The popularity of Dry January has gone up and up in recent years. The sentiment is sound – December is a big month for drinking and eating so it’s best to start a new year with a bit of a reset.
But why not watch movies about people doing the exact opposite of your healthy choices to make the countdown to February just a bit easier?
From classic party flicks like “Animal House” to more modern hits like “Superbad” and “Everybody Wants Some,” there is a specific genre of film that will make you yearn for a night out (or in) with friends and few drinks.
Below are the movies to check out in January to live vicariously through while you start the new year on a healthy note.
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Everybody Wants Some
“Everybody Wants Some” harkens back to those college days where so little was happening that the only goal was burning time until everyone was ready to go out. The film takes place over a weekend leading up to the beginning of a new school year as a nameless baseball team whittles away their time by sitting around s–t-talking friends before hitting a variety of bars once the sun is set. There is little plot and even less stakes – the film is all vibe and it hums along perfectly, which makes it a swell spiritual successor to Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused.”
Wedding Crashers
A wedding is a specific type of drinking event. Sometimes you have to dance around drinking with and around family, often times in an Avengers-like event that summons the most important people from a couples’ entire lives into one room for a celebration. It’s a recipe for a good time, if a sloppy one, and “Wedding Crashers” captures the essence and beauty of the wedding party despite the main characters never really being officially invited to the big event themselves.
The Hangover
Hangovers are among the biggest reasons not to drink in excess – but there is something horrifically beautiful in suffering through a shared hangover in the wake of a heavy night out among friends. “The Hangover” takes that to an extreme but the sentiment is still felt. A group of friends lose their friend on his bachelor party and have to sift through a variety of nonsensical clues – like a tiger in their hotel, a missing tooth, and an acquired baby – to find him before heading home.
Animal House
“Animal House” is the quintessential party movie. If it wasn’t the first to kick off the genre it certainly popularized it in the eyes of the masses. The story follows a socially lacking freshman who fails to join the polished and popular Omega Theta Pi fraternity and ends up in the party frat Delta Tau Chi. The Delta’s partying has reached the point that the school’s dean wants them removed from campus so it’s on the frat to sort out their problems with administration while balancing a “healthy” amount of drinking.
Old School
There are few better movies to watch when wanting to live vicariously through party movies than one about a group of friends who got sick of it and just went back to college for another round of fun. “Old School” became infinitely quotable for thousands the second its story about a group of older friends who end up hosting a party house near a college campus – much to the dislike of the school dean. “Old School” has been often imitated, never replicated so stick to this classic if you’re looking for something.
Can’t Hardly Wait
There’s something special about the late ’90s/early ’00s party movie. Do all the jokes hold up? Absolutely not. Are the performances great? Rarely. But they’re a time capsule of the R-rated comedy growing pains and “Can’t Hardly Wait” is the pinnacle of that time. High school is over and it’s time to enter that nebulous pre-college era for the summer. The parties are raging around graduation and a group of nerds want revenge on the meatheads who bullied them and to confess their hidden feelings to long-time crushes.
Superbad
“Superbad” has really become the go-to high school party movie despite the fact that most of the movie has the main characters just trying to get to the party. But at the end of the day it’s about the journey not the destination and the R-rated comedy makes for some of the best booze-soaked laughs you can have with a movie while you’re bravely facing Dry January.
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