My Best Friend's Girl

I watched the film My Best Friend's Girl at a screening about 9 months ago and was so outraged, offended and aghast by it i haven't stopped talking about it since then, mostly slack jawed and incandescently, stutteringly appalled. my post viewing email to the PR included phrases like "unbelievably crude and shamelessly misogynistic". the story is about a guy (Tank, played by the strangely attractive in a sort of sexy ugly sort of way Dane Cook - hmm even i surprised myself), who is hired by shitty boyfriends-who-have-been-dumped to take their freshly ex-girlfriends out on such a horrific date that they go running back to them. you see him in action (10 steps of hell for any girl) but then he's hired by his best friend and falls for the girl he's supposed to be offending/insulting/generally being grim to (Alexis, played by Kate Hudson). she also weirdly likes his shallow offensive misogyny for various reasons... cue rom com situ. in an anti rom com sort of way. My main problem was i couldn't imagine who the fuck it was aimed at - was it a girls' rom com or a lads' film? both and neither it seemed. It's got Kate Hudson in it, but it has lines like "treat her like a bowling ball (licking of three middle fingers and then sticking them up)... Strike" and scenes when the male lead's father (a sweaty, wheezing Alec Baldwin, who usually i LOVE in 30 Rock, but is repellent here) talks, in a male bonding fatherly sort of way about his Dirty Houdini filled night with a student. that's their level of connection. he's a women's studies lecturer BTW, so delivers this speech of 'sexual prowess' having left a classroom full of girls who thinks he respects them. this from a man who grades women not just 1-10 but a-z. anyway, it came out at the cinema with little fanfare in November, and is out on DVD nowish, so i was sent a copy in the post. i took it on holiday last week to share the ghastliness. but my outrage-primed audience fricking loved it. and er, so did i. whaaat? serious about turn. i mean it's grim, but also funny. Tank takes one religious girl on a date to Chesus Crust, and orders a Pizza of Nazareth for fuck's sake. what's happened to me??????? how could i have had such a crazy change of heart? was i a sense-of-humourless prude who has come round, or have i lost my moral, political and feminist compass? who the fuck knows.