Introduction
I love making fun of movies. I love turning a piece of criticism into a piece of entertainment. I love pointing out a plot hole that makes a superfan write me an angry e-mail. I love turning my unsophistication into a tool. I love being hyperbolically, cathartically angry for no reason. I love being flippant and careless and earnest and meticulous all at once.
Shit, Actually is inspired by a series of essays I started at Jezebel, in which I’d rewatch successful movies from the past to see how they hold up to our shifting modern sensibilities. That concept has grown even more relevant in recent years, as grappling with those shifts has become something of a national obsession. What do we do now with beloved cultural works that don’t hold up? What do we do with the oeuvre of beloved people who fail us? Are we “allowed” to like imperfect things that mean something to us?
A few of those Jezebel pieces became extremely popular, none more so than my Love Actually rewatch, which to my great joy still makes the rounds online every December (I’m told that some families now read it aloud each year à la “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”). Love Actually is in here, along with some other favorites from that series, spruced up and expanded for freshness.
But I’ve also added a whole bunch of new ones! If you’re wondering about my methodology for those, I selected movies that fit at least one of three categories: 1) cultural phenomena that took over the Earth, 2) movies I was personally obsessed with, or 3) movies I picked because it seemed like someone should talk about them. Lots of things are missing. Don’t think about it too hard.
I started my career as a snotty twenty-three-year-old (!) film critic who was, to be honest, less interested in film than in exploiting my column inches to write jokes. As I grew older (I am thirty-eight now) and graduated from a local to a national platform, I shifted from writing about movies to writing about politics, and my writing, of necessity, became increasingly serious. After the bone-deep vulnerability of my memoir, Shrill, the exhaustion of writing political columns both during and after the 2016 election, and the careworn scream of my second essay collection, The Witches Are Coming, I am excited to be writing some goofy jokes about movies again.
And Shit, Actually is that! But what I began working on as a silly book for release into a darkness I understood—the demoralizing grind of public life under Donald Trump—is now to be a silly book for release into a darkness I don’t.
I finished writing Shit, Actually six weeks into the COVID-19 stay-at-home order—six weeks of trying to think of funny things to say about Face/Off while worrying about a friend on a ventilator, six weeks of mustering comical outrage over Harry Potter plot holes while the president went on television to suggest that the ill try drinking bleach. Meanwhile, Trump and his party (whom, in a previous book, in a previous life, I might have described as morally bankrupt but now feel comfortable calling FULLY FUCKING DEMONIC) have been flagrantly funneling taxpayer-funded relief money to the richest and least deserving while the rest of us sit, isolated, trapped in our homes, as everything we know and love crumbles into uncertainty.
As shelter-in-place stretched on and I began adjusting to my new, smaller, lonelier life, I started to find a strange comfort in the task of making this book for you and thinking about it in your hands and homes—this silly, inconsequential, ornery, joyful, obsessive, rude, and extremely stupid book.
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.
Writing this, in a way I could not have guessed, has made me feel less alone. Thank you for being my friends. It kept me afloat knowing you were there.
Love,
Lindy
The Fugitive Is
The Only Good Movie
Objectively, there’s only one good movie, and it’s The Fugitive. The Fugitive is the only good movie. Now, if you think I’m being capricious, know that I have had this feeling before about other things—I remember when I first read Island of the Blue Dolphins, I was like, “Shut it down, no need to write more books.” Ditto with “The Sign” by Ace of Base—but those feelings didn’t last because eventually I heard “Poison” by Bell Biv DeVoe and read a little story you might have heard of called THE BIBLE? But when it comes to The Fugitive, I have never wavered. The Fugitive is the only good movie. We didn’t need any more movies after The Fugitive. We didn’t need any movies before it either. We should erase those.
I wanted to call this whole book The Fugitive Is the Only Good Movie, but my publisher wouldn’t let me, probably because they’re deep in the pocket of Big Gump. 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.
In case you haven’t seen The Fugitive and have somehow escaped prosecution under my regime, The Fugitive is the terrible tale of Dr. Ser Richard Kimble, American hero, America’s sweetheart, America’s Next Top Daddy Doctor, Heir of Isildur and King of All the Dúnedain.
Richard Kimble is a respected Chicago vascular surgeon who, after a long day vasculating, is having a well-earned glamorous night out with his sexy ’90s wife and his doctor friends at a sexy fashion show benefit for the Children’s Research Fund. (You want a children’s benefit to be as sexy as possible!) All the other doctors agree that Richard Kimble’s wife, Helen, is the number-one coolest and hottest wife of all the doctor wives. Kimble is on top.
Kimble and Wife Helen head home, erotically, and they love each other very much in the car. Kimble touches his wife’s face; it’s so cute. Suddenly, Kimble is called in for emergency surgery! He’s gotta go. “I’ll wait up for you,” says Wife Helen.
Flash-forward. What’s this? Two cops are interrogating Kimble, and it is just like The First 48! Just like The First 48 (and, incidentally, all police departments worldwide), there’s two cops: glasses cop and grumpy cop. Also like The First 48, the cops arrest Kimble on the Husband Did It principle because—WOW—someone went and murdered Mrs. Helen in the night while Richard was at the hospital!
The cops ask Richard questions about what he remembers, insinuating that he, the Husband, Did It and is planning to collect megabucks from his Helen insurance. Things are not looking good: “His fingerprints are all over the lamp, gun, and the bullets. And the good doctor’s skin is under her fingernails.” Now, I watch a lot of murder shows if you have any questions about how murder works. 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! Richard’s boned!
Also, on Wife Helen’s 911 call, she’s like, “Richard, Richard, he’s trying to kill me!” And the cops are like, “Hmmmm, YOUR name’s Richard. Do you think maybe she meant…you?” Which, to be fair, and I know this is tacky because she’s a corpse, but Helen could not have done a worse job here. Like, watch ONE Dateline, Helen! You have to say, “A large, upsetting Greek man with a perm, a large, upsetting Greek man with a perm, HE’S trying to kill me! Not Richard, who is nice!”