Miss March

By Sunday it had been nine full days since I had seen the inside of a movie theater. My flu-cold relapse had kept me inside for four straight days, and I was beginning to get a bit antsy to get out. Three new wide-release movies had rolled into theaters on Friday, and to let the entire weekend go by without seeing one seemed like the wrong thing to do.

So I set off to Leominster on a perfect sunny afternoon. Spring was pushing its way into New England. When I got to the multiplex, however, I found the parking lot still rimmed by giant mountain ranges of plowed snow, covered in grime and soot like I remembered from my Midwestern childhood. But the sun felt pleasantly warm, and instead of my hat and gloves, I was now wearing sunglasses.

With the sap rising in the trees, it felt like a perfect afternoon for a teen sex comedy, perhaps. That goat-footed balloonman impulse was rearing its horned head on the marquees. I bought a matinee-priced ticket for Miss March and found myself in a mostly empty auditorium with four or five young teen couples. Evidently this passed for a date movie.

Normally with this kind of movie, I would be braced for the worst, but I had come to learn better. I knew by now that raunchy sex comedies had become Hollywood's favorite stealth vehicle for delivering sweet romantic tales with sentimental happy endings.

My suspicions were right, so this time I wasn't fooled at all by the raunch. I could see the heart of gold in this movie right from the start.

The premise was surprisingly fresh. We meet two teenage boys who are friends in high school. One, as you would expect for this type of movie, is the sex-absorbed "tail-chaser," completely controlled by his baser impulses. He is an avid subscriber of Playboy magazine (sort of quaintly anachronistic in the Internet age, if you ask me), and takes liberties in posing female clients at his job as a department store photographer. So far, so good.

But the protagonist, it turns out, is a twist on the standard formula. He is hapless with women, as the formula demands, but he's not at all interested in getting laid. He's actually a prude, and is determined to remain a virgin until marriage. He and his busty girlfriend give enthusiastic chastity lectures to elementary school students, but it is she who secretly wants them to break down and consummate their relationship. He is the one putting up a sincere fight against her pressure to get dirty.

A prudish male character like this is usually potrayed in a supporting role as a villain, shown to be malformed in his soul because of his repression, but here we get a very sympathetic portrait of him. We know he is sincere. Of course we also know the life force is going to conquer his resistance eventually. His girlfriend is just too hot to resist for long.

So the premise, in case you haven't seen the trailer, is this: the virginal young man breaks down and accedes to the young lady's request to deflower her during a wild post-Prom house party, at which he is awkwardly out of place.

To calm the young man's nerves before he ascends to the premarital sin chamber, his randy sex-absorbed friend forces him to down multiple rounds of hard liquor, something that he of course has very little experience with. The hapless virgin, too drunk to notice where he is going, opens the wrong door, falls down a flight of stairs, and gets brained by a heavy object.

The next thing he knows, he is being awakened by a reckless blow from a baseball bat being wielded by this same companion. He is in a hospital bed. It turns out that four years have elapsed, during which time the young virgin has been in a coma.

He quickly learns that his friend has no idea what has happened to his one-time sweetheart. She long ago went away to college and disappeared, it seems. Then quickly they find out that, by a weird coincidence, the old sweetheart is the centerfold in this month's Playboy magazine.

With the aid of a subplot that serves to force the pace of the action and put obstacles in their way, they quickly take to the road on a cross-country quest to get to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles in order to reunite the virginal man-boy with his old flame. He must see her again, at least to know why she has abandoned him.

At this point, the movie slips somewhat into the genre of the "sex road trip" flick, although in this case sex isn't the ostensible goal of the virgin protagonist, because of his nature. The subplot that forced the action-quickening serves to keep them in danger the entire time, as they elude cadres of supporting characters who seek to do them harm.

The main plot is framed perfectly classically in a geographic sense: the two young men start on the East Coast, reach Chicago at the exact mid-point of the movie, and then head to L.A. for Act Three and the climax. In Chicago they link up with a comic relief character who serves to give them more grief during the "sex odyssey."

It took me about twenty minutes to realize that the raunchy teen sex comedy layer of the movie is actually satire, perhaps too clever to be noticed by most of the people watching it. As such, the movie walks a fine line between being just perfectly or too much offensively raunchy (and scatological) at times. If you can laugh at a parody of a hip-hop artist chanting the line "Suck my dick while I fuck that ass," then you'll be in on the satire part just fine.

There were a few obvious cliches, of course, but in satire you need to have cliches. Perhaps the most obvious one was the busty sexy lesbian couple who come to the aid of the young men when they are lost in the desert. Like I said, I was fine with all this.

The story had a nice classical climax (no pun intended) inside the Playboy Mansion as both young men get to have separate private audiences that each serve as the respective endpoints of their quests. The virginal young man finally gets to meet his ex-girlfriend, and we get a delightful "aha" twist revelation about what has really been going on for the last four years, one that serves as sweet testimony to the existence of true love after all.

Classically, as a balance, the sex-absorbed friend must therefore get a private audience with an older man, in this case the real Hugh Hefner, his personal hero, who patiently explains to him to the wisdom of true love, and the real meaning of life. He is thus lifted out of his "base" self and into true manhood, at which time he can make repair his life and find his own true love ending (or at least a satirical form of it).

The screenplay showed nice low-level stitching at this point: the sex-crazed friend barges into a room to meet Hef, whereas the virginal protagonist is already in a room, seated, when the girlfriend comes in to find him. Touches like that make for a good script.

Hefner's presence marks his second acting gig in eight months, after The House Bunny. It seems that the "Playboy Mansion movie" has become a mini-genre. The use of Hef's classic pipe as a prop was somewhat novel and appropriate here.

Like I said, the movie comes in on the crude side, but I found most of it quite fresh. At only ninety minutes, it flew by, never dragging for a moment.

The movie was written and directed by the two male leads, Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, who created the television show "The Whitest Kids U Know," which I had never heard of, until researching this blog post. Personally I was quite impressed. Count me fan. At the very least, this is another entry in my 2009 Movies I Didn't Hate.