pigeonhole it into some kind of a stoopid comedy genre. In a way that description is accurate, but it misses out on 2 things that for me makes this movie worth watching.

First, is the plot, which goes like this. 4 people throw a stag party at Las Vegas. They wake up the next morning, one of them is missing, and they start to recreate the events that took place the night before. There is not much to say about any individual aspect of the plot. All the stuff is completely preposterous, but it is kinda clever how everything fits together in some kind of jigsaw puzzle. The sheer volume of original ideas in this show alone makes it worth watching.

The second is the whole point of this movie, and how it captures the essential truth of what a stag night is supposed to be. You have one wild night of partying, without your wife, of course. You do all the things you could do as a single before you settle down to married life. What is a party? It is a celebration of life. It is a wild orgy of male bonding, and you get married in the afterglow of that wild partying. You don’t get deprived of all the things you used to enjoy as a swinging single, and you don’t carry that bitterness into your married life. The movie is one of the most happening parties you’ve ever seen, and probably a great exaggeration, but it definitely is a stag party, and what it really means.

It is your license to be licentious. Nobody has to know any of the weird details. For myself, I have never consider any of these things to be wrong in of itself: partying, booze, promiscuity, gambling. It is only wrong when it is carried out to excess. One night definitely does not count as excess. It is education.

One thing about the movie is the lightness of touch. Everything and everybody is redeemed in the end. It would be ridiculous to say that this movie has a moral message, but it does have a moral centre.

One of the key scenes in the movie is when the 3 friends of the groom, who are trying to track down the missing groom, find a doctor who had treated one of them the previous nights. They try to pump him for information, try to get every possible clue out of him, even bribe him, until the doctor, exasperated, tells them to fuck off and do their detective work themselves. Thus, with no small ingenuity, we have 2 great adventures in 1: first is the legendary wild stag party itself. Second is the hilarious attempts at uncovering what happened in the wild stag party. And thus we have some kind of moral closure in the end: you make your mess, and you clean it up.

The other aspect of morality is how everybody turns out to be innocent in the end. Hangovers are always associated with guilt, but obviously the decision was made that guilt would have nothing whatsoever to do with this movie. How? You make all the characters so busy that they don’t have any time to feel guilty at all.

Most of the people turn out to have an innocent side in the end, and even the Chinese gangsters are funny. At the beginning, everybody talks about Las Vegas as some kind of a sin city, but everything turns out well.

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The stripper could have been a gold digger, but turns out to be a nice girl with a heart of gold. The drug dealer who swiped the ecstasy with date rape drug could have been an evil man with ulterior motives, but he turns out to be just a confused person. The brother-in-law could have been a total loser, but he turns out to be a total gambling genius who saves everybody’s skins by returning $80K to the gangsters. The casino security could have been wary of the card counters, but they manage to get away. We could have seen the decrepit state of the police and the health care system but that is whitewashed. The tiger could have mauled all the people, but gets returned to Mike Tyson safe and sound. The groom could have been kidnapped, but turns out to have been left behind on the rooftop. All the characters lead a seemingly charmed life. The wedding could have been called off, but proceeds as planned when the 4 of them get back to LA safe and sound.
(spoilers)

Some of the funniest parts of this movie take place in settings that you would not necessarily associate with Las Vegas. Like a police station, or a hospital. Some touches, like throwing in the baby add some fun to the proceedings. But it is a great idea in the movie to merge 3 worlds that roughly correspond to heaven (the real world that the 4 people live in), hell (the Dionysian excess of the stag party itself) and purgatory (the madcap scramble to uncover the events of the previous evening, and get the groom back to reality so that he can get married). Not surprisingly, the purgatory is where most of the movie is set.

In the end, it is this purgatory which proves to be an even more powerful male bonding experience than the stag party itself. And after everything is said and done, and everything is uncovered, what we have to look back on is that that night has actually provided plenty of great memories to look back upon over a lifetime. The movie is unabashedly optimistic, and suitably so, because it just whitewashes away all the bad parts, as though everything were seen through the lens of nostalgia.

