Bad Movie Roundup

Look Both Ways, Purple Hearts, and The Hating Game

by screen time honey

There are movies that come out, always straight to streaming, that I cannot wait to see. Not because they look good but because they look so bad. I always need to watch these movies with a friend as watching alone is too painful. With a friend, we can repeat the terrible dialogue. We can pause to discuss wild plot holes. And we can get so high we actually start to enjoy it a bit. It’s bliss. This past weekend, I had the pleasure of watching three of these bad movies:

1. Look Both Ways: A candy-coated version of life showing a woman’s life if she ended up pregnant and one where she wasn’t.
2. Purple Hearts: A melodrama about opposites falling in love featuring the military and breathy singing.
3. The Hating Game: Yet another opposites attract film about colleagues working at a publishing house that somehow pays a liveable wage.

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Look Both Ways

Look Both Ways was a fun, wholly unrealistic, zero-conflict film in which you can: can tune out, do laundry, get high, take a poo, come back, and you’ve missed no essential plot points. You need zero mental capacity to watch. Conflict is more or less absent from the film.

A pretty, white, blonde woman, played by Lili Reinhart, goes through life with incredibly minimal strife. In one reality, Rhinehardt (no idea what her character’s name is) gets pregnant and decides she has to keep the baby and sadly forgoes her 5-year plan, which involves being an illustrator in LA. No idea why she decides she needs to keep the baby.

In the baby version of life, Reinhart lives with her upper-middle-class parents in Texas. These parts were filmed before Roe v. Wade was overturned, and abortion was never discussed (I guess it was too deep a topic). At this point, Luke Wilson enters the film as Reinhart’s dad. He definitely understood the assignment and was happy with the paycheck and with doing minimal work. At first, her parents say she needs a job, but that seems to go by the wayside. She never gets a job, lives happily with her parents, and has two scenes with her child. The house betrays no signs of a toddler. It seems like a pretty great setup.

In her career side of the story, Reinhart goes to LA and gets her dream job and a nice apartment. Her boss owns the company and is a legendary illustrator. When her boss says her drawings are unoriginal after years of working for her, Reinhart has an epiphany, quits, and breaks up with her boyfriend. This is where we reach the ultimate low point for our heroine. She has to go to a party and explain to a pregnant friend that she has no job and no boyfriend. She is in utter despair. This lasts about five seconds because, in the next scene, her illustrations are picked up for a short at South By Southwest.

In the baby version, Reinhart never has a job but somehow manages to apply to a panel at the same South by Southwest. We never find out how it happened. She also gets with her baby daddy at the end, even though he is engaged to someone else. No discussion of the fiancé. It was so peachy.

At the end of the career version, Reinhart sees her old friend (who would have been the baby daddy), and he is famous and playing in a cool band (rather than a lame cover band in the baby version, it seems he is the only one who seriously missed out in the baby version of life). In this version, Reinhart also ends up with a hot guy from her old company. Again, another peachy ending.

So being blonde, white, pretty, and privileged ensures that whatever you do in life, you’ll be successful and happy. Wrong if you think about it. Just fine if you are high and don’t want to think.

After seeing this movie and the other movie Reinhart produced, Chemical Hearts, it is clear to me that Cole Sprouse definitely broke up with her because he judged the fuck out of her.

How High You Need To Be To Find Funny:

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Purple Hearts

Purple Hearts was fucking scary. A liberal girl with diabetes can’t afford health insurance, so she marries a conservative marine whose friends make racial slurs. They fall in love. It is very melodramatic and is trying to make young girls horny by depicting a girl with a debilitating health condition being looked after by a strong, protective man strong man who can lift her up and shit.

The liberal girl is also a singer, and her singing is so autotuned she sounds like Akon, yet when she lip-sings, she holds her abdomen and looks like she is giving birth through her mouth as she” belts” her super slow computerized melodies. It’s painful.

I would say this movie was more scary than romantic. It is unclear if either changed character political views or actually ended up with health insurance…

How High You Need To Be To Find Funny:

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The Hating Game

I was actually pleasantly surprised by The Hating Game. I assumed it would be a fast-talking, “chic,” and uber-sanitized version of New York with people living in way too big of apartments. It was not original or funny in any way. While the first four were true, despite being a straight-to-Netflix rom-com starring Lucy Hale, it actually has some funny moments.

The film features a girl and a guy (forgot both characters’ names) who work for the same publishing house, are polar opposites, and, uh-oh, want the same job. One cute moment displays the guy’s OCD tendencies, leaving Hale in utter shock after a sleepover they have where he sets the bed after sleeping in it, leaving her on the other side of the bed, obviously still unmade.

I thought the film would be the typical rom-com duo that fights the whole movie even though they are both really attractive and have overwhelming sexual tension. However, within the first ten minutes of the film, the guy maturely asks, “What are we doing? We fight a lot; this is a joke, right?” with the implied suggestion that they both seemingly like each other. Lucy Hale rightly makes out with him and is immediately down to hook up. They still fight because they are very different, but keep hooking up as normal people would.

I thought there was going to be an annoying triangle when Hale starts dating a not-as-hot guy at work, but that relationship quickly ends, and she becomes friends with the not-as-hot guy. How not annoying and normal! Lucy Hale also wasn’t an overly quirky manic pixie dream girl, which was refreshing.

So yeah, I really liked it. Although to be fair, it was right after Purple Hearts and Look Both Ways, so maybe it just seemed good comparatively. Regardless, it will still be a fun watch, even if it is slightly worse than I have been letting on.

How High You Need To Be To Find Funny: