That’s right boys, it’s time to be pretentious and read too deeply into a film’s plot beyond its intended meaning with lethal doses of sarcasm and anecdotes along the way that may or may not have anything to do with the film itself, AKA a Yu-branded review. That’s what you’d come to for when reading my stuff, right? Sincerity has no place in the eyes of the sarcasm queen.
That said, I do admire a lot about this film and the questions it bonders.
Naturally, by the very essence of philosophy itself, you can’t claim there to being a one-size-fits-all methodology that’s works in every scenario.
Every method you could suggest has something that it needs to address, but without getting too deeply on that, let’s focus on the one particular example the movie tries to present as an answer.
Funnily enough, the movie is actually way ahead of me here, but let’s suspend our belief for a moment and pretend that it’s a conveniently poorly written film (which to be fair, a lot of folks already think so, so I do have my work cutout for me.)
Yes Man doesn’t do a bad job here, it lays the foundation for a philosophy that’s not presented commonly here.
There’s an inherent resistance that a lot of ex-introverts like myself expressed frequently in life to invitations and opportunities to learn new things and expand our horizons. Mostly if it had to do with some form of commitment, be short-term like hanging out with folks or long term like trying a new exercise every day. Now a lot of these scenarios vary from one person to another, as well as how we respond to them, and it’s obviously generally good advice to try be social if it can prove healthy for your mental well being, which in my case it did. You don’t quite need a philosophy discourse to present something like that.
Not to skip ahead, but the movie does actually address all of this. Because the protagonist Larry (his name isn’t Larry, I’m just messing with anyone who’s seen the movie) is basically inducted into what initially seems like a cult, and starts believing he has to say yes to everything.
Once again, to skip ahead, Larry (okay, I’ll stop, his name is Carl, which is hilariously equally fake sounding) finds out there was never any spell, and that he always said yes of his own volition. There was never any spell, he was never forced to say yes, he was probably just under a lot of stress. But it did teach him Korean and how to pilot a plane, so it’s all good, yea? (Terrorist false charges notwithstanding). Terence (played by Terrence, no I did not make that up this time) tells Carl that he only did this to help people, and he was sincere about it. Carl had a hard time accepting things, due to all this leading him to the hospital.
Don’t worry, Carl does get back at Terence by tricking the his followers to attend his next conference butt-naked, so everyone lived happily ever after.
Yeah so, in the end, this movie review wasn’t really about the movie, gotcha there didn’t I.
No, I just needed an excuse to discuss something that may have changed my life for the better. It’s weird, see the movie isn’t actually that good. It’s still a poor man’s Liar Liar. It’s funny yes (man), but it’s super poorly paced.
But hey, you’re not here for actual movie critiques, if you read this far, you want THE SNARK.
To wrap things up, this was rather challenging to review. No, not cuz of the philosophical crap, but because sentimental stuff give me so little room to tear something into shreds. If it’s not clear by now, I do this even with stuff I like (and yes my friends do call me weird for it, if you were curious). I can’t help it, I’m an asshole.
To close things off, I pride myself in two things, being a snarky bloke and having some semblance of integrity, so I’d like to credit @Octopus in more or less starting the domino chain that led me to publishing my first article on this site. I’d hate to look like a jerk trying to steal his thunder. A bit smarmy on my end? Maybe. But I was on the receiving end of this at one point, so I’d hate to make it seem self centered, despite the immensely self-indulgent writing style of this analysis (if it could qualify as that). Oh yeah when I said I mock everything and everyone, I wasn’t gonna leave myself safe either.
All in all, I still recommend the movie and trying to be more optimistic in life. I’m not honestly good at being a cynic, despite that being my one gimmick, and this film is pretty fun, even if you’re genuinely better off just watching Liar Liar.
Peace out.
