[2]

Swingers is the reason we cannot let college students with broken hearts have movie cameras. If I had to say something nice about the movie, which somehow launched the careers of director Doug Liman and writer Jon Favreau, it’s that Heather Graham has probably never been photographed more beautifully. And I guess the male leads, including super-skinny Vince Vaughn, are all attractive. But that’s it. The rest of the movie made me want to barf. There is NOTHING I hate more in movies than a story about a guy who falls to pieces because some girl left him, and he can’t get on with his life — no matter what else he has going for him — until his balls are squarely in the possession of a new woman. I mean, Christ. Swingers is like a goddamned John Cusack movie without the Cusack. What the fuck? Why is this a popular narrative? Why do men like this kind of story? It’s insulting. How many more times is the love of a woman going to be deus ex machina in a screenplay? I mean, Jon Favreau’s character pines for an old love for about seventy-five minutes in this movie, all while his friends try to get him out of the apartment and be thankful for how far he’s come in his career. But nothing works. Nothing, that is, until he fortuitously meets Heather Graham at the eighty or ninety-minute mark. And first, we’re supposed to applaud Favreau’s character because he views courting Graham as a hawk might view courting a bunny rabbit (there’s literal imagery in the movie), and then once he realizes she might actually like him, we have our happy ending. Basically, Swingers is saying men are nothing without women and might as well not even try to be anything without them. So line up, men. Cut off your balls and give them to the first lady who will have them. Because you’re a slave to the opposite sex, incapable of thinking or talking about anything other than your master. Excuse me while I throw up all over the fucking place.