Things I Learned From Joe Versus The Volcano

I’d been meaning to see this movie for a while, but I hadn’t gotten around to it. I’d been told it was a good, silly romantic comedy. It’s not very good, but it sure is silly. And it taught me a few things:

– Advances in sound recording and editing capabilities mean that even the shitty short films I worked on when I was in school sounded way, way better than a pretty decent-budget studio film 15 years ago.

– If I wasn’t already gay, the sight of Tom Hanks with a mullet would have immediately removed any attraction whatsoever I had to men. It’s gonna take me days to get that image out of my mind. Mullets are a bad idea, period, but his is so very, very frightening and wrong.

– Meg Ryan in a brown wig and affecting a bad Noo Yawk accent looks exactly like Mary-Louise Parker. Meg Ryan in a red wig and trying to act coked out looks exactly like Nicole Kidman.

– A typhoon creates waves smaller than the tide pool at Six Flags. Also, your boat can get split in half by lightning during a typhoon in the South Pacific, and you won’t be immediately eaten by sharks.

– Luggage that’s waterproof floats, no matter what it’s made of.

– Nathan Lane looks even more ridiculous in Pacific Islander tribesman makeup than he does in drag. And he still comes off as a screaming queen.

– Erupting volcanoes cause the islands that they are erupting from to melt. And even bad special effects have come a long, long way in the last 15 years.

– You should probably get a second opinion when a doctor diagnoses you with a terminal disease called “Brain Cloud,” and you’re a hypochondriac who’s never heard of it.

Please. Hypochondriacs research everything that could even remotely be a possibility. They know more about disease than most doctors. If a hypochondriac hasn’t heard of it, chances are it’s fake.

And my final finding, the most astonishing one of all:

– There are romantic comedies that I am not a sucker for, but only if they’re neither romantic nor funny.

Leave a Reply

  

  

  

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.