Worst of Netflix: Dirty Love

[FYI: Meg is horribly sick. You'll get your Jersey Shore recap and Ren Fest recap and Queer Amy and all the other stuff she owes you next week. I talked to her night before last and she sounded like shit and had no time for my jokes about fingerblasting, so I'm going to take that as a sign that she's not faking. But for the record, Larry Hagman is alive.]

It’s interesting how broad the term “movie” really is. Gone with the Wind, The Queen, and Dirty Love are all movies. The first gives us sweeping drama, beautiful sets, and exquisite costuming, all of which work together to evoke a world gone by; the second contains talented actors giving bold, imaginative performances that create memorable characters, and the third was written by Jenny McCarthy.

I am exactly the right age to remember Jenny McCarthy. I was in seventh grade when her “sketch” “comedy” “show” was on the air, and so I still think of her as an MTV actress first and “the autism lady” second. Thank God something distracted her; Western free-market democracy couldn’t have handled another written-by-and-starring-Jenny-McCarthy sledgehammer to the throat. Al-Qaeda briefly used clips from this movie in their training videos, but were forced to stop when the terrorists-to-be just shrugged and said, “Why blow anything up? Their whole civilization should be collapsing in, say, 45 minutes? We can just take the bus over afterwards.” Plotless, classless, and witless, Dirty Love is the most boring time you’ll ever spend being offended.

I’m tempted to just type up my notes and let you draw your own conclusions. Blogging certainly does open new frontiers; I never thought I’d look over my own notes and see the phrases “Is Carmen Electra the tranny or the ‘black girl?’ Brad Pitt’s throbbing cock. She shat on the bed. Why is he lunging like that?” so chalk one up for experience and let’s get started.

If you can believe it, the movie opens with a flashback and a voiceover. Rebecca (Jenny McCarthy) and some generic “hot” guy are at Coney Island or the Jersey shore or something. There’s sand, soft serve ice cream, and a lot of smiling at each other. The voiceover opens with the phrase “Love is so great…” and rattles on in the same vein. There’s a little unintentional humor when she says that falling in love made her feel as if “the butterflies in her belly dusted off their cobwebs and started fluttering again.” Does she know what happens to butterflies that land in spiderwebs?

We cut to Rebecca on a Hollywood street, screaming “Oh my GOD!” seven times and making sobbing noises. She sounds like a wildebeest in rut, but she’s supposed to be merely a weeping woman. She says “funny” thinks to passersby, including transsexual prostitutes, a biker and a bum, whose cigarette she steals. We flash back to earlier that day, when she arrived home from her job as a photographer (it has Plot Significance! REMEMBER THE CAMERAS) to find her boyfriend slamming some random broad. We only see her lower legs, pressed against Generic “Hot” Guy’s chest as he rubs his own nipple, fixes his hair, notices Rebecca, greets her awkwardly, and comes. It’s the most convincing acting in the whole movie.

What do you do when you’re upset and need a friendly ear and a shoulder to cry on? Rebecca goes to her psychic, a cameo by either a pre-D-list Kathy Griffin or an unconvincing Kathy Griffin impersonator. She does a bad impression of her own trademark rapid-fire sarcasm, spouting some “oooh, mystical” horseshit about love and quest and darkest before the dawn, ending with a nail-through-the-forehead-subtle piece of foreshadowing: Rebecca is to look for a WHITE PONY, which she will ride off into the sunset. Chekov said of playwriting that if the author places a gun on stage in the third act, it must go off by the third. McCarthy has chosen a water cannon full of chocolate laxative, rolled front and center with a knowing wink, but it’s the same idea. Sort of.

