Movie: Bridesmaids

[Possible spoiler - though I think everything here is in the trailer.]

So regarding Bridesmaids:  reality check me here.  A bride and her bridesmaids go to a high-class dress shop.  They all get food poisoning and vomit and have diarrhea over everything.  Is that a funny idea?  Am I missing something?  I mean, I get that it’s funny if you’re two 9-year-old boys trading jokes in the back seat of Mom’s mini-van, but I mean for the rest of us?  I thought Super-Bad and Knocked-Up were pretty funny because they were essentially about 9-year-old boys or men who behave like them, but in a story about a wedding, the raunch doesn’t seem truly to communicate the characters or situation.  Plus, did I mention it’s not funny?

And by the way, I saw this in the theater and the audience, many of whom seemed to be the college kids for whom it was made, chuckled, but didn’t erupt with any really big laughs.  As for me, I admired Melissa McCarthy, who worked hard to get the humor and humanity out of every scene she was in, and I smiled at the scenes in the jewelry store and the ones with Jon Hamm, which seemed to me approximately as amusing as a lesser episode of Friends.  Other than that, I found the whole thing drab, predictable and flat.

So assuming for a moment that it’s not me, that the film really isn’t very good (despite the undeniable talents of many of the performers involved), what accounts for some of the smashing reviews from venues on both the right, (Wall Street Journal ) and left (Los Angeles Times and New York Times)?  Could it be that reviewers, most of whom are much older than college students, have been so intimidated by the fear of their own priggishness or irrelevance that they’ve lost the courage to state the obvious -  ie. the movie’s not very funny?

Most of the reviews I read celebrate that at last women on screen can be as raunchy as men.  But why is that good per se?  If anything, it seems to point to the fact that any move toward “fairness” tends to downgrade everyone.  Soon animal rights advocates will be able to celebrate that, at last, humans are as stupid as dogs, while socialists will be able to say, at last, rich people are as poor as poor people…

What was I saying?  Oh yeah – it’s not a funny movie.  But like I say, maybe it’s me.  Go judge for yourself.