Posted on 05/13/2011 10:32:45 AM PDT by Kaslin
We’re about to find out whether audiences truly want chick flicks to be more like Seth Rogen movies.
Bridesmaids is like virtually nothing you’ve seen before — a bridal shower of dirty jokes. Whether it represents a giant step forward or backward is subject to question.
The film, which stars and is co-written by the siren of SNL, Kristen Wiig, was also produced by Judd Apatow, whose touch is evident. The typical romcom formula of a sweetly endearing heroine whose major problem is which handsome swain to marry is, for once, discarded with a glee bordering on venom.
Wiig plays Annie, a barely employed jewelry-store saleswoman whose life’s ambition to run a bake shop foundered, leaving nothing but an empty storefront. She doesn’t have a boyfriend; instead she has a bedtime partner (superbly played with an evil streak by Jon Hamm, the star of Mad Men) who kicks her out of the house after sex.
Even this early on, Bridesmaids is getting uncomfortable laughs; aren’t handsome curs like Hamm supposed to be charming in a roguish way, like Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones’s Diary or Chris Noth in Sex and the City? Hamm is instead an irredeemable snake, a man who mistreats women simply because his good looks enable him to.
Yet far worse is to come for Annie as she helps plan a wedding for her best friend (Maya Rudolph). In a very funny scene that has much to say about the way women compete with each other (rather than support each other in the gauzy, we’re-all-sisters way of Sex and the City), she meets the bride’s other best friend, the beautiful, rich, and stylish Helen (a perfect Rose Byrne), and each tries to prove that she’s the one who is really closest to the bride in a painfully extended toast-off in which neither will let the other have the last word at the microphone. Anyone who has ever heard young (or even not-so-young) women talk in minute detail about their ongoing feuds with various friends, ex-friends, or “frenemies” will recognize that there is a lot more truth here than there has been in the last few Jennifer Lopez, Jennifer Aniston, or Katherine Heigl films. Later in the movie, when things get really bitter, Helen will tell Annie that instead of publicly issuing insults, Annie should have chosen the more normal option of pretending to be civil in person but then saying mean things behind Helen’s back. This, too, stings.
Are women ready to be shown as such petty and vindictive souls? Maybe not. Annie isn’t just a bad bridesmaid in a cute way; as the movie goes on, she misbehaves so badly on a flight to a bachelorette party in Las Vegas that she gets the entire group thrown off a plane and placed on a bus back home. Then she ruins the elegant party Helen hosts in the bride’s honor.
And in a scene that will soon be legendary in the history of gross-out humor, Annie is responsible for an endless bout of gastric distress that afflicts everyone in the wedding party except for the borderline anorexic Helen. In this scene, as in the rest of the movie, Melissa McCarthy (the star of the CBS sitcom Mike & Molly) proves to be as outrageous as Roseanne Barr was in the 1980s, but with a touch that ultimately makes you respect her for being as confident and in-your-face as she is. McCarthy’s character, a bridesmaid who spends the movie hitting on guys inappropriately, stealing puppies, and making obscene jokes, comes into sharp relief in a scene in which she explains how she was tortured in high school and resolved to make a success of herself anyway.
It’s a creative gamble for Wiig and Apatow and their director Paul Feig (who created Freaks and Geeks) to ask female audiences to laugh at crude fraternity-style humor in which women are central to the action instead of serving as the voice of maturity as they are on sitcoms like Everybody Loves Raymond. Moreover, frat humor must get continually more extreme in order to keep being shocking; 1978’s Animal House would be far too tame for today’s young moviegoers to be a big hit in 2011. But women comics have long complained that if only the male-dominated comedy scene in Hollywood would let them be themselves and mine their unglamorous real lives for material, they could create far more interesting movies than formula fare like Maid in Manhattan or Something Borrowed. We’re about to find out whether audiences truly want chick flicks to be more like Seth Rogen movies, or if they’re more comfortable with the cute and trite.
American women acting like the women media success women think American women should be. Should be good reinforcement of my preference for imports.
It sounds quite missable.
I saw it advertised the other day, it looked like it might be funny, then saw it was rated “R.”
