Your wedding can suck it.

Yesterday, not wanting to blow my resolution already by missing out on a movie this week, I went to see Bride Wars. Man, this is a funny movie! Not just funny, either, but funny in kind of exactly the way I like – i.e., it includes comedy dance scenes. One scene ruthlessly bites the Sparky Pulastri sequence from Bring It On, and frankly, there are few movies that wouldn’t be improved by some Sparky. Is it even worth explaining what this movie’s about? I don’t think anyone who reads this blog is going to see it anyway. Well, why not? Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway have been subconsciously lesbian best friends since they were little kids, and they share the lifelong dream of a June wedding at the Plaza Hotel. But when a clerical error sees them accidentally book weddings at exactly the same time, they must go to war – shady, bitchy, superficial girl war – to see who will get the coveted ceremony.

The awesome thing about this set up is that it’s immediately obvious exactly how it ends, so you can ignore the plot, and just luxuriate in the duelling anti-wedding pranks part of the story. The movie really excels here, and things escalate perfectly, so at least in the movie’s logic – “logic” – everything makes sense as a response to what the other one just did, even as they enter the stratosphere of truly insane movie prankdom. Holy shit, this movie is FUNNY.

On the downside it’s, you know, morally bankrupt. Obviously the main characters have to be complete idiots for this to work, have to care more about the formal institutionalisation of their heterosexuality provided by their wedding day than absolutely anything else, including their lifelong friendship. Chicks, huh? Ten years ago I think this movie would have just been shitty and chauvinistic, but now they just work it by ironising the chauvinism, make it like, “chauvinist movie”, we know, we’re all in on the joke, right? Nothing to get worked up about. This made me wonder at first if it was like the trickledown version of hipsterdom, the for-the-rubes version of trying to structure your pleasures around an idea of ironic distance so they don’t compromise you, the romcom equivalent of boyband T-shirts everyone knows you’re too cool to be wearing seriously. But then I got thinking, maybe that use of irony, which you, or at least I, think of as the defining mark of hipster culture, is just how culture works now in general, and hipsters are just this weird subset of the Bride Wars audience who think their assymetrical haircuts and knowingly shitty taste in house music make them cool, different, avantgarde. Am I stating the obvious? I guess so.

So I was conflicted watching this – OK it’s hilarious, but there’s no way you can defend it. One thing that is cool is how they draw out the obvious lesbian subtext that’s intrinsic to this kind of story – so the subtext is almost a subplot, without ever (really) being explicitly stated, it has a beginning and middle and climax of its own, parallel to but at odds with the main story. That part is well done. I guess there’s nothing about this movie that’s not well done, but obviously I just think about shit too much and it ruins going to movies for me. No, wait.