Bridesmaids: Gross-Out Humor Goes Co-ed
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.
I think I’ll pass on this movie and pull out the DVD of Casablanca. I know I’ll be happier watching that.
Sounds like something my 13 year old male students are going to love.
well, that is the demographic that spurs the industry apparently
At nearly $20 for a pair of tickets nowadays, its movies like this that keep me away from the theaters.
SNL was only great the first few seasons, when all the original cast were still there. Eddie Murphy breathed life back into it during his reign, but otherwise it has been all downhill since the 1980s. The last two decades the show has been nothing but boring, childish leftwing propaganda.
Not surprising that this lemon was co-written by an SNL “siren”. (whatever THAT means!)
No matter how much this article tries to put a positive spin on it, this movie sounds abysmally horrid — even for a “chick flick” (which by definition are bad)!
I will pass on this one and keep watching my DVDs at home… where I have a better sound system, picture quality and selection of movies than the third-rate overpriced theaters near me.
Well, I’m not much of a moviegoer, and certainly not a “chick flick” fan, but if someone held a gun to my head, I’d surely choose “cute and trite” over juvenile and disgusting.
So this is what feminism has come to. Women can be as gross and vulgar as men at their worst while retaining all the pleasures of bitchiness. No wonder the marriage rate is down, motherhood comes later and increasingly without the advantage of a husband to help raise the offspring. Or if there is a male in the picture, it is one revolving-door rotter after another. What a bitter harvest. The freedom to engage in fart humor doesn’t seem like much in the way of compensation to me.
CAN’T STAND Seth Rogen. The potty humor he espouses is for the idiot masses who find Adam Sandler type of material funny.
How the movies, ‘Knocked Up’ ‘Super Bad’ and like minded ventures are as popular as they were is truly disappointing. Not to mention what universe is this where a fat, go-nowhere oaf lands a successful, beautiful woman?
Honestly, the ‘King of Queens’, ‘Everybody Loves..’, ’2 1/2 Men’, ‘How I Met..’ and the other nonsensical laugh tracked comedies past and present are void of any depth, creativity.
I was SOO looking forward to the movie, ‘Paul’. I love Simon Pegg/Nick Frost features (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and their clever albeit 1 season, ‘Spaced’). And wouldn’t you know it, Seth freakin’ Rogen is the voice of the main flippin’ character!
Seth Rogen and his merry band of unfunny folks are reaping big-time from the A D D masses.
Bring back clever, at times touching material, story lines which are lost, ignored today. Northern Exposure, Frasier, TAXI, Night Court, Barney Miller, Newhart, The Wonder Years etc., (as for BBC programs, Fawlty Towers, Red Dwarf, Keeping Up Appearances were gems as well)
Well, I’m as proud, educated, and insufferable a conservative intellectual elitist as there is, and after reading this review, I very much looking forward to seeing this movie.
Same here. I think the key word in the article is ‘truth’.
Joe Y: I’m entertaining serious doubts you’re any of the above. Okay, I’ll give you insufferable.
Yet more evidence that “cinema” is a dying and decadent “art form.”
I”ll stay home and read a book, thank you.
Never knew that Kristen Wiig was part of SNL. Gave up on it after its third season. I thought Ms. Wiig was okay in Drew Barrymore’s ‘Whip It!’, but I have wish to indulge in a film where women revel in gross-out, frat boy humor.
I also wish that Hollywood would stop trying to elevate past alums of SNL as comedic Messiahs. That trend should have ended with John Belushi. Who was well on the way to hitting the skids when he OD’d.
Belushi was a better actor than any of these hackjobs of the last twenty years. I don’t mind being a little nostalgic about a man who tried to fight his demons and was eventually killed by them – particularly if he actually had talent.
“…CREATIVE gamble…”???[emphasis mine] Surely you jest.
If this garbage is an example of creativity, then I must be Leonardo da Vinci!! Simply being subjected to the previews for this movie was an unutterably repugnant experience. It seems to “run the gamut of emotions” from the merely grotesquely vulgar to pure smut. How anyone can expect our children to grow up with anything even remotely resembling what constitutes normal human decency, emotional sensitivity, and taste, much less a sense that there really are some human activities that are worthy of respect and reverence, when the average movie theatre on Saturday afternoon has become nothing more than an upholstered sewer is way beyond me. But then, I just read that ABC is about to launch a show in prime time with the mind-boggling title, “Good Christian Bit*hes.” (For anyone so inclined, an easy-to-sign petition to stop the latter, sponsored by the good people of Movieguide, is available here:
http://alerts.worldnetdaily.com/HM?a=ENX7Cqmd-97r8SA9MKJEXyznGHxKLFvFcfcStGb5lw8W0bBhOG5mpqVsje_Hhe-ud1Pr)
Seems you dislike the concept of free speech. I doubt you’re protesting the show itself. Why can’t you just mind your own affairs? Let them name their show as they like. Don’t like it? Don’t watch.
The only thing as stupid as left wing nannyism is the right wing version of the same thing.
ABC appears to be home to left wing idiots, but even these are preferable to you.
She also has a right to voice her discontent. Or does “the concept of free speech” trump…..free speech? Don’t like her views, don’t read her comments and ignore her.
First, petitioning sponsors is a perfectly legitimate form of protest. She is not the government. I wish you ‘free speech’ myrmidons would get your constitutional facts right. TV shows exist to sell advertisement, and if enough people make it unattractive to advertising, that’s call the free market, and is the ‘free speech’ of those dissenting.
What a hoot! I’ve been called many things, but nanny was never one of them. Free speech has nothing to do with it. I just think that a modern comedy of manners lampooning the cross in the cleavage crowd would be well within the reach of any good creative team, and would be all the more devastatingly witty without violating the norms of good taste. I offer no apologies for seizing an opportunity to lobby for taste and style, however bluntly I may have done so. My side’s way outnumbered these days, so this mouse plans to keep right on roarin’.
And thanks, Jarmo and Rik. Rik, your no. 13 below expressed the thinking behind my post so much better than I was able to! Allow me to add that both of your comments above stand wonderfully well on their own, but they also felt like gallantry, intended or not, on the receiving end, “and oh, the difference to me.”
The link to the GCB petition doesn’t work.
Try http://secure.afa.net/afa/activism/signpetition.asp?id=1930
or http://secure.afa.net/afa/activism/signpetition_intl.asp?id=1930 for those outside the US & Canada.
I will stay home and watch my daughter Annie’s wedding video instead, thank you very much;)
The previews scream “We want a Hangover too.” Go on girls, make your Porkey’s. Show us that you are all nothing but hedonistic animals and that we men have no reason to respect you or treat you with a scintilla of reverence. Keep spouting off about your maturity and nurturing natures and then just revel in like swine in everything about men you claim to hate. I guffaw.
I’m still guffawing over men’s secret porn collections.
sorry guys…i saw this movie and it was great…there were some long drawn out moments that seemed to stall the momenteum but for the mosty part it was funny & had several spashed of ..WTF? that you would expect in a male dominated movie. the bridesmaid dress fitting scenes were one of the sickest, yet funniest parts of the film..everyone was coming out of their seats with laughter. so don’t dog this movie before you go & see it…i took my wife and we had a blast. definatly not a chick flick that you have to be dragged to but a good fun movie…
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