JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Straight guy readers, we know you’re out there, and we know your relationship with this site is in crisis. There was no problem when we started covering rugby a few months ago—you approve of sports in which guys hit each other. But then we started featuring individual rugby players and squealing over them and things just got girlier from there. Before long the rugby players were taking their clothes off and you began to fear logging onto this site lest your coworkers see what you were reading and question your manhood. We sort of feel bad for you, but there’s no way we’re giving up our rugby guys.

Therefore we proposed a compromise. Reader Cacs suggested a column specifically addressing straight guy concerns like how to get the girl. We nominated a straight guy columnist: Jon Morales of the Philippine Volcanoes, the national men’s rugby team. Jon has lived all over the US, recently in China, and is currently based in Manila. And while he is regularly tackled playing for the Nomads rugby club, Jon sounds like a guy who’s never been hit on the head.

Cacs is concerned that our guy columnist will trigger a fresh wave of alpha male envy. So he asked Jon to list his top five guy flicks of all time, to give us a clearer idea of how his mind works. Here is the list.

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Jon Morales’s Top Five Guy Flicks Of All Time

Saving Private Ryan

When I was young my greatest dream was to be a World War II fighter pilot, piloting my Mustang shooting down Messerschmitts and then going back to the airfield and having a tragic pint at the pub with my surviving squadron mates in the evening. If I’m ever rich my first completely excessive and gratuitous purchase will be a pilot’s license and a faithfully restored P-51 Mustang. While this movie isn’t about any glamorous coolly tough and tragic flyboys it feeds into that World War II fetish.

The opening shock of the D-Day landings has to be one of the best battle scenes in any movie (I prefer to quietly ignore the schlocky old man in the graveyard opening). While Matt Damon’s character is the title character and appears in the opening and closing scenes of the movie the main character is really Tom Hanks’s Capt. Miller and the rather subtle central question of the movie is not the one that’s actually openly stated in the movie about how many sacrificed lives is one life worth?

The real question is how a civilized man, a high school English teacher who loves to tend to his roses at home with his wife, deals with the barbarity of war and the awful burden of responsibility for other mens’ lives. The arc of Miller’s relationship with his leadership position and his men from D-Day to the shaking hand episode to the disastrous assault and leadership crisis at the machine gun nest and his redemption at Ramelle saves the movie from being just another rather shallow and sentimentalist celebration of America’s “Greatest Generation” (for a pretty grievous example see: Pearl Harbor).

Days of Being Wild/In the Mood for Love/2046

Ok so it’s supposed to be a top 5 but I’m going to cheat on this list. You can’t really separate this semi-trilogy of interrelated characters spanning the 60s directed by Wong Kar-Wai and shot by Christopher Doyle (now of Slumdog fame). On first viewing all three movies are maddeningly confusing, In the Mood for Love especially uses repeated shots with small changes to advance the ‘plot’. Each movie relies more on character study than a traditional plot but Doyle’s understated cinematography does a great job of evoking a bygone Hong Kong.

If there’s one thing I learned while living in China it’s that Chinese love stories never end well, and these three are no different as they trace the missteps, bad choices, and alienation of its main characters and the evolution of different characters and how they deal with their broken hearts. Plus Tony Leung’s suit and fedora wearing, cigarette smoking tough-guy with a broken heart is so Rat Pack Cool you can’t help but like him even if he is a conscienceless playboy who spends most of his time mooching off everyone around him, breaking innocent hearts, and sleeping with prostitutes by the last movie.

Old School/Fight Club

Ok so you might think this is a weird pairing but hear me out. These two are actually the same movie.

What the hell does David Fincher’s ultra-violent, dark, nihilistic movie have to do with a jolly romp involving Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, and Vince Vaughan? Watch closely and you can see that Old School is actually just Fight Club as a comedy. The directors of Old School even self-consciously and openly allude to Fight Club, like the photocopying scene at work in both movies and the diner scene where the waiter refuses payment. They’re both about men retreating from the influence of women and a mundane existence into initially fun exclusively male societies. In the end both decide that having women around is probably a Good Thing.

