Movies To Watch When I’m Hungover and Not Really At Any Other Time
The term “guilty pleasure” gets thrown around a lot for things that don’t seem like they’d inspire actual guilt. It’s fine to like lame music or erotic fan fiction or weird retro food that your grandma used to make out of Depression-era canned goods and cheese — unless there are Nazi undertones in it, none of these should make you feel guilty. A little less cool, sure, but not actually guilty to the point where you’re loathe to admit it with context to your friends.
With that said, what I’m about to describe does not make me feel guilty, and not even less cool. I mean, they are uncool, but mostly it’s hard to feel uncool when you already feel hungover, and if you’re any kind of adult who has ever experienced any kind of a hangover, you know that the feeling beats any other feeling you’ve ever had in your life for volume of discomfort and wanting to disappear from the Earth.
Now that I’m in my 30s, my hangovers no longer manifest in episodes of extreme nausea or headaches. Instead, I have existential hangovers, if that’s even a thing. I wake up feeling okay if a little warm and sleep-deprived, and I can manage my regular coffee and breakfast. It’s not until a few hours into my day that the feeling creeps up on me, this lonely dread that makes me unable to relax or focus, unease spreading to every point in my body until I’m extremely irritable, sweaty and there’s a sour taste in my mouth. The good news is that I don’t drink much anymore, so these hangovers come maybe twice a year. The bad news is that I sometimes imagine what form hangovers will take in my 50s and I want to fall down a well and never come out.
I’ve never been a fan of hangover cures, as I don’t think anything really works. My family is Irish-Catholic — if a secret existed, someone would have told me by now. What I have discovered, though, is that being left alone to wrap myself in various blankets and curl up like some quilted cephalopod in its couch-cave is vastly preferable to going to work or doing chores, and if I’m on my couch, I’m going to watch movies. Movies that I’d probably never watch with company, movies that I know aren’t very good but I just don’t have the energy to make better decisions or change the channel. ’Tis the season for hangovers and hangover movies, I say, and here’s my list:
The Doors
The Doors (the band, not the movie) is what happens when the 1960s figured out that charisma could count more than talent and so deified a loudmouth drunk who wrote terrible poetry to Dionysian status. The Doors (the movie, not the band) is what happens when everything is made out of cocaine.
The Doors movie is such a navel-gazing effort all around that it’s a great hangover movie — you can watch it with the full understanding that this is how Hollywood was back then, and no amount of Oliver Stone slagging off Val Kilmer in the press could change that the sole purpose of this film was to make everyone look super hot and make any criticism of Jim Morrison the man look extra glamorous. You don’t have to think about it, is what I’m saying, you just have to appreciate that there was once a world in which this was a serious film and allow that knowledge to wash over you like a warm bath. Made of cocaine.
Underworld (movies 1 and 2)
How does one solve a mystery like Underworld? Underworld was made before vampires were elevated into sensitive teen heartthrobs (btw it took me like 6 tries to type “heartthrobs”), so you can imagine that when the first film was pitched, no one nodded knowingly and said “Vampires…they’re so hot right now.” Further complicating the equation was werewolves, and again, as this was before Twilight, no one really had a lycanthropy wagon to hop onto and ride all the way to the bank.
Underworld made no sense, basically, and when you add that to its style (ahem Gothic-BDSM twist on Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody” video, only not as stylish and without that little baby noise), it’s so fucking weird that it got made at all, let alone turned into sequels. I tried to see if they’d been based on graphic novels — they seemed like they would have been — but Wikipedia isn’t telling me anything and I don’t have the energy to keep digging.
I’m not even particularly into vampires or werewolves, but I will watch Underworlds 1 and 2 (the second is subtitled “Rise of the Lycans” and features some pretty dope Transylvanian castle parapet sex) when hungover without hesitation. They’re dark, moody and expensive. They’re either hideously over-acted or frustratingly mumbled, and as with any film, I sit with baited breath and wait for Bill Nighy to show up and look odd.
Independence Day
I’m not fucking around, Independence Day is a masterpiece and I am never more proud of America as I am when Bill Pullman makes his speech.