Of course, I wonder what happens to the friendship after the movie ends. I heard that this hit has a sequel, but I cannot imagine this happening, because a stag party is supposed to be a once in a lifetime event. In any case, I was reading the wiki article of this movie, and it turns out that there are only 2 minor criticisms of this movie.

I don't know if people who meet at a party and have a great time should be friends for life. I could see them, and then say, "We had such a wild time. We had so much fun together". But then we live life in a completely different context, and there's nothing there. I sometimes think that it'd be better that way.

The first criticism is that the characterization is flat. This is not a big issue because, over here, plot and action are the main draws. Basically you have 1 suave guy who actually does nothing, because this is a movie where people are doing stupid things, so the clever guy doesn’t have much to do. Then you have a nerd who learns how to loosen up. Then you have an idiot who turns out in the end to have 1 special skill who saves everybody’s ass. The star of the movie, the alpha male, in a wonderful display of subversion of plot, does absolutely nothing in this movie. He is the princess in the castle waiting to get rescued.

The second drawback is the negative portrayal of Asians as gangster thugs. I’m not surprised that the guy playing the Chinese gangster is Korean. I suppose this is how Hollywood works: if you want to play a negative Asian stereotype, get a Chinese to portray a Japanese (many of the main characters in “Memoirs of a Geisha” are played by Chinese, not only because the biggest names are Chinese, but also because any Japanese brave enough to act out the characters in that show will probably never find work in Japan ever again), or a Korean to play a Chinese, or vice versa.

One more thing: Lindsay Lohan was actually offered the role of the stripper. She turned it down because she didn’t like the script. I predict that she will ruin her career, not because of the partying, not because of the irresponsible behaviour, but because she has such bad professional judgement. I suppose Heather Graham was one of the main reasons I watched this movie. I always thought that she was hot, and she was hot in Austin Powers. But she doesn’t have much to do. None of the ladies have much to do in this show: this is a stag party, remember, and all the stars are the guys, rightfully so.

I was reading up the requirements for me to graduate from my uni. It said that for any major at all, there are no courses that are compulsory. Every course is optional, but the requirements are like “you must take x courses of type y”. I felt that this movie was saying that life is a bit like that. You must have a bit of everything.

While most reviews of this movie are positive, there are quite a few people who don't get this movie. These are the people who feel that all lowbrow humour is bad. I had been sold on the idea when I was young that British humour is necessarily better, but later on I realised that this is simply people with an aristocratic mentality at work, whose sense of humour is somehow a little less functional if you don't throw in some snob appeal for good effect. I personally don't discriminate. I think that both lowbrow and highbrow humour work for me.

I also believe that most people's reactions to this movie also depend upon how much they believe that old saying that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom". People with a overly puritanical bent would find it very hard to understand this, and consequently they will miss the whole point.

Yes, there is something religious and spiritual about orgiastic merry making. You can't do it every day, of course, because it loses its effect very quickly. But every now and then, you need to know what it is like. You need to get seriously drunk, seriously wasted, have your brain fucked in at least one way to understand more about yourself, because that is how you get acquainted with some ideas that your brain ordinarily censors itself.

I didn’t regret watching this movie: it was entertaining from beginning to the end. The Mike Tyson cameo, I felt, was a little cynical, because he’s basically using this movie to put a positive slant on his reputation. He forgives everybody in the end, reflecting on his own life as “I did some crazy things in my own time” or something like that. Fine, except that those crazy things included the rape of a girl.

What I did get reminded of is that my life is actually very small. It’s nice to get jolted out of your complacency like that. It’s not all fun and games. I’ve been to stag nights that I didn’t enjoy. I think, almost every single time I got seriously drunk (I can actually count the times on one hand – I’m a good drinker and alcohol in Singapore is expensive so you do the maths) I’ve done at least 1 thing that I’m ashamed of and even regret. I don’t really consider it such a fantastic thing to lead a “happening” life. But sometimes I need to step out of my totally boring salaryman existence. I’ve had a lot of great opportunities and choices before me but have perversely not grabbed hold of them. I’m not a person who gets bored easily but I am leading a boring life. It’s been a long time since I felt like my life was going forward.

I watched this movie on an off day. But somewhat perversely when the lights came back on after the movie was over I was thinking about a few thorny problems that would face me when I get back to work tomorrow morning.