There’s a kind of muddled scene where she calls a friend and they decide to go shopping, while two other friends go to G”H”G’s house to get Rebecca’s cameras. (I told you they were important.) The friend that goes shopping with her looks like a clearance-aisle sex doll, and she delivers all her lines in a jerky, perplexed baby-doll voice that is presumably supposed to evoke Marilyn Monroe but really just makes us think she doesn’t speak English and has leaned all her lines phonetically, with no idea of their meaning. They have an unsettling conversation about how, after this morning’s events, even BRAD PITT’S THROBBING COCK wouldn’t interest her in sex. Aren’t we beyond Brad Pitt as the default attractive man? He’s married to that lunatic who keeps adopting everything in sight: children, causes, cities, rhesus monkeys… Can’t someone else’s cock throb?

Let’s just say for example. There’s the requisite conversation about “just ‘giving up’ and becoming a Lesbian,” which should be profoundly offensive – homosexuality isn’t some last sexual redoubt before oblivion that we retreat to, bloodied failures at the red-in-tooth-and-claw merry-go-round of heterosexuality – but by now “Lesbianism-as-failure-as-woman” has been so overdone that even Eve Ensler can barely get annoyed by it. Jenny McCarthy picks her teeth and hits on a married man, then everyone slaps each other.

Cut to the friends going to retrieve the cameras. We need to talk about race for a second. Carmen Electra, who I believe is Hispanic, plays a white girl who acts like a stereotypical black girl. It’s incredibly offensive. George Wallace would be offended. Jefferson Davis, in whatever reincarnation he now inhabits, shudders and doesn’t know why whenever anyone watches this movie. She’s so offensive that I feel guilty for realizing what she’s doing. She has a gun, uses terrible grammar, and talks about how Rebecca should get pregnant “so she can get food stamps.” In this scene, she has on a tank top that says “got ho’s?” [sic] Frankly, I feel I should put [sic] after every mention of this character. Anyway, she and some generic small guy named John (I assumed he would be Standard Faggot, but he isn’t) go to pick up Rebecca’s cameras from G”H”G’s house. He pees on the guy’s sofa; she shits on his bed. G”H”G comes home and there’s an awkward confrontation where John kind of… lunges at G”H”G like he has a severe tic, but also wants a kiss.

Rebecca and Sex Doll go to Sex Doll’s audition for a commercial for a Safari Texas-style animal theme park. Some guy in the waiting room picks his nose and eats it. The guy next to him is rubbing his junk through his jeans. The next two men are looking at each other with longing, and the fifth one chats Rebecca up before sniffing her body and going into some kind of sexual frenzy, causing Rebecca to hallucinate that he is G”H”G and throttle him. Meanwhile, Sex Doll is setting them both up on a double date with the men she’s auditioning for, who are Jews.

Hep, hep. Jerusalem is lost. The Jews are about as offensive as the “black” girl, but aren’t played by as talented actors. When Sex Doll, Rebecca, and The Jews get to their date that night, the Jews writhe, mumble inaccurate Yiddish and writhe. If you ever wondered what a collaboration between Woody Allen and Leni Riefenstahl would look like if robbed of all artistic merit, look no further; otherwise, look away. Rebecca is wearing a dress with navel-deep cleavage, patterned in a Golden Girls stripe of aqua, purple, and navy. In a brief scene in the bathroom, there’s another little gem of humor as we learn that McCarthy failed genetics in high school. “These guys are one chromosome away from being Woody Allen!” They’re “one chromosome away” from being women. They’re “one chromosome away” from having Turner’s or Down syndrome. A chromosome… is not what she thinks it is. Ultimately, one of The Jews vomits down Rebecca’s exposed cleavage. Predictably, she reacts by screaming “Oh, my God” several times and tearing frantically at her dress, revealing both breasts. She’s tanned too much and they’re not at their best. Meanwhile, John tangles with a freakishly tall woman who is attracted to him. You know you’re grasping at straws when you think to yourself, “Oh, I hope that’s not Jenna Elfman standing on a cinderblock. I hope she didn’t have to do this.”

John and Rebecca go to a diner, where Rebecca cleans the Jew-vomit off her tits and John practices declaring his love for Rebecca. He starts off:

“Every single day, you teach me to be a better person, but for some reason you will not let someone love you the way you deserve to be loved.”

