Did You Hear About the Morgans?

Seen at: Cinemark 16, Fort Collins, on January 14.

Yes, I did hear about the Morgans---and the movie sucks.

Actually for the first twenty minutes it almost had me. The set-up---Hugh Grant as the frantic downtrodden power executive husband who is trying to win back his wife (Sarah Jessica Parker) about an episode of infedility---really works.

Then at the twenty minute it all goes kablooey, and degerates into the one of the most hilarious parades of ridiculous comic-suspense satire I've seen in a long, long time. For a good ten-minute stretch of the movie, there was nothing but slapstick cliches, using some shots going back fifty years or more, including the old Harold Lloyd shot hanging off the edge of a skyscraper. W...T...F...

There is something really charming in the stereotypes of Wyomingites in this movie, as if made my Californians who know better, but who are trying to exploit what they think are the stereotypes that New Yorkers have about the west, but which are really just stupid cliches going back to Vaudeville.

If I'm trying to say that this movie lacked originality, then yes, it did.

Grant and Parker look like they hated being in this movie. "Oh my god this is dreadful," Grant seems to say with every facial expression, every gesture.

I feel for you, Hugh.

That might normally be the end of it, but wouldn't you know that despite all that I just said, this movie won an award?

It was not an award from me, mind you, but from the Bovine Actors Guild, which has already awarded this movie the F.W. Murnau "Sunrise" Award---the coverted "cowie." Specifically it went to Lenny the Bull for his performance in the climax scene.

My own theory is called the Magic Cow of Happiness. One of the dictates of the this theory is that the cow should serve as a means by which the romantic couple are brought together. There are many, many examples on film.

Here, the hero and heroine, having reconsidered their divorce but not fully reconciled, are literally gored back together by a charging bull.

That, my friends, is perhaps the most extreme intervention I have yet seen from a Magic Cow in the movies---at least for a single bovine acting alone.

But that's where we are at, as a culture.