I would honestly refuse to watch Jeremy Garelick‘s The Wedding Ringer (Screen Gems, 1.16.15) if someone offered to pay me $20 to do so. I’m not sure $50 would do it. I might fold if someone slipped me a Ben Franklin…maybe. My general rule is that I’ll never watch a Kevin Hart film, and I don’t see that ever changing. I appreciate that Josh Gad has dropped a few pounds in hopes of being occasionally cast as a boyfriend or fiance, but my mind, my life and the general rules of human behavior won’t allow the notion of a smart, alert, good-looking girl looking like Wedding Ringer costar Kaley Cuoco open to mingling with a porky, bespectacled, pasty-faced geek…no way in hell.

It’s all part of a table-cleaning 21st Century aesthetic which says that guys who never got close to pretty girls in the ’90s and before are now, in movies, doing remarkably well. “Guys who got the girl used to look like guys who got the girl,” I wrote last August, “but no longer. [These days] any homely or marginal or bearded, overfed, gross-looking guy or girl can hook up with moderately proportioned good-looking types and nobody bats an eyelash. Given-to-sloth Seth Rogen married to and boinking Rose Byrne every which way in Neighbors…if you say so. Mark Duplass making sensitive-guy moves on Melissa McCarthy in Tammy…really? Anne Hathaway being sufficiently taken with Rafe Spall to move in with him in One Day…remarkable.”