Twenty minutes ago, this woman was screaming mild blasphemies as she exposed her vomit-covered breasts to a crowd of onlookers. If this teaches him to be a better person, what the hell does he do at night?

Anyway, she misunderstands him, and after eating a sundae like a pig (the melted ice cream pouring down her chin is supposed to look like semen! GET IT? SEMEN!) she goes home with the man sitting on her other side. At his apartment, she goes on a drug trip. Why do shitty movies always include a drug trip, and why are they always so unrealistic? Hadn’t a single person on this crew ever genuinely taken drugs? Anyway, “tripping balls” she goes into the bedroom, and the guy has a frozen fish in his ass. He yells “touch my bass” a few times. Yeah, yeah. Freaks. We get it. Gooble, gobble. One of you. There’s a “coma montage” as she sleeps off the “ecstasy,” we see fish marks on her back indicating that she had wild, piscine sex with Touch My Bass. She announces that Aunt Flow came a little early, and – uh-oh! – there aren’t any tampons in the house!

Well, the minstrel show becomes a menstrual show. The reader who recommended this movie to me (fuck you, Michelle) did warn me that there was a scene where Jenny McCarthy has her period all over a supermarket, but I didn’t believe it until I saw it. It happens. Boy, does it happen. It’s a Vesuvius, a high-pressure blood-blast goregasm all over the Food Lion, a uterine flash flood that leaves Piggly Wiggly afloat in gore, a gynecological Hiroshima that darkens the white stones of Jerusalem and shatters the cedars of Lebanon. She Sloughs to Conquer. On the Last Day, when God’s wrath is given vent, the sun darkens and the seas run dry, there will ride forth four horsemen: War on a red horse, Pestilence on a white horse, Death on a pale hose, and Jenny McCarthy on a super-absorbent store-brand maxi pad.

Meanwhile, Sex Doll auditions for a commercial for herpes cream.

Around this point in the movie, Leni Riefenstahl died, and David Lynch took over. The “black” girl is some kind of beautician, apparently, and she’s waxing the legs of a (male) Hispanic magician who appears to have some low-level autism-spectrum disorder. Because she’s a bitch, she sets him up on a date with Rebecca. They go to a fancy restaurant, where the magician does some magic tricks and says several things that don’t make any sense. Rebecca goes to the ladies’ room, where she comforts a sobbing woman in a red dress. Punch and Judy Wait for Godot. Leaving the restaurant, they scuffle in the car over a magic wand (not the magician’s penis, an actual magic wand), and attract the attention of the police, who search the car and find plastic explosives. Do you think they have to be cavity-searched at the police station? Is the officer performing the search a dyke? If you said “yes,” congratulations. You’re a screenwriter, apparently. Rebecca gets locked up with a prostitute and opens her heart, which can’t but make the hooker uncomfortable. “You think you have problems. Try being a whore! Everyone wants you to have a heart of gold.”

At this point, David Lynch died, and someone’s cousin who did high school theater at a two-A high school in the Oklahoma Panhandle took over. It looks like time for a neat bad-movie all-wrapped-up ending, and it is, but it takes 25 minutes. Things start to “just happen” in the way they do in these movies. The most salient features of this plotless roundup are Jenny McCarthy shaving her pits and a cameo by SUM41. (Remember them? I didn’t.) It turns out, eventually, that the WHITE PONY that was so violently foreshadowed early refers to John’s white Pony brand sneaker. Jenny McCarthy falls down a couple of times and they walk off into the sunset, ready to live happily for the next 28 days until the lunar cycle once more triggers cervical Armageddon.

In the wake of my recent difficulties, I’m trying to look for the positive in this, and I’ve developed an interest in genealogy. McCarthy is a Scottish name, and I’m descended from McGees. I want to find out if our clans were ever at war, and if so, I’m going to raise the Highlands and burn her village to the ground.