I wish I could say the pain ended with the titles I covered in Part 1, but no. No no no. If anything.............it gets worse.

The Movie: You Got Served

The Damage: Another video rental, this time with a fling of sorts. I was no longer the hapless fool I was back in my younger days...but it was her birthday, which is like a trump card. I tried suggesting other, non-sucky films to her, but this was the one she really wanted to see. I couldn't veto her birthday choice, so I relented and thought only of the massive sexual favors she was going to owe me for this one.

You all know the score...troubled inner-city kids, stricken by crime and poverty, fight their way out of the streets the only way they know how - by dancing! ...Yes, you read that right. At the big dance off, not only are a few bucks on the line, but your very pride as a human being as well. Fail to show off your move-busting grooves, and you will have been "served", which is where the title for this genious movie comes from. Cue the drama as the two main characters have a fall out over...actually, I don't know what. I think it was because one of the guys was on a date while the other guy was getting "served". Cue more drama as the main characters owe some Fat Albert drug dealer money, and must come up with the funds by *gasp* winning a dance competition! (bet you didn't see that one coming huh?)

I kept waiting for something meaningul to happen, like a gang war, or an outbreak of the plague, or at least for Julia Stiles to come in and start having sex with more black men (I think it's in her contract or something...) but then I remembered not to get my hopes up in a movie aptly titled "You Got Served". ...Exactly who do you think is getting "served" anyway? It is you! You who is foolish enough to actually sit down and watch this crap, that's who. ...Oh, some little kid gets shot, but it's just so contrived and anti-climatic. More than anything, I envied him for finding a way out of the movie.

You know who else found a way out of the movie? My date, the person who got me into this mess in the first place! I noticed maybe a little over halfway through that she'd fallen asleep. That's not fair! She'd picked this turd, and now somehow *I* was the was suffering through it! And it was pretty apparent I wasn't going to be rewarded for my troubles either. I thought about waking her up and rewinding the movie back to the parts she missed, but really that only translated into more misery for me, so I stuck it out. Towards the end of the movie, Lil Kim takes a break from her busy schedule of sucking dicks to make a cameo, and Steve Harvey also appears, probably wondering why his career has fallen so far, so fast.

"You Got Served" is a testament as to why pop-stars shouldn't be allowed to make movies. I mean, have we learned nothing from the horrible mistakes that were "Crossroads", "Glitter", and *shudder* "From Justin to Kelly"? (just typing the titles alone kinda made me queasy) I propose we position trained snipers at the entrances of every major Hollywood studio. Should they see any pop musician even think about approaching...shoot to kill. You may think my plan harsh, but you'll be on my side when the Backstreet Boys ink that trilogy deal.

The Payout: She should "serve" you...a homecooked meal. Steak and potatoes, with a tall, frosty mug of draft beer. And then go do the dishes, preferably while dancing to some euro-techno beats.

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The Movie: Cradle 2 The Grave

The Damage: Let me take a moment to explain the genious that was "Rush Hour".

On one hand you have Jackie Chan. An accomplished martial artist and impressive stuntman, sure. But above that, the guy is just lovable. Unassuming, big smile, nice guy, it's like if you met him on the street you'd just be compelled to give him a hug. In direct contract, you have Chris Tucker. Loud, brash, obnoxious. But pair him with Jackie Chan, and he becomes loveable. ...There aren't very many people who Jackie Chan can't make loveable. If they ever made a movie with Jackie Chan and Christopher Walken even Walken would become a big snuggly teddy bear. ...Maybe.

Anyway, those two just worked perfectly as a pair. Jackie is so humble and unassuming, Tucker is making himself the life of the party. Jackie is jumping through ladders and diving off buildings and Tucker is getting punched by Chinese women. Jackie makes a loveable racial slur and Tucker can't understand the words that are coming out of his mouth. It just works. But in Cradle 2 The Grave, we have the pairing of Jet Li and DMX. Jet Li is an accomplished martial artist, but he's about as loveable as a rusted old lawnmower. And DMX? ..........Riiiiiiiiight. I think you could have paired Jet Li with a BMX Mountain Bike and they would have had more chemistry. It just didn't work.

Additionally, C2G, like The Transporter, was another movie that just asked for too many sacrifices of realism. In one scene, Jet Li is fighting off a legion of cage fighters. The midget announcer also comes up and kicks Jet Li in the shin or something, so Jet Li picks him up and starts swinging him around. ...Maybe if it were Jackie Chan fending off 5 cage fighters by swinging a midget around like a sack of potatoes it would be cool. "Hey look, Jackie's fighting off all those guys using a midget!" But for Jet Li, it doesn't work. ...Oh, but my favorite scene by far has to be the one where the main bad guy is trying to get away in a helicopter. His plans are thwarted however as Tom Arnold shoots him down in a tank. ...Believe it or not, the fact that Tom Arnold was in a movie, somehow got his hands on a tank, and used said tank to shoot down anything other than Roseanne is not the unbelieveable thing here. Bad guy's chopper goes into a tail-spin, slams into a warehouse, crashes into other parked helicopters, and the whole thing explodes into one fantastic Michael Bay-ish fireball. We then cut to the wreckage of the helicopter where the bad guy gets out.......perfectly unharmed. The entire theater actually laughed out loud at this.

