The Funniest Conversation in Television History
Last week’s episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (a show that tends to be given either too much or too little – and never the right amount – of […]
Last Thursday, I punched out the first half of my list of the ten greatest guy movies, promising the top five the next day. Since I operate on CPT, that was code for a week later. Here, at last, are numbers five through one.
Some people might say it’s hard to make a case for Goodfellas as a guy movie because you could call it a love story…if you wanted to miss the point entirely and sound like a jackass. I mean The Shining featured Jack Nicholson going on a vacation with his wife and kid; I still wouldn’t call it a family-friendly romp.
Goodfellas was the first film I watched with my mom where it became abundantly clear that her limitations as a female prevented her from enjoying certain awesome movies. Before the barrel cooled on Joe Pesci’s gun, the video was being shoved back in the rental box as my mother bemoaned the movie as a overrated and far too violent, which shocked me because, up until then, my mom and I always agreed on films and I thought Goodfellas kinda rocked. It wasn’t until years later I figured out that the ovaries taking up 50% of her cranial capacity were interfering with her brain’s ability to process the film’s awesomeness. While I may have failed Anatomy that year, I aced Guy Movies 101.
Moment girls leave-When Morrie gets that icepick through his brain stem. Women see that scene and wretch. Guys laugh because Joe Pesci insulting Frankie Carbone is hilarious, even more so with a corpse evacuating itself right next to them.
The Godfather is a slightly questionable choice as a guy movie because almost everyone, male or female, has watched it. It isn’t until you ask around and learn that four out of five women (especially your mother) watched the film to get out of going down on their significant other that its selection starts to make sense. The joke’s on the guy who forsook head, though: Watching The Godfather with a girl is three hours of hearing about how Kay’s a great wife, Michael’s an uncommunicative prick and that Apollonia (that’s a NSFW link to her non-nippled Barbie boobs) deserved to get blown up for being his slutty side-piece.
Moment girls leave-When Moe Greene gets popped through the glasses.
Aliens is a love letter to everything I was obsessed with as a kid. A plucky team of space marines? Check. Futuristic weaponry? Check. Monsters that combine “cool-looking” and “frightening” so well that they induce pants-shitting awe? Check. Sometimes I think that James Cameron’s focus group for the film was a class of fourth grade boys. “Yeah, I guess the plot is okay, but can you make Hudson say more cool things? Sweet. Oh, and I want a robot. And I want the robot to die. And, when he dies, I want him to puke milk like I did in the lunchroom. No boobs, though. Those are gross.”
Moment girls leave-The initial space marine massacre that kills half the characters they’d just spent an hour growing to love.
*The real number two guy movie of all time is Predator. But I’m sick of writing about it. I’ve written about it here. And here. And here. (Okay, that last one was a link to hilarious moments from To Catch a Predator, but items always sound best listed in threes.) So, instead, you’re getting Full Metal Jacket. And that’s fine, because FMJ deserves to be on the damn list. The movie made such an impression on a teenaged John Papageorgiou that I held a cassette recorder to my TV to capture R. Lee Ermy’s opening monologue so I could then listen to it on my Walkman as I paced the halls of my high school. Two weeks later, every guy in every one of my classes was reciting the film scene by scene with me whenever we got a chance. Were we viewed as hot commodities as prom dates that year? You betcha!
Moment girls leave-The blanket party.
Here it is. Heat. The greatest guy movie ever made. I’ve never met a man that didn’t speak of the film in reverent, hushed tones. Asking a guy what he thinks about Heat is akin to asking him “Do you like breasts?”: He’s going to look at you cockeyed for a moment, then bury a pickaxe through your forehead, because you were either an alien or a Russian spy and, in order to be safe, you had to go.
Conversely, it’s easier to grow bacterial colonies in a Petri dish full of rubbing alcohol than it is to get a girl through a viewing of Heat. If The Godfather is a movie that portrays women as dopey and superfluous, then Heat presents them as actively ruinous, existing only to complicate a man’s life as he seeks to give it real meaning by battling his arch-nemesis, a person who understands him more than any lady could. Heat is the ultimate guy movie, and it taught me more about being a man than school, the Cub Scouts and all of my years of youth sports combined. Thank you, Heat. Thank you.
Moment girls leave-THE OPENING CREDITS.
Now that I’m done, what would your top ten list be? Leave a comment, Tweet it to me or leave a message on Facebook. Just make sure to do it somewhere I can publicly scold you for being incorrect.
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