Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema

by Lindy West

More than anything I want this book to make you feel like you are at a movie night with your best friend (me). I had no way of knowing, when I proposed Shit, Actually back in 2017, that I’d be writing it in a time when movie nights with your best friend no longer existed.

Undeterred, I shall be rating every movie in this book on a scale of zero to ten DVDs of The Fugitive. I rate The Fugitive thirteen out of ten DVDs of The Fugitive.

Did you know that if your DNA is under a murder victim’s fingernails, they don’t even have to give you a trial? The sheriff just yells, “Geeee-ilty!” and then his dog chases you all the way to prison!

Kimble boards the prisoner bus, which features all four types of prisoners: spooky white guy, great big Black guy, Latino guy, and Richard Kimble.

Instead, US Marshal Tommy Lee Jones shows up to investigate, and he’s like, “My, my, my, what a mess,” and you just know he’s thinking about Al Gore in the dorm room.

Here’s a fun Tommy Lee Jones trivia game you can play with your friends: it’s called “Is Tommy Lee Jones 20 or 100 in This Movie?”

This is allowed because in 1993 it was still okay to make movies all about men, as their contract wasn’t up yet.

You know, I approached this essay from the semi-joking, hyperbolic premise that The Fugitive is the best movie ever made, and assumed I was setting myself up for disappointment. But then it turned out that I was right and it’s literally true! The Fugitive IS the best movie ever made! I set myself up for appointment!!!!

Crashing a pharmaceutical gala when you are a fugitive positively drenched in blood? This movie is from 1993, but that’s a 2020 mood.

I was going to say that they don’t make movies like this anymore, where the last thirty minutes is just one continuous incredible chase, except they do, all the time, but they make it all CGI so it’s impossible to care about. Who cares about a drawing of a very fast exploding truck that a computer made? Not me! I care about Joey Pants getting bonked in his actual head with an actual steel beam on a zip line that is somehow an integral part of washing hotel sheets! Real cinema!

The Fugitive is the best movie because it has the best lines and is never scary, only interesting and exciting. All other movies should quit. Case closed. GAVEL.

If that’s not the epitome of unexamined privilege—declaring that the airport is your favorite place—then I don’t know what is. Welcome to Love Actually.

I should be able to watch a movie without my brain being forced to contemplate the current dilation of Bill Nighy’s butthole.

This movie is so fucking incompetently made that even the people doing their fake jobs inside the movie are incompetent.

None of the women in this movie fucking talk! All of the men in this movie “win” a woman at the end! This goddamn movie.

What percentage of Americans believe that Hugh Grant literally is the prime minister and/or boy king of the UK? I’ll bet you the number is not zero, and that is why we should all probably eat poison.

HEY. DUDE. YOU’RE A DICK. THIS ISN’T ROMANCE, IT’S CRIME.

Um, sorry, WHAT KIND OF BUSINESS MEETING IS THIS? Was the working title of this shit Hostile Work Environment: The Movie?

This is a movie made for women by a man.

Hugh Grant offers to have Natalie’s ex-boyfriend murdered for telling her that her thighs are too large—which is an especially adorable flirtation when you consider that he’s a major world leader whose office has historically colonized half the world and bombed and murdered countless actual human beings.

This entire movie is just straight white men acting upon women that they think they “deserve.” This entire movie is just men doing things!

Also, who writes their novel on loose pages on a typewriter in an open-air shack next to a pond? Amelia Bedelia?

Everything in this movie is fucking insane. That’s not how press conferences work. That’s not how diplomacy works. That’s not how prime ministers work. NOTHING IS HOW ANYTHING WORKS. That’s not how weddings work, that’s not how audio recording works, that’s not how saxophones work, that’s not how hair works, that’s not how business meetings work, that’s not how art works, that’s not how grief works, that’s not how primary school Christmas concerts work, that’s not how airports work, that’s not how music charts work, that’s not how fat works, and none of it is how “love” works.

I am so so relieved that there is someone who hates this move even more than I do and that that person is Lindy West.

OH MY GOD, OR YOU COULD JUST GO TALK TO HER.

Love Actually puts a lot of stock in the idea that people are either good or bad. People either love or they don’t, reciprocate or they don’t. The grander the gesture, the greater the crime of not reciprocating. LOVE GOOD. NOT-LOVE BAD.

The truth is that you simply can’t make it into adulthood unscathed. And if somehow you did, you wouldn’t have the perspective and empathy to properly care for another human being for the rest of both your lives. It’s impossible. Everyone’s going to have their shit.

You’re promising another person not just passion and love but a safety net, some degree of stability and certainty in a fucking terrible world. You’re saying, “I promise I will stay with you even if you suck for a while,” an almost narcotic comfort that we all deserve.

What about her career? What about the untapped greatness that lies inside her? What passions did she shove aside to be the caregiver for this gibbering little turkey boy?

