Non-documentary colons

Rarely have I passed up seeing the type of movie I always try to see like I did with Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, when it was available for me to watch in time to rank it in 2023.

The simple reason I did: From that title, I had no idea it was the type of movie I always try to see.

I must have not seen any images from Foggy Mountain, because if I had, I might have identified it as an example of the outrageous comedic sensibilities of a trio of young white guys. And as much as it pains me to admit that this sort of movie should be in my wheelhouse -- not to the exclusion of the same sort of movie from a trio of young black guys or a trio of Lithuanian lesbians, I hope -- it definitely is.

No, I judged this book by its cover, a.k.a., its title. 

As I've discussed before, movies with colons in their title strike me as the latest quickie documentary made for Netflix with dubious feature length justificastion, not a comedy in which Conan O'Brien and Bowen Yang play small but meaningful roles, which is produced by Judd Apatow.

To the extent that I did get past the colon to analyze the rest of the words in the title, did I really think there was a place called Foggy Mountain and that it had a treasure? Because for it to be a documentary, there would have to be and it would have to have one. But there are a lot of places out there, and I could believe one of them was called Foggy Mountain, and that it might have a real or at least a lengendary treasure.

The Please Don't Destroy part? Well that's the name of the comedy troupe, which features these three guys: Martin Herlihy, John Higgins and Ben Marshall. I don't know what I thought it meant in the context of this potential documentary, but I'd certainly never heard of that troupe before.

And watching the movie, I certainly might have thought it was plot related. The treasure they're seeking is a bust of Marie Antoinette (?!?) that was hidden there in the past and is supposedly worth $100 million. The characters have been looking for it since they were kids. But the character played by Yang does actually want to destroy it (spoiler alert), so I didn't actually figure out the comedy troupe was named Please Don't Destroy until researching this post just now.

Anyway, I laughed out loud a number of times during this movie. The bird call that sounds like a screaming man got that reaction from me every time.

So are you telling me I have to look at movie titles with colons in them more closely from now on, and not just instinctively click to the next title on Netflix?

Oh all right.