by WDC
05/12/2009

A pussyhound photographer finds himself invited to his brother's wedding, which is being planned by his ex-girlfriend. The one he should've been with forever. He gets drunk and the ghost of his dead pussyhound uncle shows up to warn him the three ghosts of girlfriends past are coming to teach him the error of his ways. It backfires, since he doesn't appear to be learning his lesson, and spends the time admiring the skills his uncle taught him on how to pick up women.

First off, Mathew McConaughey is good in just about every comedy he does, regardless of the quality of the script. This film was very funny, and pulled off what it was trying to do. It's faults are forgivable, given it's the hundreth fucking remake of A CHRISTMAS CAROL, and some of the plot points are predictable. But you don't go to a romantic comedy to bitch about minor details like that. Also that poster on the right is terrible. I truly expected a bad movie walking into it.

Going down the list, McConaughy goes downstairs after his first meeting with the uncle, and accidentally hits on the bride's mother, thinking she's one of the ghosts. The exchange between the two about casual sex wasn't bad, it was entertaining. It ends with him courteously being directed to someone younger. All of the bridesmaids are there for casual wedding sex, so it's a good thing the pussyhound showed up. He's the only real option they have, otherwise it's the groom's geeky friends. One of them becomes so desperate, she hides in his bed. Really, that's where a lot of the sexist humor comes from. Beautiful girls constantly moaning about who they're trying to have sex with and how they came close but screwed it up.

I don't feel sorry for any of the girls he breaks up with (he does it over a four way conference on his computer, while he's in the middle of fucking a singer). Clearly everybody he dates is shallow and got exactly what they paid for. The real humor of the movie was his dead uncle, Michael Douglas, who constantly goes on entertaining rants about how he managed to fuck everything with a pulse. I like the scene in the bar, after he explains everything to young Mathew who demands to see him in action. He gets slapped by the broad, but tells the kid it was a success, followed by one of her friends coming over and propositioning him for his dirty mouth. His major point was that at the end of his life, nobody would show up at his funeral or miss him. Which goes back to my point: they were all a bunch of pretty looking skanks anyway.

Casting the first ghost as a lesbian from the '80s was cute, and I definately needed her to get through the scenes with his younger self, because the actor they cast wasn't worth watching. Watching her freak out because he's ignoring everything she says to look at the women was funny. She just kind of sits there in the background during the prom and parties and distracts you from a scene that isn't that great anyways. Then she goes on a rant about her being the one who took his virginity within 39 minutes. Afterwards she gets the job done in bulk and runs him through a room about a mile long filled with all his ex-girlfriends, ready to tear him apart like zombies.

The second ghost wasn't exactly creative. It's his lonely nerdish indian secretary, who isn't actually dead, she just has nothing better to do. I can't remember if this was before or after her introduction, but there was that funny scene where he tries to get drunk with the forbidden champagne. He pops the cork too close to the cake and ruins it. At least that was more amusing than his secretary. She's so socially inept, she arranges get-togethers with the women he breaks up with behind his back. The closest they come to a dramatic plot point is the bride getting pissed over her fiance sleeping with a bridesmaid years earlier, yet it's her friend and she's not even mad at her. The third ghost wasn't creative at all, and I already went over the graveyard ending.

So clearly this film isn't Ingmar Bergman, but what other alternatives did I have? I found THE SOLOIST to be mediocre garbage. STAR TREK has an entertaining cast, but the script isn't memorable. WOLVERINE is god-awful. If I really had to choose, GHOSTS OF GIRLFRIENDS PAST was the most successful for the moment. None of the things wrong with it actually bothered me, I didn't even really think about them until I wrote all of it out. The sexist humor kept me entertained through what was just another date movie, and I'll probably wind up getting it on DVD, where the wife will play it 20 times over the next year.