[Just Say No]

Perhaps, dear reader, you are a little something like me. Perhaps you enjoy the occasional (or even frequent) bad movie. Perhaps you have a deep-rooted fondness for John Cusack & cheesy 80s movies. Perhaps you generally avoid trailers, which could have warned you off. Perhaps.

Lucky for you, in addition to all of those things, I am also willing to see a potentially terrible movie if I can see it for free. Which is how I wound up seeing the first half of Hot Tub Time Machine.

Yeah. The first half. For the first time that I can remember, I walked out of a movie. I don’t want to hear any bullshit about how we just didn’t get it, or how I am some kind of film snob because come on. I loved Legion! I am first in line for anything Apatovian! I even enjoyed Zack and Miri Make a Porno, and that came with its share of gross-out moments, but you know what it didn’t have? Endless rape jokes, for one thing. Or rampant homophobia. Or an utter lack of any redeeming qualities whatsoever.

I was particularly taken aback by how terrible Hot Tub was, since there were so many free screenings of it. Like, 5 times as many as a typical movie, which had fooled me into thinking it might actually be a fun dumb movie and they were trying harder than usual to drum up word of mouth.

It’s not fun. It’s appalling. It’s one of those movies where you’re sitting there, listening to the audience laugh, and wondering if you’re seeing the same thing. If we were seeing the same thing, I am judging them harshly.

Much to our disappointment, the utter suck of Hot Tub eliminated another terrible movie from our schedule: She’s Out of My League. Same situation: never saw a trailer, Jay Baruchel is adorable (and carries the Apatovian vibe), but the screenwriters? Are the same as for Hot Tub. So, you know. Don’t see that one either. Don’t even put it in your Netflix queue, thinking “It can’t be that bad”. It will be.

It’s a shame, too, because I think I finally learned the title. For a solid week, every time I tried to think of it, I wanted to call it He’s Just Not That Into You. I could never remember if it was My League or Your League. By the end we had morphed it into something like He’s Just Not That Into A League of Your Own.

Which is possibly a movie we’d see, though how someone could *not* be into A League of Their Own is beyond me.