There is one more thing I'd like to nitpick about "Cradle 2 The Grave". ...What's the deal with the 2? What the fuck, someone was too lazy to pound out "to" so they decided to use "2" instead? Are they trying to be all "Generation-X" edgy or some shit like that? C'mon now. I could understand maybe if you were trying to abbreviate some long, tedious word, like "supercalifragilisticexpialadocious" into "17" or something like that, but c'mon, "to"? When has it become acceptible to replace prepositions with numbers? What's next? "I'm going 2 the store 31 my car. It's just 12,948 the street." This isn't even an English major thing but....okay, it totally is an English major thing. But these people are killing our language, they're killing it, and everytime another little part of me dies.

The Payout: You should be able to opt out of your next five arguments with "I DON'T UNNDERSTAND DA WORDS THAT'RE COMING OUTTA YOUR MOUF!" And then she should give you a sexy Asian massage.

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The Movie: Bring It On

The Damage: This was a video rental inflicted on me and another hapless male by a female friend of ours. She once suggested it jokingly, and we were so violenty and vehemently opposed to it that she sort of made it a mission to somehow rent it one day and torture us with it. Why? I can only assume she hated our guts and wanted to make us suffer more than any man has ever suffered in a thousand years. One fateful day, she was unusually quiet and full of evil glee on the ride home from the video store. Upon getting back to my place, we found she'd somehow rented "Bring It On" in secret. ...Why are women so Goddamned evil? Why?

"Bring It On" is the, ahem, "story" of a Beverly Hills (or some other rich white neighborhood) teen who is gearing for her big cheer competition when she finds that the former team captain has stolen all their cheers from the black cheerleaders from Harlem (or wherever). GASP! The priviledged white girls must devise a whole new routine in order to defeat the black girls and win the crown of best cheerleaders. Or what the fuck ever. ...Pardon me if I don't give a rat's ass.

I kind of want my movies to count for something, y'know? Like the fate of the free world is at stake. Or a kind and gentle princess has been captured. Or, zombie aliens who have come to suck out all the cream filling from Hostess Twinkies. World-saving aside, at least relate to me in some way...a tale of love, of triumph, tragedy, something. So this movie, about high school cheerleader girls, really didn't appeal to me in any way at all. "Hey, at least you can see girls in cheerleader outfits" my evil female friend tried to console us. This is another one of those "on the grand scale of things, totally not worth it" things, kind of like telling someone who just got their arms and legs amputated "Hey, at least now you've lost weight..."

Aside from only really appealing to a very, very, very miniscule select audience, the movie was just dumb in general. It was filled with the vapid babbling nonsense that I hated even back in high school. And it made cheerleading out to be some sort of huge, monumental part of our society. The girls had their Cheerocracy (they actually used this term...), they drove home in their Cheer-mobiles (bought by daddy of course), they ate Cheer Yogurt for lunch and made sure to Cheer-Vomit it out later, they went to bed in Cheer-jamas and had Cheer-mares (the whole movie could actually be classified as a Cheer-mare). This movie pretty much violated everything I ever believed in. Near the end of the movie, a guy throws up, and more than anything I was offended he beat me to it. For the finale, I kept hoping that Darth Vader would make a cameo and wipe them all out of existance, but alas, it wasn't meant to be.

The Payout: I want to say that she should have to wear a cheerleading outfit for you...but this movie has just killed it for me. Everytime I see a cheerleader it makes me want to go into violent, uncontrollable spams while crying on the floor. If a woman has subjected you to this movie...the only possible "payout" I can think of is for you to have her drawn and quartered.

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The Movie: But I'm a Cheerleader

The Damage: If you think "Bring It On" was bad, "But I'm a Cheerleader" is a whole 'nother world of pain.

Our same mischevious female friend who inflicted "Bring It On" on us, must have decided that her Grinch-heart had dangerously swelled to almost 1/50th that of a normal human heart, and had to be downsized immediately. She also somehow rented this title in secret (how does she do that?) and subjected us to her devilsh whims. ...It occurs to me now that I'm older and wiser, why didn't I just refuse the pain and leave? Better yet, it was my apartment! I could have shut the TV off, thrown the DVD player out of the winder, thrown her out of a window, anything. The only reason why I didn't was, well, I was a sucker. Plain and simple. Men, don't be suckers.

