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40 Days and 40 Nights and 9 Reasons It Sucked

Josh Hartnett works for a burgeoning “dot-com” (we know, 2002, hilarious) in San Francisco and he has a big problem: every beautiful woman he so much as bumps into on the street wants to immediately go to bed with him. How will he ever find true love if he keeps giving in to their sexual advances? Well, like anyone with this completely relatable problem would do, he consults the Catholic Church for some healthy advice on sex. After talking to a priest (who happens to be his brother) in a confessional, he decides to go the entirety of Lent—40 days and 40 nights—without sex, intimate contact, or...ahem...self-gratification. The rub? (Pun intended.) He then meets the girl of his dreams (she has a name but we just call her Manic Pixie Dream Girl). Also, for added pressure, his office has a betting pool on when he will cave, and so they try to tempt him to give up his celibacy at every turn. We would like to say hilarity ensues, but as the church has taught us, even the smallest lie is a sin.

1. The Only People Who Could Possibly Relate to This Premise Are Single People During a Pandemic

The problem: we are not single. Also, a second problem: our brains work. 

2. Josh Hartnett’s Horniness Defies the Laws of Human Biology

Poor Josh Hartnett is so horny that, for the last two of his 40 days he has a perma-boner and is shaking like a heroin addict at a methadone clinic. So horny that, on the last day of the challenge, he hallucinates that he is floating through a sea of (really unattractive) boobs in a fevered psychotic break from reality, like Ewan McGregor seeing the dead baby on the ceiling in Trainspotting. So horny that, in the aforementioned psychotic break, he doesn’t even realize that his ex-girlfriend is mounting him in an effort to sabotage the 40-day challenge at the 11th hour. He imagines that he’s at the laundromat or some shit while his ex-girlfriend gets on top of him and has sex with him to completion before he comes to (pun intended) and realizes what has happened. And all of us watching are supposed to go, “Yeah, that tracks. I remember not getting laid for the entirety of high school and it was exactly like that.”

3. His Ex-Girlfriend Sexually Assaults Him and Yet He Still Has to Apologize For It

Speaking of the aforementioned scene with the ex-gf, we are still beside ourselves that during Josh’s fever dream (where he’s basically unconscious and tied to the bed), his ex-girlfriend legit rapes him, and no one in the movie—including Josh Hartnett—even suggests, “Hey, that kind of wasn’t cool.” His new love interest, Manic Pixie Dream Girl, walks in on it and swears Josh off forever and he spends the last 15 minutes of the movie apologizing and trying to win her back, when the misunderstanding could have been solved with the following 4 lines:

MPDG: You slept with your ex-girlfriend!

Josh Hartnett: No, actually, I was sexually assaulted.

MPDG: Oh my God, I’m so sorry that happened to you.

Josh Hartnett: Thank you for understanding. Let’s get a panini.

<Roll credits>

4. They Could Have Cast the Female Characters as Blow-Up Dolls, Because the Women are Just Props in This Movie

All the women, except for Manic Pixie Dream Girl, are completely interchangeable. So much so that it takes next to nothing to set her apart in Josh Hartnett’s eyes. “This girl is so quirky! She dances by herself wearing headphones at the laundromat! How quirky!” Other women are beautiful and ready to sleep with him at any moment, but this girl is different. 

In fact, this must be Donald Trump’s favorite movie because it’s a world where women are just there to seduce men, and the fact that men can’t control themselves sexually is completely justified. And also because there are no black people. For real, like, none. It’s just a world full of white guys who all look exactly the same, and one Asian guy (the Rolling Stone dude from Almost Famous) thrown in for “diversity”. That’s it.

5. Josh Harrnett is REALLY Bad at First Dates

Their first date was worse than our first date, and we drunkenly sat drinking water out of Tupperware. JK, that was a great 1st date. Ours, not theirs. For their first date, Josh Hartnett took Manic Pixie Dream Girl to the most romantic place on earth, the bus. They literally just rode the city bus for what must have been like 4 hours. Not to mention the fact that they live in San Francisco and the bus managed to drive by every tourist spot on this fictional city bus route, as if it were a trolley tour. HEY there’s an idea, why didn’t he take her on a romantic trolley tour? You know what this movie needed? One rewrite. Just one. 