Any good couples therapist will tell you: sometimes the dork you married accidentally shrinks the kids and they get imprisoned in a Lego by a scorpion and their pet ant sacrifices himself to save them and they ride the dog into the house and then your son falls into the Cheerios and your husband almost eats him for breakfast and then your husband reverses the shrink ray and re-biggens them all again and you all eat a big turkey.

Much like Love Actually, this is a movie made for women by a man. Thanks, men.

Yo, does this really have to be McAdams’s life? Just endlessly stalked and followed and watched and obsessed over by every man she ever meets? And then she has to say, “Thank you,” and call it “love”? This sucks!

If you could run a light bulb on Harry Potter plot holes, we could solve the climate crisis because Harry Potter plot holes are AN INEXHAUSTIBLE RESOURCE.

Ma’am, you are engaged in guerilla warfare against a shadow army of fascists that can do magic. Turn into a cat one time?

it’s so tall, I can’t get through a door.” The pointy hats are the most implausible thing in the whole series, and that includes someone whose last name is Lupin coincidentally getting bit by a werewolf.

sometimes I forget about Nicolas Cage for weeks or even years at a time, and then I watch a Nicolas Cage movie again and it feels like coming home—to a house where your dad is cocaine and your mom licks your face if you’ve been good AND if you’ve been bad. I’m happy there!

This combination of sounds is profane even in alien languages from the coldest depths of deep space, and is actually used as an emetic by the worm lords of Xooxoo-12. If you say, “You know, I can eat a peach for hours,” in the presence of a gaseous one from Quabzab 971bb7cx80001, he will straight up ruin your face.

It would be a real letdown if the last thing you did in your life was suck Nicolas Cage’s tongue. And I say that respectfully, as a fan.

I know that whenever my brother’s acting a little weird, my first assumption is that the FBI has taken his face…off and glued it to the skull of an FBI agent.

(The number-one rule of time travel, as far as I can discern from time travel movies, is to never, ever use it to correct any of the catastrophic sins of history, such as by killing Hitler or giving a machine gun to every enslaved person in the antebellum South, but instead mainly just try to pass your history report and hornily scam on babes.)

TIME TRAVEL DOESN’T MAKE SENSE, AND I THINK WE SHOULD MAKE IT ILLEGAL.

If time travel ever becomes a reality, I don’t think its primary utility should be for middle-class white families to erase the minor consequences of their own incompetence.

Yes, I can understand why you think of women as a great mystery because if the gender composition of this movie is any indication, you have never talked to one.

Maverick is the villain of Top Gun.

YES!

Goose: The list is long but distinguished. Bingbong: Yeah, so’s my johnson. I want to hate it, but “Yeah, so’s my johnson” is a real workhorse of a phrase. It goes with anything, like using florals as a neutral. Try it!

The next day, at plane Hogwarts, they’re having their first lesson with a civilian contractor who’s there to teach them about how planes stay up, and—OH SHIT. BATHROOM CHARLIE IS THE CIVILIAN CONTRACTOR. Maverick, did you sexually harass the civilian contractor AGAIN!?!? This happens every time we go to a new fighter boy pew pew school!

I actually think being exceptional is bad. It’s dangerous and unfriendly and it prevents us from building robust systems of aid and care. It precludes forethought and planning (oh, a hero will save us!), and it undercuts accountability when talented people do bad things (oh, but he’s so special). My Norwegian mom always told me, “You’re not special—never think you’re better than anybody else,” and I’m glad she did! Now I listen to other people and treat them with respect and wear a mask at the grocery store! Exceptionalism is a grift!

This is such a fucking brilliant paragraph and the fact that it comes in the middle of a hilarious takedown of one of the ultimate 80s bad boy movies just makes it even more beautiful.

Maverick loves to buzz the tower. (That’s what he calls it when he shaves his pubes.)

MAVERICK. IT IS BAD TO BE DANGEROUS. YOU ARE FLYING A MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR WARPLANE PRESUMABLY CHUNKY-STUFFED WITH WEAPONS THAT COULD KILL LOTS OF PEOPLE AND POTENTIALLY CAUSE A GLOBAL WAR IF USED IMPROPERLY. HOW IS ICEMAN THE VILLAIN OF THIS MOVIE??????? BECAUSE HE LIKES SAFETY???????????????????????

Because my generation was raised to believe not just that safety is for dweebs but that it’s EVIL! Maverick is a full psycho and would definitely be at the “reopen America” protests because he wants the RIGHT to get his b-hole waxed even if he isn’t actually GOING to go get his b-hole waxed and even though he knows that many thousands more marginalized and high-risk people will die and many b-hole waxing businesses will ultimately fail because you cannot sustain an economy on a handful of slobbering fascists who feel the need, the need for a Jamba Juice.

Indeed, it is incredibly inappropriate, and as we have just seen, dangerous, that you are falling for your student! You already can’t give him necessary and valid feedback on his flying because of his lacy-crispy-wafer-thin ego! This is bad!