Top Five Anti-Valentine’s Day Movies

Since I’m so awesome and women are always throwing themselves at me, I never have a problem finding a date for Valentine’s Day. However, if you’re a loner, loser, furry, or psychopath, then the following movies make excellent Valentine’s Day viewing. And, if you happen to actually be in a relationship, watching these films on the big V-day will have your guy/gal going apeshit like Christian Bale on a Director of Photography (What? Too soon?…or perhaps too late?). Regardless of your situation, at least it will go better than Gilmore’s standard pickup line: ”Hey, baby, does this smell like chloroform to you?”

Oldboy
Part of director Park Chan Woo’s revenge trilogy, Oldboy is full of Valentine’s Day no-no’s. There’s the brutal violence. There’s the weird Korean imagery. There’s a dude eating a live squid. Oh, and did I mention incest? Yeah…incest…that just never seems to go over well with the ladies. Sure, there are the artistic hipsters and film students who think this movie is the schizz-nit, but it certainly doesn’t make for appropriate watching when you’re snuggling on the couch and acting as the cuddle bitch for that girl “who just doesn’t like you in that way.” At the end, when everybody’s killing each other and getting covered in gobs of blood, you can pretty much hear Park Chan Woo saying “Try Getting Laid, now!” and then laughing while eating Kung Pao Chicken and playing Starcraft (because I’m a huge racist, you see).

Closer
What better way to give Valentine’s Day the proverbial finger than with a movie that throughly examines how couples continually cheat, abuse, and f-ck with each other? Closer is like a primer of what not to do in a relationship. The entire movie consists of attractive people talking about how much they hate one another and how they are screwing somebody else on the side–not exactly “cutesy romantic comedy” fare. Throw in a Damien Rice song or two and you’ve got yourself two hours of anti-Valentine’s Day goodness. Plus, there’s the added bonus of awkwardly squirming through Natalie Portman’s striptease sequence. Sure, she’s hot and all, but she does sort of have the body of a 12 year old Filipino Boy [Editor’s Note: F-ck you, Ivan].  Uh…did I just hear Chris Hansen knocking at my door?

Requiem for a Dream
Besides giving the world the most overly used musical score in the history of the world (I’m looking at you random film school freshman at NYU), Requiem for a Dream has the distinction of being one of the few movies to throughly scare the crap out of me. I mean, it’s not like I was planning on trying heroin prior to viewing this film, but after seeing it I pretty much never want to be in the presence of any form of drugs whatsoever. I think I may have even irrationally cleared my medicine cabinet of Claritin and Robitussin. Seriously, Darren Aronofsky’s film messed me up. Yes…that’s right…Requiem for a Dream’s unflinching tale of crushed hopes and rampant drug abuse is guaranteed to turn even the most lovely of Valentine’s Day evenings into a sordid puddle of pity and disgust. By the time you reach the climactic scene with Jennifer Connelly’s infamous portrayal of a certain form of sexual deviance, your “Valentine” with most likely be puking in the corner. I mean…you know…unless she’s into that sort of thing…

Amores Perros
Title translation? Love’s A Bitch. So, from the get-go you can tell this one is a real romantic winner. This is a movie from Babel director Alejandro González “My-Name-is-Hard-to-Spell” Iñárritu. Like Babel, it’s filled with interconnecting stories about people dealing with the miserable tribulations of life and the pain of relationships. When it comes to love connections, watching this movie is like getting kicked in the balls repeatedly while watching The Hills and drinking Red Bull–it’s friggin’ painful. Definitely the pinnacle of “Anti-Valentine’s Day” viewing.  If that wasn’t bad enough, this movie’s plot heavily focuses on dog fighting. Want to make a girl cry? How about forcing her to watch two hours of puppies beating the crap out of one another? Punching her in the ovaries also works…uh…I mean…so I’ve heard…

Schindler’s List
The Holocaust–otherwise known as the ultimate boner shrinker. Nothing screams “It’s Not Me, It’s You” quite like watching a movie about one of the most horrendous acts of human atrocity on Valentine’s Day. Just the very thought of watching it has caused Cupid to die of obesity and remorse. While there are a lot of movies out there that show crappy relationships, mass human genocide sort of trumps them all. For this reason alone, Spielberg’s film tops this very scientific list. That’s why Hitler could never get laid on Valentine’s Day. True Fact.

Ivan Kander is the handsome and debonair cohost of his very own video podcast. Check it out at www.lucky9studios.com/worstmovieever. He thinks Secretary’s Day is just a myth.