6. Josh’s Workplace Makes Frat Houses Look Like a 1930’s Ladies Sewing Circle

Where is the HR office at Josh’s dot-com office? Did they outsource it to India or decide to convert it into a marshmallow pit wrestling ring? We’re guessing one of those scenarios took place seeing as how Josh’s boss talks to the women in the office like it’s last call at a meat market bar, looks up the women’s skirts when they aren’t looking, fingers dried apricots like they are ladies’ sexual organ, and performs cunnilingus on said dried apricots. But it’s all given a pass because he is such a sexual being and just can’t help himself. Josh’s coworkers also attempt to drug him with Viagra in order to thwart the 40 day/40 night challenge but end up accidentally drugging the World’s Horniest Boss instead, who subsequently masturbates in the office bathroom for the rest of the day, which everyone thinks is HILARIOUS. No wonder the dot-com bubble burst.

7. The Entire Conflict of the Movie Could Have Been Circumvented with One Simple Conversation. 

Josh Hartnett was like halfway through the 40 days already when he meets Manic Pixie Dream Girl, so the central conflict of the film could have been solved with the following 5 lines:

Her: Wanna come back to my place?

He: Actually I gave up sex for Lent. I have 20 more days. 

Her: So, as two people who just started dating, if we have the completely normal amount of one date per week, it’ll be like 2 or 3 more dates before we can have sex?

He: Yeah.

Her: Cool.

<roll credits>

8. This Isn’t the Longest Movie Ever, But It Feels Like It 

At one point we turned to each other and exclaimed, “How can there still be 30 MINUTES LEFT?????” This is like the “Layla” of movies, in that you think it’s done, but it just keeps going.  But unlike “Layla”, which goes from something awesome to another something awesome with a little break in the middle, this movie just goes from suck to suck with no break. 

9. They Had a Sex Scene Where They Use Only Flowers and Neither of Them Even Makes One “De-Flowered” Joke

Josh Hartnett brings Manic Pixie Dream Girl flowers to make up for the fact that he’s not sticking her good. So, naturally, instead of thanking him for the gesture, she makes a big deal out of the fact that she and Josh haven’t kissed yet (kissing is part of the “no sex for lent” shebang) after like TWO DATES. She says that the kiss is the only way you can tell if there’s a real connection between two people--she heard it in a Motown song once, so it has to be true. So instead of kissing they get creative and begin to “touch” each other using the flowers Josh had brought. Josh then proceeds to make her orgasm by just using a flower petal and gently blowing on her nether regions. “Wait, would this actually work?” Heidi asked Mike during that scene. But Mike had already hurried off to the bedroom with an asthma inhaler and a dream.

In conclusion, we’ll never watch 40 Days and 40 Nights again. Except during Lent, as our penance. 

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We’re Just Not That Into He’s Just Not That Into You

9 Netflix and Grill Takeaways 

1. Ginnifer Goodwin Acts Her Ass Off 

We both had a sudden realization when watching this movie: Ginnifer Goodwin is (or at least should be) America’s sweetheart. She’s cute, likable, intelligent, vulnerable, and funny, and she carried this movie like she was Atlas and this turd of a movie was the world resting on her shoulders. 

2. It’s Chock Full of Stars 

Even the smaller roles are played by like A-List actors. How they got all these assfaces to sign on for three total minutes of screen time in this dud is the biggest head-scratcher of 2009 (and that was the year everyone was still trying to figure out what caused the financial crisis.) There are roughly 700 major characters in this film, and their lives all loosely intersect like a way-shittier Magnolia or a slightly-shittier Love Actually. 

There are so many characters, in fact, that perennial star Drew Barrymore pops in and out so infrequently that you forget that she’s in the movie. It seems Drew Barrymore’s character’s sole function is to plug the barely-still-relevant MySpace in the 3 scenes she’s in. We half-expected Tom to make a cameo.

3. Jennifer Connelly Is Way Too Intense for This Romcom

Someone shoulda told J-Con, “This isn’t Requiem For a Dream, this is just some light viewing for couples on date night or boozed-up quarantiners. Let’s take it down about 5 notches.” But instead, J-Con swings for the fences in this fairly banal role as if she can smell an Oscar within reach. Like when she flips out on her poor home renovator (Luis Guzman), delivering a diatribe aimed at him with the same intensity that Liam Neeson directs toward the kidnappers in Taken. And over what? She suspects he and his fellow workers have been smoking. (Cue members of the audience clutching their pearls.) 

In fact, the whole subplot of her paranoia about everyone around her enjoying a cig on the down-low feels like a “truth” anti-smoking ad. She even lets husband Bradley Cooper off the hook for nailing ScarJo behind her back as long as he wasn’t smoking during it!

