Tuesday 30 August 2011

Friends

Bridesmaids was disappointing, maybe because of the big hype. A film with women! Funny women! Women being funny! Who'd have thought it?

Trouble was it just wasn't that funny, in fact I found it a bit depressing. Too women's magazine in its conception. Let us count the cliches:

Woman upset and envious about her best friend getting married (nb not about her being in a happy relationship, she's fine with that, just about her getting married) when she herself is single.

Woman getting jealous of someone younger, prettier and richer & so being all catty and bitchy. That's what us girls are like, you know. Beneath a thin veneer of sisterhood we're all BITCHES and the only way we can relate to other women is to compete.

Woman getting jealous of someone trying to STEAL her BEST FRIEND. (Past the age of 10, do you really need to have a Best Friend? Grow up!)

I think that women's friendships are complex and can be tricky to negotiate in lots of ways. There's probably a great film to be made about women's friendships, and it would be funny too, but this isn't it.

(I did like the bridesmaid who stole all the puppies though. More of her.)




6 comments:

  1. Yes, but do they get naked? :-)

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  2. Oh yes. And tnen they mud-wrestle.

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  3. Oh but when she's high on the plane.. I laughed and laughed....

    XX

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  4. This writer broke it down better than me...

    http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/bridesmaids-am-i-doing-being-a-woman-wrong

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  5. It depressed me too. I thought the entire story concept was depressing. Maybe that's because I'm single. Even more depressing was that for me the only funny characters were male (the puppies girl was a bit too broad comedy for me). And the entire movie basically failed the Bechdel test.

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  6. Not so much because she was funny but because she was happy - all the other characters seemed to be self-loathing or miserable in some way.

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