NOT MY DRINK

DIRECTED BY TODD PHILIPS

STARRING: BRADLEY COOPER, ZACH GALIFIANAKIS, ED HELMS, JUSTIN BARTHA AND HEATHER GRAHAM

Yes, I watched ‘The Hangover’, about a year (or more) following its release and gigantically successful and well-appreciated run, and I must admit on the forefront that I think I had missed out on some seriously funny moments in a compactly done film, and being one who dug even films like ‘Disturbia’ and ‘21’, I acquiesce that I should probably have watched this a whole lot earlier. But, (and this is the crucial point) I still stand by my claim or stand to not watch this film because it’s just what it is – a Hangover. A bunch of guys trying to remember the fun they had, morose not because they had misbehaved, but more because they don’t remember it, and in that way ‘The Hangover’ is in no way a ‘film’ of sorts. I felt the same about ‘Knocked Up’; same about ‘Superbad’, and this is no different.

But again, this is well written. The task of keeping the viewer in the dark, not giving too much away, keeping it up to hunches and notions in a quirk of suspense in the overall comic ambience required some good screenwriting and I found the writers well up to their mark. I don’t know, the film gave me this impression that usual successful films give, this compliance with the sequence of events rather than an urge demanding for a better one instead – I just watched the film, which means I drunk into what was offered and didn’t ask for more, as far as the writing was concerned. The important task was to keep me clueless till they chose to disclose and that was successfully maintained. Well done!

Negatives? Let’s not talk about it, decidedly. It’s a lost argument to bring ethics into an utterly perverted comedy drama, doesn’t work even as much as it would in a slasher-thriller. Not blood in this case, though, but urine, it’s more than disgusting that Alan is always caught with his pants down. Heather Graham is made to look like an idiot with what could be the most inappropriate role ever, (counting in the likes of Kirsten Dunst in ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’) and the writers could have found no better way to fart on marriage and the sanctity behind the same. The excuse could be that this is ‘a guy thing’, which not only makes the misogyny excusable, but also mandatory.

So how do I end this, then, a film that cannot be called one but which has to be given credit because I was found rolling with laughter, caught with my hand in my pants? The answer is that while ‘The Hangover’ could appeal to the hip, clubbing, weed-smoking new generation (of which I do not identify myself as a part) citing cheek in humour and fairly exaggerated reality, it is an otherwise useless refuge for the conscious film-viewer who, if still existent, would stand up to ask every single moment if these people are capable in the slightest of the extinct thing called ‘human emotion’.