{"id":465,"date":"2011-05-14T01:32:36","date_gmt":"2011-05-14T05:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/funnyfeminist.com\/?p=465"},"modified":"2013-05-28T23:56:11","modified_gmt":"2013-05-28T23:56:11","slug":"bridesmaids-female-friendships-and-fat-bottomed-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/2011\/05\/14\/bridesmaids-female-friendships-and-fat-bottomed-girls\/","title":{"rendered":"“Bridesmaids,” Female Friendships, and Fat-Bottomed Girls"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I saw the trailer for Bridesmaids,<\/em> I expected to see a female version of the buddy comedy and watch a rag-tag group of misfits struggle through the planning of a wedding and have wacky misadventures along the way.<\/p>\n

Instead, I watched a movie about a down-on-her-luck woman struggle with her rather pathetic life while serving as her best friend’s maid of honor.<\/p>\n

It was a different movie than I expected, and one that I enjoyed for the most part.\u00a0 More than anything, I appreciated that the movie was clearly written by women who value other women. Not knowing much about the movie except for what was presented in the trailer, I expected to see Kristen Wiig’s character (Annie Walker) fall into a tizzy because her best friend was getting married and she was (presumably) the only single bridesmaid in the wedding party.\u00a0 As it turns out, singlehood was the least of Annie’s problems.\u00a0 Yes, she was in the middle of a dehumanizing fling with Jon Hamm (playing a handsome but amusingly toolish character), but only because the rest of her life was in shambles (her pastry business fell apart and her current job was horrible).<\/p>\n

As it turned out, the main conflict in the movie was Annie vs. her low sense of self-worth, as well as her rivalry with Helen (Rose Byrne).\u00a0 And, to my pleasant surprise, Annie and Helen don’t fight over a man, or money, or social status.\u00a0 Both of them want to be the best friend to Lillian (Maya Rudolph).\u00a0 Annie needs Lillian’s friendship during this rough patch, and Helen needs a close female friend, period.\u00a0 Because the movie is told from Annie’s point of view, we don’t see Helen in a sympathetic light for a long time, but her redemption in the end is well-earned.\u00a0 In one of the final scenes, where (spoiler alert!) Helen and Annie find common ground, I kept waiting for the punchline, expecting a crude joke to interrupt a nice moment…and it never came.\u00a0 They express sincere appreciation for each other, and the audience gets the sense that maybe, just maybe, they’ll actually become friends.<\/p>\n

I’ve been in their position before.\u00a0 I watched Annie seethe with jealousy and I cringed because I remembered how that felt.\u00a0 During the unhappiest times of my life, when I needed my girlfriends more than anything, I resented my best friends’ other friends.\u00a0 Those emotions aren’t pretty, but they’re real, and I was happy to see the movie explore those feelings with a nice mix of humor and pathos.\u00a0 Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph have believable chemistry as lifelong best friends, and Wiig and Rose Byrne hit all the beats of their developing relationship very nicely.<\/p>\n

And since I’m on the subject of female friendships, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about Melissa McCarthy’s character, Megan.<\/p>\n

Megan is the Fat Girl of the bridesmaids, and the writing delved into the Fat Girl stereotype too many times: She’s aggressive!\u00a0 She makes loud bodily functions and can’t tell whether she burped or farted!\u00a0 She’s sexually<\/em> aggressive and involves food in her foreplay!\u00a0 (Of course she does.)<\/p>\n

But even though the writers (Wiig and Annie Mumolo) wrote a few too many potty-humor jokes for my taste, I left the movie with an an overall positive impression of Megan.\u00a0 She’s confident and goes for what she wants when she wants it.\u00a0 She’s also good at her job, unapologetic about who she is, and a good friend who knocks some sense into Annie when she’s reached an annoying, self-indulgent, whiny phase.\u00a0 She’s the least conventionally attractive of the main cast of women, yet she’s the boldest and most self-assured.\u00a0 She’s also pretty damn funny and takes too many party favors from the bridal shower just because she can.<\/p>\n

The movie wasn’t perfect.\u00a0 There was a little<\/em> too much gross-out humor, and there wasn’t enough for Wendi McLendon-Clovey and Ellie Kemper to do.\u00a0 But the focus on women’s friendship was strong, I’m always happy to see Chris O’Dowd from The IT Crowd<\/em> get work, and there were plenty of laughs that didn’t resort to cheap jokes.\u00a0 I’m glad I saw it and I hope to see more movies like this in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I saw the trailer for Bridesmaids, I expected to see a female version of the buddy comedy and watch a rag-tag group of misfits struggle through the planning of a wedding and have wacky misadventures along the way. Instead, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[17,18,20],"class_list":["post-465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-more-feminist-than-it-seems","tag-movie-reviews","tag-movies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3zNYR-7v","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2850,"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions\/2850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theresabasile.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}