Cynical Cinema

The cover of the DVD “Cougar Club” certainly seems to indicate toplessness. As does the banner splashed across the jacket, “topless menus!” And it delivers! There are indeed topless girls in the menus. Possibly cougars, but likely a little too young to truly be actual cougars. So…if you click around on the menus, you will see boobs. If you watch the film all the way to the end, you will see boobs there as well, in a monatage of boobs over the closing credits. In between, during the movie itself, there are not many boobs. But a few boobs. In short, the only thing this movie has going for it is boobs, but there are not enough boobs to make this boob of a movie any less of a boob. The dialogue in the film is just about as clever as my own in the first part of this paragraph. An altogether painful experience, Cougar Club.

I know what you are thinking. If you knew it was just going to be one of those stupid teenagers-have-sex-with-people movies, why did you rent it? Good question. The main reason was the cast. I saw the DVD case and moved on. But on a second pass, I saw the name Faye Dunaway! And I took a look at it. I then saw Carrie Fisher, Joe Mantegna, and Izabella Scorupco. I thought, there is no chance all these fairly significant actors (or, in the case of Dunaway, legendary actors) would all have made a terrible error at the same time, would they? But it appears that yes, they would. And there is a big problem with a movie that’s only premise is the promise of boobs. The problem is that people will rent the movie based on their desire to see the boobs of the actresses whose names appear on the cover of the film. When neither Fisher, nor Dunaway, nor Scorupco, and not even the wrestler Chyna (who gets big billing as well) doff their tops, even though they all have gratuitous sex scenes, it clearly undermines the rest of the boobs, which belong to nameless girls and are so gratuitous as to be comical.

The basic premise of Cougar Club is that two young guys go to work for a law firm, and discover that they can easily have sex with their bosses’ wives. So the wives recruit other cougars, the young guys recruit other young guys, membership fees are charged, and a brothel of inter-generation trysts is created. This all gets wrapped up nicely in one of the worst courtroom scenes in history, and definitely the most offensive back-of-a-courtroom scene of all time. I have spent a long time enjoying cougars myself, but…I have spent way too much time dissecting a movie that really shouldn’t ever even be discussed. This ends now.