The creative geniuses in Hollywood have a little secret that may just shake you to the very fabric of your being and perhaps blow your mind. When this knowledge is thrust upon your undoubtedly unprepared consciousness, you might be thrown into an existential whirlwind of questions about your worth as an organic cluster of cells.
Are you ready?
I ask this question rhetorically because there is no way that you could ever really wrap your mind around a concept so big, so groundbreaking, that not one, but two major motion pictures chose to reveal the philosophy with their taglines.
Here we go. Strap yourselves in because this one is a doozy.
Apparently love is not all that it’s been cracked up to be. In fact, if I may be so blunt to quote directly from the tagline for The Heartbreak Kid, “Love blows.”
The fine folks behind Good Luck Chuck look at things a little more optimistically. In their opinion, love only blows sometimes.
What? How could you say such a thing about love? Maybe I don’t fully understand what they are trying to say. Perhaps they are using another definition of the word “blow.” Let me consult my dictionary.
As far as my good friend Webster is concerned, the word “blow” has many meanings. One of these is “to send forth a current of air or other gas.” From the looks of the Good Luck Chuck poster, this might be what they mean when they say that sometimes love blows. They know that love is so magical it can gently breeze past Jessica Alba causing her to whimsically hold down her dress while Dane Cook stands by and looks uninterested.
Another definition of the word is “to make a sound by or as if by blowing” This is probably what The Heartbreak Kid means when they say that love blows. Ben Stiller’s love has filled his lady friend with joy to the point the only way she can express it back to him is by playing the hand trumpet. Like a typical man, Stiller isn’t listening to her.
Apparently “blow” is also a slang term for cocaine, but I can’t see any evidence on either one of these posters that implies that is the direction they are heading in.
The last definition of the word blow that comes to mind when I think of these two movies is “a forcible stroke delivered with a part of the body or with an instrument.” Ah, finally what I have been looking for. Just the thought of either one of these movies makes me want to come to blows with anyone who had anything to do with putting these things together (except Jessica Alba, she always gets a pass in my book). Watching the trailers or looking at the poster makes me feel like I’ve taken a blow to the head.
Hollywood has a terrible track record of releasing pairs of similar movies in close proximity to one another (Deep Impact and Armageddon, Mission to Mars and Red Planet, and who can forget 1980 basically giving us the same movie twice with Ordinary People and Cannibal Holocaust). While this pair doesn’t look quite as similar to each other as any of those, they are still a couple of generic romantic comedies guaranteed to make me blow chunks.
I hope that Hollywood can get it together and stop with the cookie-cutter remakes and formulaic sequels and other garbage they seem to be cranking out of the junk machines they pass off as studios. Because right now, I have a review for the movie industry, and while it’s not a bright one, it does rhyme with the phrase:
“You glow.”
Aaron Hertzog can be reached at aaron.hertzog@temple.edu.
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