Image Credit: Jacob Hutchings
It reduces the hilarious humanity of Bridesmaids to sum it up, simply, as the comedy that proved that girls in a movie could be just as gross and raunchy as guys. Yet there’s no denying that it did prove that. The movie, for all time, busted down that door. Bachelorette, a long-sloshed-night-before-the-wedding comedy that’s as caustic and brittle and high-strung as its damaged-princess heroines, zooms through the door that Bridesmaids kicked open without ever looking back — and, while it’s at it, it busts open half a dozen new ones. In Bachelorette, girls behaving badly isn’t just a joke, it’s a way of life.
In the opening scene, set in Los Angeles, Becky, who is sweet and plus-size and deeply self-conscious about it (she’s played by Rebel Wilson, Kristen Wiig’s cockney freak of a roommate in Bridesmaids), informs her best friend, the lovely platinum-blonde ice queen Regan (Kirsten Dunst), that she’s engaged, an announcement that Regan greets by just about choking on her lunch with jealousy. That’s what a petty, lacquered bitch she is. Most of Bachelorette takes place six months later, in Manhattan, on the eve of Becky’s nuptials, which is of course the perfect occasion for a drug-drenched bachelorette party that spins wildly out of control. But this isn’t a daffy clockwork farce like the Hangover films; it’s more like a relentless, revved-up pageant of naked feminine dysfunction. The setting may be New York, but at heart Bachelorette is a very L.A. movie, one in which vanity has become toxic. It’s a comedy of values about young women who don’t have any. READ FULL STORY »
