fertilecelluloid Review of Bride Wars

Bride Wars (2009)

Just when you thought dumb couldn't get any dumber...

[1/10 · 14 January 2009]

Director Gary Winick ought to be ashamed of himself for creating such utter garbage as this and spitting on cinema's potential. The film is legitimate "anti-cinema", sort of a big screen TV pilot that doesn't even come close to the quality of contemporary TV. It exists in a curious time warp of brainless, vapid twaddle that would boggle any intelligent mind. Clearly, "Bride Wars" isn't aimed at intelligent minds. At the session I attended with my partner, several unfortunate looking, slightly overweight women constantly texted and glanced upwards occasionally at the screen. It has become infuriating to watch movies at the cinema with these little glowing squares popping up all around you in the dark as you're trying to concentrate. I told two of these women to stop texting and was met with moronic, vacant stares. These people are the audience for "Bride Wars", although they're not the only ones texting; that's a cancer that has infected cinema going worldwide. As you would expect, the dreadful and vile Kate Hudson toplines this hideous wreck. She opted to smear her entire career with cinematic manure years ago, so her appearance in this was inevitable. Not so Ann Hathaway, who recently starred in and was quite good in the highly overrated "Rachel Getting Married". At least that had a semi-decent script and was directed by a filmmaker, not a fraud and betrayer of Real Men. Is Hathaway being groomed to replace Hudson? Or maybe Jennifer Anniston? I sincerely hope not. The story is simple and predictable. Hudson and Hathaway have been friends since childhood. They once visited a famous New York hotel and witnessed a wedding. From that moment, these vacuous, boring women have been obsessed with getting married at the same hotel on the same day. Zoom forward two decades. Hudson is now a horrible lawyer and an utter bitch. Hathaway is a slightly more tolerable, doormat-type girl who has just been proposed to. Hudson is angry about that. She is so angry, in fact, that she marches into the office of her pussy-whipped fiancé and demands he propose to her, which he does. If you're looking for strong, independent men who wouldn't put up with a minute of this woman's crap, you're in the wrong movie. These movies are all about men (most men, actually) who've been brainwashed into thinking that their job in life is to make women's dreams come true. Screw their own ambitions. These guys have no balls at all. Anyway, once these two dreadful dames are engaged, they visit wedding planner Candace Bergen, who informs them that it won't be possible for them to get married on the same day because the hotel is fully booked. That's when the film starts earning its "Bride Wars" title. Although they've been buddies for years, these so-called friends plot and scheme to ruin each other's "Big Day". This really is frightening film-making. Starting with the premise that a woman's wedding is "The Biggest Day Of Her Life" (how depressing!), it goes from bad to much worse as director (?) Winick rapes every cliché in the book in his attempt to milk laughs from the retarded script. Not only does everything end "happily" (if you can call getting married to Kate Hudson happy), the writers contradict their own logic in order to contrive a resolution. Although everybody has been told that there is no room at the hotel for two weddings (which is the basic dramatic set-up), the climax takes place at the hotel as the two weddings take place in two difference areas. Huh?! Sloppy? You bet. Hathaway is probably too young to realize that making this would do nothing for her career. Then again, she probably made a killing financially, so who cares, right? I do, but that's silly of me. Not surprisingly, the film opened with healthy grosses, guaranteeing that more of its stinking, rancid ilk will be rolling down the assembly line very soon. The fat, homely "princesses" out there should be ecstatic.