Hola all. Massawyrm here.
Have you ever had someone that let you down – that just plain disappointed you? Even though whatever it was that let you down involved someone else who you aren’t the slightest bit disappointed with…because you’ve come to expect that from them? That’s Bride Wars. I don’t know what the fuck Anne Hathaway was thinking. She’s awesome. She’s got a great nose for projects. And she always seems to appear in projects that audiences often find to be much better than they have any right to be at first glance. I will never forget that cockeyed stare Harry gave me the night I went over to his house after posting one of my earliest reviews for the site. “The Princess Diarrhea?” Diaries. “Gay.” You watched it? “Gay.” Watch it, Harry. “Ga-ay.” I remember in that piece discussing what a great young actress Hathaway was and how, if she played her cards right and chose the right roles, she could be a major talent one day.
Guess what? She played her cards right. She chose the right projects. And then she turns around and makes this.
Kate Hudson? By this point I’ve come to expect EXACTLY this kind of movie out of her. She couldn’t smell a wet turd on a hot day from five paces away. She doesn’t need career advice, she needs a bomb sniffing dog and a restraining order against Matthew McConaughey’s people. She doesn’t make good movies. She simply uses her God given talent and charisma to get people to go see very bad ones. So I can’t be angry at her. She’s just doing what is in her nature to do.
But Anne, she’s my pick for Best Actress this year. She blew my doors off in Rachel Getting Married. So to watch her slum it in what I can only imagine is just another casualty of Writer’s Strike filmmaking kind of hurts. It’s not that I expected this to be a whole hell of a lot walking in, but I certainly never imagined it was going to be a nigh unwatchable mess seasoned with a healthy mix of unlikable characters and boring, entirely unbelievable situations.
The film this most reminded me of was How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Not only did it have the same cheap production values and goofy floor wax commercial score – but it seemed to have the very same hatred of women that its predecessor had. The biggest problem with How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days was that every woman in the film was either a backstabbing bitch or whiney and entirely lacking in the ability to function on their own in the real world. Every woman but one, that is. Kate Hudson’s character. And that is because she was written as a man. It boggled my mind at just how eagerly women gobbled up a movie about stupid women were, but it worked. And so they’re trying it again.
This movie does not like women at all. It seems to be in love with girlish things and ideas. But not actual girls. Both of the film’s leads are stereotypical time bombs waiting for some occurrence to come along and give them an opportunity to finally use their ticket to take the express train to crazytown. And as you watch two men smile and even celebrate what they love about their soon to be spouses…things that we married men like to refer to as WARNING SIGNS…you quickly become freed of any attachment you might have to the characters and simply sit back and watch a boring hour and a half of lame, catty revenge.
Imagine if Nora Ephron awoke from a dream to pencil down a half baked idea based upon having watched Rushmore just hours before and then that notepad was stolen by someone with no imagination whatsoever that wanted nothing more than to set feminism back 20 years or so. That’s Bride Wars. Lacking a single enjoyable, or hell, even palatable moment, this film meanders from lame girly revenge moment to lame girly revenge moment as two women who were at one time lifelong friends, seek to completely humiliate the other by dying their hair blue, giving them a super orange tan or tricking them into overeating so they won’t fit into their wedding dress. For 90 cringe inducing minutes.
Yeah. It’s Mean Girls for the ladies that found that film a little too cerebral.
But that’s nothing compared to the mind altering surprise twist ending that the film seems eager to set up only to nonsensically try to explain and get away with just short of rolling the credits. It’s a moment so out of left field, so undeserved and cheap, that had I had an ounce of investment in the film, I would have felt robbed. Instead, it was just another thing to add to a laundry list of complaints when trying to unravel at which point this film really went wrong. Was it the constant stream of 3D photo montages that looked more like it belonged in an UHF advertisement for a local wedding planner than it did anything resembling a Hollywood movie? Or was it Candice Bergen’s seemingly contractually obligated droning voiceover explaining to us things that might have been more interesting had they been shown to us instead? The world may never know. Even Hathaway seems to be phoning this in, seemingly grasping the idea that her character actually HAS no character and doing the bare minimum necessary to collect her check and move on to a project with merit.
I know the January/February dumping ground is tough – hell a goodly half of my worst of for last year came from this very same period. I just didn’t realize that this would be a solid contender for next year’s list. But it is. If you run into a moment this weekend in which your significant other offers this film as an option and opines “Really, how bad could it be,” feign an illness. Really. An appendix bursting or something. Because as much as I have a strong distaste for How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, at least that had a romantic chemistry to distract you from the films awfulness. This one doesn’t.
I daresay this is one of Hudson’s worst films. And that’s saying something.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
Got something for the Wyrm? Mail it here.