Aside from any deeper philosophical considerations Old School’s just damn funny and still my favorite of that genre of comedies that started coming out in the late 90s/early Aughts that continues to this day.

Kung Fu Hustle

Kung Fu, singing, dancing, gangsters, comedy, a love story, lollipops…really what more could you want from a film? Stephen Chow pays homage to just about every movie ever, Chinese or Western, in a light-hearted comedy. Plot’s pretty basic, petty loser who gets up to random antics and is kind of a jerk unlocks his inner goodness and discovers he has super powers and saves the day. My friend who watches a lot of movies contends that the less famous Shaolin Soccer is better but he’s probably being an elitist jerk show-off.

All of the Bourne Movies

So you’re probably going through this list and thinking ‘my god! I thought this list was for straight guys! I thought this guy was a rugby player? Where are the action movies? What sort of fellow is this? Is he man? or mouse?’ So here you go, the Bourne movies. Starring a guy from my hometown who made his name making a movie about my hometown.

The first one was a nice antidote to the Bond series of the 90s which, while we all like Pierce Brosnan and he’s a great guy and all, let’s face it, had basically become a parody of itself. Anyway Bond works for The Man and if you really think about it doing The Man’s dirty work isn’t really all that cool, even if you do get to wear tuxedos and sleep with gorgeous international women while doing it.

You know what’s cool? Fighting the Man. Fighting the Man and winning. That’s cool. The Bourne movies are probably also directly responsible for sending Bond into the new, grittier, much better Daniel Craig direction. You know? The one where Bond actually acts like a person who kills people for a living? That one. The Bourne movies pull off the pretty tough trick of each one getting better than the previous one too, which is fairly impressive.

As you probably have noticed I’ve left The Shawshank Redemption off the list because apparently that’s totally clichéd. Actually I left it off because Shawshank is so damn good that there’s really no need to discuss it further. If you’re a straight man and you don’t like Shawshank please proceed directly to the bureau of manliness and turn in your man card. That will be all.

Runners-up:
Old Boy
Casablanca
Terminator 2
The Road Warrior
Blade Runner
The Big Lebowski

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Post a question for Jon. He will answer your questions every week.

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Jon has answered your initial questions.

Thanks for the love on my opening column.

@#1 angus25: I like Shawshank, but I didn’t realize that it was a masculine movie. How come?

We could go into a long discussion about exclusively male societies in art, from Plato’s Republic to Hemingway’s Men Without Women to every war movie ever to the Old School/Fight Club pairing. Or the implied misogyny of having only two women in the entire movie: one’s a dead adulteress who is the root of the movie’s central dilemma and the other one’s a poster. But maybe straight guys deep down just fantasize that if there just weren’t so many damn women around we could get down and talk about our feelings!

@#6 Akyat-Bahay Gangster: How does one find time or make time to watch movies? I work 60 – 80 hours a week and barely have enough time to go through my subscription copies of The Economist and Fortune. Layer on that the usual family and social obligations (already minimal for me), and there’s nothing left for films. Or so I think. Advice?

I used to work in Manhattan on Wall Street hours (90 average 130 peak hours a week) so I can empathize. With all of the technology out there now you can treat movies like books and carry them around with you if you have the means to buy the gadgets. Watch it when you’re commuting, or waiting for someone, or sitting on the toilet (I would suggest not trying to watch while showering though). I try to be really selective too and wait to hear buzz from trusted sources or media to see if its worth the time commitment. I miss a lot of mainstream movies because of this though: I still haven’t seen Anchorman, Tropic Thunder, or Toy Story 3.

@#8 goofy: Strange. I always thought that Wong Kar Wai worship was a gay thing.

Is it? It might be. I don’t know as many gay people here in the Philippines as I used to so maybe I’m out of touch. Then again Moulin Rouge almost made this list so maybe I’m just a really sensitive guy.

Come what may…….