Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

It is wrong to have to justify oneself, but in this case there's no other way besides admitting that I owe myself a whopper of an explanation. First of all, I was on an airplane, and my sense of perspective gets all hazy when I intermittently surrender to moments of awareness and come to understand and feel that I'm moving at 500mph at 30,ooo feet above the ocean, through clouds, and accomplishing this by sitting down in a reclined position and drinking Sprite. I had also just finished reading the Duino Elegies which is a poem about how angels are kinda dumb and I figured angels and ghosts of girlfriends past share a similar kind of stupidity and the transition from the one to the other wouldn't be as rough as it otherwise appears. Obviously I'm even dumber than angels are but that's not my point. Or maybe that's exactly the point, and maybe that's exactly Rilke's point and instead of berating myself I should be celebrating just how non-transcendent I really am. This observation is made implicitly by McConaughey for even though airplanes don't crash anywhere near as much as cars, we still feel like they do, and here I was, in the clouds, perhaps living my last minutes, and volunteering to spend them with a man who is much closer to dust than he is to the heavens, probably. But so far I've merely described a minor felony. The crime is that I cried while watching this. Well, not really, exactly--tears weren't rolling down my cheek and I wasn't sniffling, but they were moist enough such that when the stewardess walked by my seat I instinctively moved my head slightly to the left in order to preclude her from seeing that I was having any kind of reaction whatsoever to what she could easily discern was a movie starring Matthew McConaughey. So how do I live with myself, now, knowing that I had a stronger visceral reaction to a movie in which the characters talk to, run from, get yelled at, and get beat up by quasi ghost-angels who argue that Love is a good way to avoid dying alone than I did to a poem in which the poet boldly and unabashedly admonishes himself for bothering with angels at all? I don't think I can weasel myself out of the obvious and necessary conclusion: I am ridiculous and wrong and can only hope that if angels do exist, they don't act or look like Michael Douglas in sunglasses. This movie also raises an important but seldom asked question: what, exactly, is a chick flick? Like, if you were to make a chick flick recipe, what are the necessary ingredients? For example, can one exist without there being a wedding?

A note on the new scale I'll be using to offer our legion of fans a more concrete big-picture summary of the value of the movie under review: the evaluation will now be a range between two numbers, 0 and 100, the lower number indicating what kind of nuclear combustion would occur if you happened to watch the movie on a Winter afternoon with Tarkovsky on your left and Bergman on your right , and the higher number representing how good the movie might be if you watched it with Mitch Hedberg while getting high and eating cookies (Or if you've watched it on a plane after just having read the Duino Elegies). It stands to reason that statistically the truth is somewhere in the middle, though with things like this one also ought to keep in mind the power-distribution curve rather than the bell curve and things like mean, mode, and average. I will try to keep the range as tight and well-tuned as possible. So--Ghosts of Girlfriends Past: 32-79.