Movie Review: Bride Wars Starring Kate Hudson

Bride Wars (2009) 

Directed by Gary Winick 

Written by Greg Depaul, Casey Wilson, June Diane Raphael 

Starring Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway, Chris Pratt, Steve Howey, Candace Bergen

Release Date January 9th, 2009 

Published January 10th, 2009 

Two best girlfriends go for each others throats after their weddings are booked on the same day. Some might say, big deal, share the day. But then you wouldn't have a series of scenes where the now former BFF's trade nasty pranks ending with one tackling the other from behind as she walks down the aisle. That is the nasty little premise of Bride Wars a dull witted new comedy that provides the latest evidence of the career devolution of the once radiant Kate Hudson.

Liv (Hudson) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) have, since they were little girls, always dreamed of June weddings at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Emma has gone so far as to save from her teen years to now just to pay for her dream wedding, Liv is independently wealthy having grown up to be a lawyer. Now, both have met the man of their dreams and their dream weddings are approaching. 

Two dopey doofuses have sought the chance to marry our wedding obsessed heroes. Fletcher (Chris Pratt) has romantically pursued Emma and given her lovely surprise proposal. Poor, dummy Daniel (Steve Howey) is basically tricked into asking Liv to marry him following a mix up with a ring in their shared apartment. Both men are merely props in this story and neither prop is well used. 

Things are in perfect order for two dream weddings at the Plaza as a high profile wedding planner happens to have three openings in June, two on the same day, one 3 weeks later. While the girls think they have booked separate dates, the wedding planner botches things and the girls end up on the same date. And the hilarity begins..... or not.

Bride Wars is briskly paced and bubbly early on as we can sense the fun in this idea and the possibilities of these two talented actresses. But, it's not long before things begin to fall apart and once the girls have split up and are going after each other things turn from bubbly to brusque, from brisk to bludgeoning. I adore Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway but watching the nasty ways in which they attack each other in Bride Wars is unpleasant, 

Under the direction of Gary Winick, who brought much charm to Charlotte's Web and 13 Going On 30, Bride Wars is so childish I wanted to hire a babysitter. What the movie desperately needs to balance the lunacy of Hudson and Hathaway's antics is one adult character. When none emerge the movie flips and flops about in demonstrations of nastiness that even tweenage girls will find childish.

Anyone whose every tripped over the reality show Bridezilla on the We Network knows there are big laughs to rend from the idea of crazed women in search of the perfect wedding. That Bride Wars is incapable of finding any of those laughs shows just how wildly inept the entire enterprise is. Bridezilla is Kubrick-ian level cinema with the wit of a 70s era Woody Allen compared to Bride Wars. 

Movie Review Sweet Home Alabama

Sweet Home Alabama (2002)

Directed by Andy Tennant 

Written by C Jay Cox 

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Josh Lucas, Patrick Dempsey, Candace Bergen, Fred Ward, Jean Smart

Release Date September 27th, 2002

Published September 24th, 2002 

In Legally Blonde, Reese Witherspoon showed herself to be the romantic comedy heiress apparent to Julia Roberts. With her perky good looks and sugary sweetness offset by a wonderfully mischievous smile it was impossible not to fall in love with her. Witherspoon brings those same qualities to her latest film, Sweet Home Alabama, but under the direction of Andy Tennent the same qualities that made you love her in Legally Blonde make you loathe her in this dense retread of every romantic comedy ever made.

In Alabama Reese has one of those great Hollywood lives where everything is perfect: perfect job, perfect friends, perfect man, just perfect. As Melanie Carmichael, Reese is a New York fashion designer about to marry the son of New York’s Mayor. Patrick Dempsey plays the perfect guy, Andrew, just going through the motions playing the same role Bill Pullman played in Sleepless in Seattle. No matter how good a guy he is, the trailer has already explained his fate.

After Andrew asks Melanie to marry him, Melanie has to go home to Alabama to take care of the small detail of her current husband Jake (Josh Lucas). In flashback we are treated to the scene when Jake and Melanie fell in love, they were struck by lightning as the shared their first kiss. Watching this scene my eyes rolled so far back I could see the dull faces of the people directly behind me. You can say I’m cynical but haven’t we seen this exact seen or something very similar at least a thousand times? Melanie and Jake’s bad sitcom style arguing is just one of a million tip offs that they will back together at the end of the film.

Having returned to her home town for the first time in 7 years Melanie takes time to revisit her old friends including Bobby Ray (Ethan Embry) who has a secret only Melanie knows about, the kind of secret that stereotypical southerners don’t react well to. There is also Melanie’s former best friend Lurlynn (Melanie Lynskie) who now has three kids including a newborn she takes to the bar as so many southerners are prone to do. Let us not forget Melanie’s parents Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place, who don’t so much fit into the role of stereotypical Southern parents that everyone in the audience assumed they would be.

So golly, do you think Melanie’s unusual southern friends and family will clash with her high class New York would be in laws?

Poor Candace Bergen, this wonderfully talented Emmy winning actress is stuck with the film's most thankless role. As the ever scowling and disapproving mother-in-law, Bergen is never allowed to smile, never allowed to joke. The purpose of Bergen’s Mayor of New York and mother of the groom is to be the bitch so at the end of the movie she can get her comeuppance in what is supposed to make the audience cheer.

That is the essence of the problem with Sweet Home Alabama, every scene has been filmed with the purpose of exerting a particular response from the audience. It is as if every scene in the film was individually test screened by demographic to make sure it illicited the correct audience response.

Like a romantic comedy machine, Sweet Home Alabama grinds through it’s mechanical plot, perfectly calibrated to meet exactly what the audience expects. The film is so predictable even lines of dialogue can be anticipated. Scenes are setup ten to twenty minutes ahead so, rather than watch the movie, I was sitting and waiting for the expected payoff and like clockwork I didn’t have to wait long for it in exactly the way I expected.

Sweet Home Alabama is the latest film to exhibit my biggest movie pet peeve. A film based on seemingly intelligent characters making intensely dumb decisions because if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a movie. Not a frame of film goes by that Melanie doesn’t have an opportunity to solve all her problems with one intelligent decision. One line of intelligent dialogue and problem solved, movie over.

Sweet Home Alabama is an awful film and I had very low expectations for this film. I expected to laugh a couple times, fall in love with Reese Witherspoon again and leave the theater with a smile on my face. Instead I walked out depressed after seeing a film that illustrates everything that is wrong modern Hollywood film-making. This is yet another film that had a poster before it had a screenplay. A film where marketing execs made the creative decisions and hired creative people to carry out the vision of the publicity department. Director Andy Tennent was likely instructed to simply make Reese look cute and hope that the writers might squeeze in a sight gag or one liner somewhere, spoiler alert: they didn’t.

To steal a line from my hero Roger Ebert I hated, hated, hated this movie. This film does not improve upon the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. I still love Reese Witherspoon, but only because I watched Legally Blonde. Had I not, I might curse her for having made this film. Hollywood has no shame churning out the same drivel month after month. And I know what you're saying and yes I shouldn’t act so surprised but I honestly believe that there is art out there somewhere, Sweet Home Alabama dims that hope slightly but that dream is still there.