Milking the MoviePass I sat through Game Night, which was not quite the thriller I expected but still a lot of fun. I actually thought it was going to be a credible true-to-life thing, but once I gave up on that possibility it was fun, and left me not even thinking about leaving early.

I don’t know if it’s bad marketing or if I’m just ambivalent to details but I seem to get the wrong idea about a lot of movies. I remember getting into the RoboCop series thinking it was some kind of cartoon-like series for kids, when of course it could be nothing farther from that. It can take me years to discover that I did not see or listen to things on account of what I thought they were. The B-52s, for instance. I thought they were punk and that punk was scum. That was just the reputation of that scene passed on to me from editorial or comments I read in local newspapers. I hear the B-52s today and hear it as just harmless joy. Somehow I got a similar impression of the band Cheap Trick, that they were just bad people and their music sucked anyway. None of that turns out to be true but it kept me from giving them a chance for years.

I’m not as confident about Game Night as most of the reviewers I’ve seen so far. The side stories between the couples were tedious and not always funny, although the Denzel Washington cameo and its reason for happening were clever. As seems to happen in almost any movie I see there was a character who looked so much like someone I know that I could hardly think of the dude as an actor. In this case it was the police officer next door, played by Jesse Plemons, whose appearance and even to an extent his demeanor in this film reminded me of Vince, a guy I know from a bar but don’t really talk to anymore.

I just messaged Vince to comment on the resemblance. He did not disagree, though all he said in reply was “Haha”.

A friend of mine once stared at me with a look I would describe as aghast mixed with fascinated when I mentioned, one after another, how much people passing through the television looked like other people. He thought my comments were beyond the pale of normalcy, saying “You are so random.”

I found a lot of the plot twists in Game Night inevitable from the get-go, the return to grace of the aforementioned police officer being the most obvious, and from an hour away I predicted some kind of heroic redemption for the dopey guy. References to other movies abounded, as seems to be more common than I thought in films these days. I could tell references were being made but that doesn’t mean I understood the lot of them. The Pulp Fiction allusion was obvious enough for anyone to get. I guess I need to see Eyes Wide Shut, since it was referred to not just in this but in Get Out, which I watched last week. In Game Night someone referred to “Eyes Wide Fight Club” to describe a strange basement scene in which rich people paid poor people to engage in fistfights. I never watched Fight Club either, because I don’t like seeing faces pounded to bloody pulps; and I avoided Eyes Wide Shut because I never liked Tom Cruise.

Anyway, I was patient with Game Night but don’t think I’d watch it again or recommend it. I guess it was rated R for the blood and guts and maybe for the vomiting scene, which I looked away from so maybe it wasn’t that gross. Seeing vomit or even thinking about it makes me want to vomit. That should be a new rating for movies: V, for vomit-inducing.

This was also the first time I used the Regal Cinemas app with MoviePass. I got a free popcorn for using it the first time. Hooray.