Anyway, "But I'm a Cheerleader" is about a high school girl, popular, well-liked, etc, but her parents suspect her of being a closet-lesbian. Despite her protests to the contrary (one of her thrilling justifications is "but I'm a cheerleader!" - which is where this movie gets its genious title), her parents send her off to a Gay Reformation Camp. ...Yes, a Gay Reformation Camp, designed to make gay boys and girls straight. At said camp, one counselor is RuPaul, who actually appears as a man who is trying to get gay boys to turn straight. ...If that isn't more than enough to demonstrate how claw-your-eyes-out-bad this movie is, I don't know what else will. Even our female friend realized that she'd not only crossed the line this time, she'd totally obliterated it. She apologized to us constantly while my friend and I beat her with sofa pillows.

The Payout: In Bizarro World, this movie would be "But I'm a Hairdresser". In it, Jake Gyllenhaal would be your ordinary homosexual guy until his parents, Elton John and George Michael suspect him of having heterosexual tendencies. Despite his protests to the contrary, he's sent to Straight Reformation Camp to make him gay again. At said camp, one counselor is Jessica Alba, dressed up as a man, trying to make straight boys gay. At the end of the movie, Jake realizes that he's a raging hetero and goes on a fucking spree that spans half the western hemisphere. ...You know, that's a movie I might actually pay to see. Any woman who inflicts "But I'm a Cheerleader" on you should find a way to take you to Bizarro World so you can watch "But I'm a Hairdresser". The NC-17 version, where the boob to movie running time ratio is 3:1.

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The Movie: Yanni Concert

The Damage: Not a movie per se, but it would have been so much worse. It would have been like the difference between being shot with a bullet and being shot with a rhinoceros.

A girl that I was kinda sorta maybe casually dating (to this day, I'm still not even sure...was I?) said that Yanni was in town, and she really wanted to go see him in concert. Would I come with her? Here, the normal response would have been to punch her in the face and run away screaming. Yet somehow, that didn't happen. In fact, the downright unthinkable happened - I said yes. Perhaps I was thinking that if I accompanied her to a Yanni concert, surely this would be a guaranteed ticket for sex. God, I was so stupid back then. NOTHING would have been worth a Yanni concert. NOTHING. Men, don't be suckers. Seriously.

She'd got the tickets and everything, but then thanks to Sacramento Kings playoff basketball the concert date had to have been changed. Somehow it suddenly became inconvienent for her so she scrapped the idea. ...I erected a monument to the Sacramento Kings in my bedroom which I still pray to to this very day. Had the playoff basketball schedule not interfeared...I might have found myself at a Yanni concert. A. Yanni. Concert. I shudder to even think about the possibilities. His long, flowing, Grecian locks bobbing about as he furiously strikes the piano keys in passion. Women around me melting into puddles of icky goo. It would have been the musical version of The Lifetime Channel. Gentlemen, check your nuts at the door with your ticket stubs because you certainly won't be needing those anymore.

The Payout: I'm going to let my old roommate handle this one. When he heard I was going to be going to a Yanni concert (and paying $50 bucks for a ticket no less), he let me have it. He laid into me for a good hour or so, rightfully so. I couldn't catch all of the tirade, but some of the more memorable blasts were as follows.

"$50 for Yanni? $50 for Yanni!? She'd better suck you off like ten times. $50 for Yanni, she'd better let you stick your dick wherever you want to. Pussy, ear, between her teeth...she should let you poke out her eye and skullfuck her. Man, if you were my son, I'd be whipping you right now. My parents are going to disown me for living with a guy who pays $50 for Yanni. Man, I can't even look at you. You're gonna hafta marry this girl. For all the pussy she has to pay out. Man, $50 for Yanni? The opener had better be Jesus.

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So there you have it. A collection of movies that have either just left a bad taste in my mouth, or mentally scarred me for the rest of my life. There is a very important lesson to be learned here. Men - don't be suckers. Don't agree to watch a movie you know going to hurt you just because you think that maybe, maybe you just might get a shot at getting some. Make a stand. Put your foot down, and just say no to awful movies. If you don't, you may one day find yourself at a Yanni concert. And don't come crying to me when your nuts shrivel up to the size of raisins because of it. I've warned you.

And girls, next time you recommend a movie to watch a guy, be it a husband, boyfriend, or that ever-loyal friend you like to keep on a leash, please keep in mind that there's a very real possibility that it will cause him varying degrees of physical pain. Sometimes, we're willing to bear that burden, so the least you can do is reciprocate, reward our sacrifice. Do this, and all will be well.

But try to drag any guy to a Yanni concert and I'm calling the authorties on you.