As regular readers of this update will know, my wife Barb and I are dedicated moviegoers, and almost always see at least one movie a week. A typical weekend will have me working on Sunday and then, as sort of reward, catching a late afternoon show at the Palms, a very nice multi-plex here in Muscatine, Iowa.

Those readers will also know that the missus and I have been known to walk out of movies. I mentioned, a while back, that Barb and I were watching a really terrible Italian western at home one evening not long ago, and I said, “Honey, back in the ‘70s, would we have walked out of this movie?” And she said, “No…but then we had our whole lives in front of us.”

Barb usually has long since decided to bail before I’ve given up on a movie. She patiently rests her eyes, waiting for me to catch up with her disgust. Occasionally it takes us, or anyway me, a long time to realize I’m throwing time away on an unworthy film. CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR (which a good number of people liked) just wore me down with its constant over-the-top battles and contrived conflict, but we stayed probably a good hour before jumping ship. The awful Seth Rogen Christmas comedy (make that “comedy”), THE NIGHT BEFORE, was until this weekend the film that took us the least amount of time before walking out – fifteen or twenty minutes.

But the loser and new champion is BAD MOMS, or as Barb described it, “That was a really, really expensive box of Milk Duds.” We left around the ten-minute mark. We had chosen the film because SUICIDE SQUAD looked like the kind of film we’d wind up writing a suicide note after seeing – the unpleasant imagery of the preview was already more than I wanted rolling around somewhere in my brain. We considered JASON BOURNE, but nothing about the trailer indicated it would include anything we hadn’t already seen three or four times before in the franchise. And BAD MOMS had a decent Rotten Tomatoes rating (63% fresh, 78% favorable from audiences).

Also, BAD MOMS had Kristen Bell in it, second-billed. Both Barb and I are VERONICA MARS fans in particular and Kristen Bell fans in general – I even sat through every episode of her Showtime series, HOUSE OF LIES, despite finding the lead characters incredibly unsympathetic and even unpleasant. We suffered through the really crappy Melissa McCarthy movie, THE BOSS, chiefly because Bell was in it.

But BAD MOMS is so offensive – not in the sense that its would-be raunchy humor offended us, rather that it was an insult to the human race – that we left before the second-billed Bell even appeared on the screen. Reviews indicate that this female version of THE HANGOVER (by the same writers) has a funny, mostly improv performance by Kathy Hahn, who also hadn’t made it on screen before we left. Have to take their word for it.

Mila Kunis plays a Mom with two dreadful children who don’t appreciate her, and a boorish husband whose depiction made me feel like I was Martin Luther King at a Stepin Fetchit film festival. The life on screen, in a supposed suburb of Chicago, had no resemblance to human experience. Kunis, beautifully dressed, works at an office where she seems to be the boss, claiming to be the oldest one there at age 32, yet is also described as a parttime employee who’s been there six years. Clark Duke of HOT TUB TIME MACHINE, either a fellow employee or Kunis’ boss, immediately tells Kunis and another female employee about a creepy, overtly sexual dream he had, something that would get him fired or sued at any real company. Kunis is shown dropping her kids off at school and carrying in a giant paper-mache head of Nixon that she made for her son for a school project. Please explain to me what’s funny about that, and why we should like a mother who does her son’s homework for him (the title BAD MOMS is supposed to be ironic…see, they’re good moms but off on a HANGOVER-type spree, or would have been if we’d stayed around for it). Also at school is a trio of country club women (led by Christina Applegate) whose lot in life appears to be standing at the curb in front of the school to dis Kunis. Kunis’ husband is an unshaven fool who laughs at his wife when she struggles into the house carrying armloads of groceries, says he had a hard day at work because he had two conference calls and a nap, gobbles the elaborate meal she makes without thanks, gives his son a high five for getting a D on a test, and – caught masturbating in front of his computer with his pants down – tells his wife he’s checking his prostate.

Barb went out so quickly she might have been fleeing a fire. I called down the hall to her, “What time is the Apocalypse?”

By the way, a lot of people were laughing at this stuff, inexplicably…and some had their young children with them. There was a Trump rally feel to it.

A bad movie you walk out on is like a really, really bad dream from which you force yourself to wake up.

Let’s conclude with a prayer for the future of mankind in general and America in particular, and a look at this very nice BETTER DEAD review.

M.A.C.

Tags: Better Dead, Movie Reviews, Nathan Heller, Reviews