Another Round, & Other Movies To Drink To

Another Round took the Best Foreign Movie Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards and rightly so. It is a fantastic nuanced movie about middle age, friendship, and alcohol. It avoids black and white moralizing and approaches its topic and subject with subtlety and compassion rather than slapping us in the face with a “drinking is bad” message.

It is funny, sad, and uplifting, and boasts another fantastic Mads Mikkelsen performance. After watching it, I got to thinking about other drinking movies, and here are five favourites.

The World’s End

The final installment in Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s Cornetto Trilogy, The World’s End is a movie about that most British of pastimes, the pub crawl. Pegg’s character, Gary King, wants to recapture his youth and find some semblance of meaning in his life by gathering together his old schoolmates to recreate the pub crawl they did as teenagers. The mates aren’t as stuck in the past as King and neither is their childhood home which has seen the pubs become soulless chains and everyone replaced with alien robots.

As the crew gradually get drunker and drunker, the fight scenes with the interstellar interlopers become more insane with the fighting style mimicking that of Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master, a movie that sounds like it should be on this list but alas is less about drinking and more about imitating a drunk to karate the shit out of your enemies.

As with the other movies in the trilogy, Wright and Pegg’s message is that growing up isn’t what it cracked up to be. Pegg’s character being stuck in the past is tragic but his friends becoming real estate agents, bankers, and – urgh – grown-ups is presented as something even worse.

Leaving Las Vegas

Nicholas Cage’s reputation as an actor who can only give a huge performance is earned. In the past few years, he has managed to go from being a parody of himself into an actor who appears in weird genre movies like Mandy or Color Out in Space giving scenery-chewing performances that steal whatever movie they’re in.

However, people forget that he is an Oscar winner. And a legit one as well. By that I mean he actually gave a great performance rather than, oh I don’t know, wearing a fat suit and doing a Churchill impression or lip-syncing some Queen songs.

Leaving Las Vegas is the story of Ben, a failed screenwriter who loses everything and decides to travel to Vegas to drink himself to death. Along the way he meets Elizabeth Shue, a prostitute working the strip, and a doomed love affair begins. This is a long way from The Rock or National Treasure.

Drinking in movies falls into two categories, the fun kind or the Leaving Las Vegas kind.

The Lost Weekend

There’s a story that Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend was deemed such a danger to the alcohol industry, they employed a gangster to offer Paramount 5 million dollars if they would burn the negative of it. This unflinching look at alcoholism terrified them and brought on worries that it would somehow bring about a return to prohibition.

Obviously, it didn’t, but for a movie released in 1945, its depiction of a writer succumbing to alcoholism over the course of a six-day binge is no less confronting when watched today.

The Lost Weekend follows Don and the ways in which his friends and girlfriend try to keep him on the straight and narrow as he veers off course into self-destruction. In an interesting parallel to Another Round, when pushed about his drinking, Don declares that it improves his mind because “it tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar.” But also like Another Round, that can come with a terrible cost.

Oh, and what did Billy Wilder say when he heard about the five-million-dollar offer the studio got to burn the movie?

“Give me the five million and I’ll burn it.”

Rough Night

Researching this article and thinking of the drinking movies I’ve watched over the years, it became clear that the drinking movie is mostly a genre populated by sad middle-aged men. There are some solid female drinkers like Nora in The Thin Man but a movie about women that features a lot of boozing is a hard thing to find. Luckily though, there is Rough Night, a female riff on Peter Berg’s Very Bad Things that finds a bachelorette weekend ruined by murder and inept attempts at covering that murder up.

Rough Night features a murderer’s row of comedic talents with Ilana Glazer, Kate McKinnon, and Jillian Bell, alongside Scarlet Johannsen and Zoe Kravitz who are less obvious choices for a slapstick comedy farce but who hold their own in a cast that also includes Paul W. Downs, Eric Andre, and Bo Burnham.

Written and directed by Lucia Aniello, Rough Night manages to be a raunchy comedy about a drunken weekend gone wrong while also touching on female friendships and growing older/apart.

Also, Kate Mckinnon does a pretty solid Aussie accent throughout so that helps earn its place on this list.

Withnail and I

Finally, if you’re going to talk about drinking movies you can’t leave out the movie that comes with its own drinking game. The game requires you to go drink for drink with Withnail, the alcoholic actor played by Richard E. Grant.

This means by the time this hour-and-40-minute long movie is over, you will consume half a pint of ale, half a pint of cider, two and a half measures of gin, nine and a half glasses of red wine, six glasses of sherry, thirteen drams of Scotch, and a shot of lighter fluid (replace with rum or something less non-lethal).

If you survive the game, you get the joy of watching an English classic with all those English classic things like down on their luck people, booze, shitty weather, eccentric weirdos, and stirring Shakespearean soliloquies. Closer to Leaving Las Vegas than The World’s End, Withnail and I remain one of the funniest movies ever about getting pissed and trying to stay that way.

Have you seen these films? Do you agree? Let us know in the comments below!