Bret Easton Ellis Did Not Particularly Enjoy The Hangover
Novelist Bret Easton Ellis has a Twitter account that he rarely updates, except to review movies, and tonight he tweeted his somewhat predictable disgust for The Hangover and the simpletons surrounding him who actually had the audacity to enjoy it.
You see, we've picked up on a trend amongst "the intelligentsia" of an almost kid-on-Christmas-morning eagerness to run to the theater to see this film just so they can trash it on their blogs and Twitter accounts and in doing so feel superior to the doltish masses who actually derived some sense of pleasure from it. Of course, we have no actual data to back this up, there's just a palpable snobbishness wafting through the air right now that our finely-tuned cultural antennae has picked up on.
Some members of the aforementioned "intelligentsia" who we actually like and hold in high regard have written about the film without really making much mention of the film itself, choosing to focus instead on the "ugly and thoughtless" clothes worn by the other moviegoers at a screening in a notably unhip Manhattan neighborhood instead.
What's perhaps most perplexing about the gripes we've read and heard about The Hangover coming from members of "the intelligentsia" are their genuine professions of profound shock over how "fratty" and "juvenile" the film struck them. It's almost as if they truly expected that a film titled "The Hangover" might actually be some sort of Fellini-esque neorealist high art film.
Another common trait shared by members of "the intelligentsia" who hated The Hangover is that they invariably loved Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, a film we desperately wanted to like but truly thought was one of the biggest steaming piles of cinematic dung to emerge out of the 21st century.
One last thought about The Hangover—Yes, it's a silly movie, but it's not completely devoid of intelligence, and silly movies seasoned with just a sprinkle of intelligence can often do wonders for the soul. If, that is, you're willing to unclench your anus just over the course of the couple of hours it takes to watch them.
With that said, go see The Hangover and judge for yourself.
