On Saturday night I got a full-on eyeful of rutty, desperate, stupid, angry, cheesy, Jerry Springer-style sexual aggression, so I was a bit anxious about watching "The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down" this afternoon. Did I really want to see a movie about the kind of people I'd reluctantly shared a bar with just 24 hours ago, let alone a movie intended to REINFORCE such behaviour?
But no, it was wonderful! As a tongue-in-cheek "guide" to the typical party night, it certainly WAS dead-on, and it WOULD have been depressing except that the party-people in the film were far funnier and more interesting than such people are in real life (just watch the "behind-the-scenes" footage to see witty characters become boneheaded REAL people in the blink of an eye).
I particularly liked the movie's observations about the END of the night, when everybody is at the tail-end of their buzz and all promising to do fun things tomorrow ("Let's go to Vegas!" "Let's play Laser Tag!")...but nobody EVER calls, because they're all too exhausted and jaded to want to see each other. I also enjoyed their "mouse experiments," and their expose of the "coke bore" personality.
If you've ever looked at bar/club sexuality with a critical eye, this movie really IS a must-see. It even manages to have an upbeat message under all the debauchery: even if you're depressed the morning after, don't worry...you will rise "Phoenix-like" in just a few days, and you should be happy that you had more fun in a few hours than many people have in a month. As somebody who gets unaccountably melancholic after most nights out, this is good advice indeed.