Love Actually
I first saw Love Actually several years ago, when my grandmother gave it to me as a Christmas gift, which should have bothered me but it didn’t because to be honest, neither of us ever knew what to get each other. I didn’t re-watch it until fairly recently at the behest of a friend who promised me it was very funny. That friend is still my friend but she was very wrong. Love Actually is not very funny. It’s not very good. It’s very awkward in that stammering, socially disastrous British way where everyone you know can afford to live in fucking Kensington or wherever and okay, Rowan Atkinson makes an appearance and I suppose Alan Rickman should have saved this flaming attempt at lonely people throwing their money at a film, but overall, it’s such a blatant effort at turning the romance and Christmas up to eleven that I kind of resent the effort.
But still, I will watch it, because like everything else on this list, it requires no critical thinking. Every single plot point is so obvious and ham-fisted and there’s no real talent to marvel at (even the very best actors such as the aforementioned Rickman and also Emma Thompson, who is a jewel of a human, don’t get any toothsome material), so watching Love Actually is like smoking a joint of middling quality and not really having anything to do for a couple of hours. This is exactly what I’m looking for when I’m in my hermit crab cave made of blankets and I don’t want my fingers to get cold when I reach for the remote.
27 Dresses
Can we all just get together and admit that hating Katherine Heigl is pretty much an adored national pastime? I wish I could find something in the various horror stories about her that points to her being a largely misunderstood-but-secretly-amazing feminist, like Janeane Garofalo was in the mid-90s, but overall, she just seems kind of like a bitchy narcissistic loudmouth who can’t quite grasp the non-importance of appearing in a glut of rom-coms.
Whew. Sorry. I told you it was like a sport.
So what is it about 27 Dresses that allows me to watch it when hungover? I’m really not sure. Heigl’s character is fucking insufferable — a martyr who loves talking about it, seems universally beloved for no discernible reason whatsoever, rejects niceness of others and can’t figure out why she’s single which is horrifying because in her world a boyfriend is more important than having a career or a healthy relationship with her family, etc. It’s plausible that the entire film was constructed upon the need to film a montage, which is kind of the point of 27 Dresses — it’s one of the laziest movies I’ve ever seen, to the point where I suspect it was written by a romantic comedy bot farming bad jokes off of Twitter. But I watch it. I watch it because, when I’m hungover, I need to know that someone else in the world phoned it in in a colossally bad way, and that James Marsden’s character is going to marry the worst woman in the universe. Much like the appeal of watching couples on House Hunters, knowing that their divorce is going to be fucking spectacular is what keeps me coming back.
Can’t Hardly Wait
I’m torn on the topic of Can’t Hardly Wait. On one hand, I once considered it to be a very good movie, insofar as a 17-year-old Me could consider a movie in which a Moonman-meets-N*Sync-looking Seth Green exclaims “yo I GOTSTA get laid tonight!” to be anything more than profoundly ridiculous.
And I suppose it’s cute and some parts are funny and an awful lot of late-90s teen movie starpower was in the room when it was filmed. But when I watch it now, I realize it’s kind of sexist, and the protagonist is pretty creepy, and the one character I really enjoyed — Lauren Ambrose’s Denise Fleming — is simply rude, rather than hilariously prickly and plucky. At this point in my life, I suppose the main appeal of Can’t Hardly Wait is that it acts as a sort of yearbook for the faces I once kind of recognized and now only faintly notice as the ones appearing in minor guest roles on major network crime procedurals.
Top Gun
Full disclosure: I fucking love Top Gun. I love it and at the same time I admit that it is just awful, complete jerk-off military propaganda, and that the most compelling character by far is Sundown, the only black pilot in the whole thing and he only gets 2 lines, one of which is sung at a bar. But I loooooove Top Gun. I know every line. I can sit through Tom Cruise flexing his jaw so hard his teeth might splinter, I can buy Meg Ryan as Goose’s wife with her brayingly stupid accent, I can buy Michael Ironsides being 1000% Canadian but still acting as one of the best dogfighters to ever come out of the US Navy.
I will watch Top Gun back-to-back if I have to, although I refuse to ever watch the sequel because no one took mine and some friends’ suggestion of having Goose’s ghost haunt an aircraft carrier and calling it “Goose’s Revenge.”
The Last of the Mohicans
Okay this movie is actually very good, but it keeps its status here because I first saw it in 7th grade, when my history teacher tried to base her entire curriculum on movies (I also watched Glory and 1776 — the musical starring Boy Meets World’s Mr. Feeny — in her classroom). This is a terrible and lazy way to teach 12-year-old students about America and it’s no wonder why we find ourselves in this mess today.
But that Daniel Day-Lewis is really something, isn’t he?