4. Jennifer Aniston is Somehow a Pathetic Character 

We are supposed to buy that the other characters in the movie look down on the still-unmarried Jennifer Aniston like she is a pitiable, kooky old maid with 39 cats when in actuality she is literally the most beautiful woman in the world (see People Magazine in 2004 and 2016). 

To both of their credit, Jennifer Aniston and on-screen beau Ben Affleck prove their star quality with a touching proposal scene that could easily have become a romcom cliché. Heidi definitely got a bit misty-eyed. Mike wept openly.

5. And Justin Long Is Somehow the Heartbreaker

Remember Justin Long as Warren Cheswick, the super dorky teen in the TV show Ed? Well, that’s how we will always remember him. How did he make the insane leap from that (very appropriately cast) role to one where he is slaying puss like Leo at Cannes? The world may never know. 

6. ScarJo Is Apparently a Rising Music Star and We Never See Her Sing 

A struggling musician, ScarJo connects with music exec Bradley Cooper and they exchange numbers, so at their next meeting he obviously he comes to see her at a venue where she’s performing, right? Wrong, it’s at a yoga class that she apparently teaches, as if yoga has anything to do with anything. E from Entourage also has the hots for ScarJo and is chasing her all over town, so we see him catching up with her at an open mic, rehearsal room, or recording studio, right? Wrong, wrong, and wrong. When does she perform/rehearse? ScarJo’s character might be the least disciplined artist since, well, us.  

Then, at the end of the movie, we finally see a snapshot of ScarJo performing without sound as if they are hiding the fact that she can’t sing, which is completely bizarre, as ScarJo has released two albums in real life and, oh, by the way, has a song on the film’s fucking soundtrack.

Of all the silly choices the filmmakers made for this movie, and there are many, this bungled subplot is by far the most baffling.

7. The Story Incorporates Pointless Confessional Vignettes 

The writers of this movie evidently watched When Harry Met Sally, saw the confessional interviews interspersed throughout the movie, and said, “Let’s just copy those and make them strange non-sequiturs instead of using them to connect the narrative.” It’s almost as if the writers were getting paid by the movie minute, making this already-too-long-movie even longer. 

8. E From Entourage’s Character Is the Most Hard-Up Person in History 

E from Entourage has it bad for ScarJo, his friend who he used to date.  ScarJo  exploits his attraction to her in order to gain emotional support, but that’s fine with him because he is obsessed with her and will take what he can get. She’s all, “Could you just tell me I’m beautiful?,” and he’s all, “Could you just touch it, blow on it, look at it for a second, literally anything?” In one scene where she greets him with a hug we expected him to immediately need a change of pants.

 9. Heidi’s Favorite Song Is In the Movie

It’s the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place,” which is ironic, cause this 41-per-cent-on-Rotten-Tomatoes chick flick is the last place she wanted to hear this song. 

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How to Get Through a Quarantine in 10 Movies

(The Netflix and Grill Guide to Movies You Will Love to Hate)

1. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days

Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey are both charming and pleasing to look at, but even they can’t out-act this God-awful script. We felt our minds wandering through all the exposition, so much so that the movie should be called How to Lose a Viewer in 10 Minutes (nailed it.) Kate Hudson’s gold dress was, and always will be, the star of this movie. 

2. The Notebook

We both (separately) bought tickets for this movie in the theater when it was released in 2004, when the average movie ticket price was only about six bucks, and we both had the same thought upon leaving: “I definitely overpaid.” We watched it again on Netflix and, after figuring out our per-movie cost from our monthly subscription, found that this viewing cost us about 34 cents. We still think we overpaid. Someone needs to tell Allie she’s in an abusive relationship with Noah. Someone needs to tell Noah that no means no--an easy way to remember that is that it’s the first syllable of his name. We thought it was an interesting choice that Allie’s later dementia was foreshadowed by her younger self forgetting what accent she was supposed to have in any given scene. Allie the Sometimes Southern Belle is a flighty bird, Never-Say-Die Noah is a toxic male bird, and we wish we could fly back in time 2 hours. 

3. Eat Pray Love

What could be less interesting than a well-off white woman traveling across the world to escape her first-world problems, the worst of which seems to be that her husband loved her too much and her subsequent much younger boyfriend loved her even more? Answer: nothing. Why this movie became such a phenomenon escapes us the same way Julia Roberts’ character escapes accountability for any of her shitty behavior. 