At that point I realized the “funny” would be largely scatological, porny, cussy, and revolting.
So I knew then I’d skip it.
This looks like THE HANGOVER for chicks.
Should be an interesting experiment on women because they’ve been programmed on chickflicks & romcoms that men are always heavily flawed, can’t control our urges, and it’s their job to teach us cavemen on how to be better. If there is a female character whose mean and sleeps around, she’s always doing it because she’s got an alpha-male complex and/or was sweet at one time, but got screwed over by a man and drove her to be this. They’re always the ones that at the end of the movie bested by the lead female.
The uncomfortable laughter reported at this movie makes me believe this movie won’t be a major hit like Hangover was.
Actually this isn’t true the gross out movie when CO ED in 2002 with a movie called “The Sweetest Thing”, it had Cameron Diaz and Christina Applegate, and Selma Blair.
Premise is pretty much two happily single young party gals and best friends, one far more cynical of love than the other.. of course the more cynical falls for a guy big, and then they cross the country to see him, and calamity ensues.
It pretty much didn’t gover over great at the Box Office, with a production budget of $43 Million and Domestic Gross of a bit over 25 Million. Overall worldwide it did make money, with gross worldwide revenues of a little over $68.5 Million.
Maybe it was too soon for audiences to accept the female raunchie movie, or maybe it was simply the writing wasn’t as strong as it should have been... and frankly there are parts of the movie that are just a mess.. however there is no doubt that this was the first real co-ed gross out movie, at least mass marketed anyway.
This was a scene that never made it to the released film, but was released on the DVD extras and is probably what the film is best remembered for... this is not work safe.. but it should give you an idea of the level of raunch this thing was going for.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tWfosqBsOY&feature=grec_index
Idiocracy, here we come:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czSegPchDmU
I don’t know.. the folks who have seen it at pre-releases and are telling me its hysterical are just as many women as men.
Obviously it won’t hit all cylinders with all women, but I think this thing is going to score well.
If you’re an Austen fan, see if you can find Lost in Austen to watch (Netflix has it.) It’s a BBC production (miniseries) from a few years ago and it even had my husband watching (and he’s no Austen fan, LOL.) Very original plot and fun to watch.
I’m a 47 year old female. I can’t stand chick flicks. Give me Tommy Boy over Steel Magnolias any day. While I prefer my time in the barn, I can get dressed up and be as ladylike as well. This movie just might be worth seeing and I only go to the theatre once every few years.
I saw a sneak peak of this film and it was not good. They tried to cram in as much stuff in a two hour time frame. It should have been shorter. It seemed like a rough cut and there was hardly any music. I think most of the budget was spend having Wilson Phillips perform on at end of the movie.
This movie reminds me of The Borgias on Showtime in that there is no character in the series that has any redeemable qualities. On the other hand in Camelot on Starz, King Arthur, though flawed is maturing and gaining wisdom.
I’m sure women will watch this. I can ‘t believe what people watch, but they do.
If the networks and movies had to program for the women I care about, 80% of what they do would not be there.
When I first saws the trailer for the movie, all I could think was,
“Oh, great! Yes, let’s have a movie about women behaving boorishly, because we certainly need to see more examples of classless, tasteless, immoral people!!”/sarc
I have had enough of “raunchy”. And, chickflicks? *dry heaves*
I saw it this past week myself, and its good, its not all over the top raunch.. sure it has some, but its not all raunch all the time... in fact its really more of a story of a gal falling down and coming to terms with issues in her life, and her friends, more than a flat out raunch comedy.
Don’t get me wrong its definitely got some moments, but its not the same as the Hangover.
In fact there are some very slow moving parts in the middle, and there are few scenes where they milk a comedy pretense a bit too far and long and it doesn’t work well, but its an overall decent story.
I was suprised that the main love interest was an actor from the British series The I.T. Crowd, more than anything else. I hadn’t seen him in any US films before.
The I.T. Crowd is a hysterical series, and I love the show, even though because its British means that a “season” is only 6 or 8 episodes, still its some damned funny stuff. You can find it on NetFlix on demand if you have it.
Reading this book now.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1374989/
I’m sure Austin would have wrote in zombies and ninjas if she knew about them.
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