Guilty Pleasures and Secret Shames

Let’s face it, we all have movies that we are a little (or a lot) embarrassed to admit we like (or love). Last night two of mine were on back to back and right now I am watching another. I may not watch them all the way through every time they are on but I always stop for a few minutes and will frequently watch all of them if I catch them at the start. I didn’t see them in theatre, and don’t own them on DVD and I don’t want to, there is something extra fun about catching these guilty pleasures on TV, by chance, you run across them and it is a little pick-me-up. So, last night…back to back.

Fools Rush In and Overboard

Fools Rush In, for those of you who missed this romantic/comedy gem from 1997 starred Matthew Perry and Salma Hayek. Basically this white bread guy (Perry) has a one-night stand with a sassy and spicy Latina (Hayek), she gets pregnant, they keep it, get married, and culture clash comedy ensues but of course it all ends happily ever after. My favorite line of the whole movie is when Alex (Perry) yells to Isabel (Hayek), “Isabel Fuentes I love you”, reading it does it no justice, but trust me on this, it is awesome.

Overboard, which stars Goldie Hawn and real life partner Kurt Russell is another romantic/comedy with culture clash, but instead of the race/ethic culture clash it is more economic. Goldie is a snobby rich woman and Kurt is a poor handyman/carpenter, she hires him, treats him poorly and stiffs him for the work. She falls overboard (from her yacht) gets amnesia and isn’t claimed by her husband. Kurt’s character finds out and decides to get his payback in the way of labor and revenge. He picks her up, claiming she is his wife (he is a widow with a bunch of boys) and gets her to cook, clean and raise his kids. Since she does all of these things poorly there is lots of slapstick comedy around these attempts as domesticity. Anyway, they fall in love for real and by the time she gets her memory back she doesn’t want to go back to her old snobby ways and will give up her rich-bitch life, but here is the kicker, it was all her money anyway! It ends happily ever after.

The extra kick is that Goldie is also in one of my other guilty pleasures, Wildcats, a 1986 football comedy. In addition to Goldie this movie stars a young cast that includes Wesley Snipes (in his first movie) and Woody Harrelson (in his first major movie) and of course the ever lovable Nipsey Russell.

Finally this morning I ran across one more. I was thinking how this weekend really had a lot of my favorite secret shames on and how great that was, and I just had to write about them. Anyway…this morning’s movie is more romantic/comedy (do you see a pattern?), but is of the teen genre, Chasing Liberty. This is a movie I would have never thought I would like, Mandy Moore? Seriously, not my kind of teen star. Boy was I wrong. Mandy does a fine job portraying teen angsty romance wishing feeling. But the best part is Matthew Goode, he plays a young agent that is secretly protecting Mandy (who is the presidents daughter by the way). Matthew is like a younger straight version of Rupert Evert (aka totally hot). It is filled with all kinds of romantic scenarios that the seventeen year old in me still wishes for, and surprise, it ends happily ever after.