4. Crazy, Stupid, Love

Ryan Gosling is a street-smart Brooklyn-Italian-sounding ladies man who says things like “Just bang the broad, Bah-fahn-gool. Fuhgeddaboutit.” (We paraphrased.) And Steve Carell was like, “Remember when we did 40-Year-Old Virgin? Let’s do the exact same thing again.” Let’s also not forget that boundaries and propriety don’t seem to be a thing in this movie, as the grown-assed babysitter gives nude pictures to a minor and we’re all supposed to be cool with it. A lot of people are crazy, stupid in love with this movie. We think they are crazy and stupid. 

5. P.S. I Love You

This movie begins with what feels like a 3-hour exposition scene to set up the fact that Hilary Swank is oh-so-unhappy with the fact that she's already 28 years old and her carefree Irish husband hasn’t given her 5 kids yet. Also, their ultra-beautiful and hip New York apartment isn’t enough--why don’t they have a house already??!!  Waaaaahhhhh. Then her husband dies, and Hilary’s already unlikeable character spirals from annoying into the realm of insufferable. The dead husband orchestrates a series of notes to be delivered to Hilary, still trying to please his sullen and ungrateful wife from beyond the grave, proving that he has just as poor taste in women in death as he did in life. 

6. Catch and Release

Oh, we caught it, but we didn’t release it soon enough. We suffered through to the end. Why was Kevin Smith in this movie, and why was he trying so hard to be funny? The plot is so unclear and convoluted that we can’t tell you exactly what happened, but the bullet points are: Jennifer Garner’s fiancé dies, leaving behind a million bucks that she didn’t realize he had; she moves into a house with her dead fiancé’s buddies for some reason; her dead fiancé had a secret lover (Juliette Lewis) and possibly fathered a son with her; and, in the end, Jennifer Garner gets with Timothy Olyphant, her dead fiancé’s best friend. Why does all of this make for a compelling movie? It doesn’t. Why was this movie called Catch and Release? Beats the hell out of us. What could possibly account for this movie getting made? Our guess, cocaine. 

7. Monster-in-Law

Monster-in-Law...more like a Monster Waste of Time (nailed it x 2). Jennifer Lopez is at war with her fiance’s mother (played by Jane Fonda), who has a death-like grip on her son, Michael Vartan. Jennifer Lopez is just a simple dog walker with the beachside apartment of a tech CEO who fell in love with the world’s biggest mama’s boy and got engaged to him after what seems to be four dates, a fact which Jane Fonda hates. Conflict ensues. And that’s it, just 102 minutes of that. Except for Wanda Sykes, the no-nonsense assistant and only sympathetic character, and you can practically see the sweat beading on her forehead from her straining to try and save this steaming pile. The other movies on this list we either loved or loved to hate. This one we just hated. 

8. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

Makers of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, you did it. You made a movie that not even Emma Stone, Matthew McConaughey, or Charles Goddamn Dickens could save. This movie came out eight years before the #metoo movement, and has aged about as well as Harvey Weinstein’s face. To be clear, it sucked regardless, but now it suffers from the double-whammy of both sucking and trying to evoke empathy for a sexual predator.   

9. My Best Friend’s Wedding

In fairness, Heidi actually loves this movie, and Mike thinks it’s not the worst thing ever. Ok, he loves it too, in spite of (and sometimes because of) its many flaws. The movie begins with a music video that has nothing to do with the rest of the story, leading you wonder how it’s going to pay off, and yet it never does. It’s so laughably dumb that we both wish we had thought of it. Julia Roberts’ gay (2nd) best friend, Rupert Everett, flies in not once but twice to save her ass. And at the last minute, too, so you know those flight prices must have been steeeeeep. Which made us realize we need better best friends. Mike’s best friend stole his wallet. On his birthday. Heidi’s best friends are not quite so bad. They just forget her birthday.

10. Dear John

What a snooze fest. Any movie that Channing Tatum is in where he doesn’t dance isn’t worth watching. Any movie that Amanda Seyfried is in that’s not Mean Girls isn’t worth watching. Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum don’t get together, though. She instead marries family friend Henry Thomas, who even as he’s dying of cancer admits that he’s really only a sub-plot in Channing and Amanda’s life--a plot device more alien to us than the one in Henry Thomas’ most well-known role (Elliot in ET), in which he encounters an actual alien. 

[netflixandgrill-blog]

Introducing Netflix and Grill

Hi there! We are Heidi and Mike. We watch cheesy movies. And rip on them. It’s almost as fun (if not more fun) to watch a bad movie and make fun of it as it is to watch a good movie and enjoy it. We’re in the middle of a pandemic, and you gotta do something to pass the time, so that’s what we do.  We hope you enjoy!