Respect Authority

Okay, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know The Beach was bad. Even though this movie came out in 2001, when Leonardo DiCaprio was at the veritable height of his career as a teenage heartthrob (not to be confused with his current career as an adult heartthrob), all anyone really knows about it now is that it’s bad. Things like the mildly ludicrous plot, or the highly ludicrous editing, were lost as conversation topics over the years, replaced with the more vague and easier-to-remember “The Beach? Man, that movie fucking sucked.”

But Sunday wasn’t exactly full of television options, and in a hungover daze on Saturday morning, I actually watched The Truth About Cats and Dogs, so I figured the bar was already set pretty low.

Just in case you haven’t seen The Beach, the rumors are all true. Absolutely true. Once I was done snickering over the island’s dual (yet undoubtedly related) purposes as a youthful paradise and marijuana planting ground, all that remained were overdone themes on human nature and DiCaprio looking a little too teenage to be considered hot. 

This screen shot would make total sense of Leo was, say, yelling, like “Watch out! Bear attack!” or “Bring some more weed, we’re out!” but he’s not. He’s hissing. Seriously, hissing. Apparently the island “does things” to people who bask in its wilder parts for too long (now there’s one I haven’t heard before), and after weeks in the jungle our lead, charged with retrieving a copied map to the place from unfortunate tourists, thought the best way to handle that particular mission would be to act like a feral cat. 

Honestly, The Truth About Cats and Dogs was better.