Bridesmaids and Serbians
After leaving work today, I went to see Bridesmaids, which I thought was pretty danged incredible, honestly. People who have been clamoring for a female-driven Superbad or Hangover-type raunchy comedy will get their wish with this one. Raunch aside, it's just really well written and well acted, with believable female characters in fairly believable (for the movies) situations. I don't know why this is apparently so difficult, but I'm glad at least one movie managed to crack the magic code.
Beyond that, though, somehow Kristen Wiig (who actually co-wrote this as well as starring in it) has seen into my soul and written a main character who shares a lot of my issues. MAN, could I ever relate to the friends-growing-apart thing and the feeling upstaged by a new friend thing. Oh, and the "OMG this is the last time I'll ever..." thing. Oh, and DEFINITELY the "help me, I'm poor" thing. ;-) Great performances all around, particularly Wiig and Melissa McCarthy (who steals every moment she is in). This movie proves that guys aren't the only ones who can do bodily function humor. And I suddenly have a nostalgic need to listen to Wilson Phillips (my small but spirited audience this morning was actually singing along at the end).
And this evening, about a year after seeing a pirated copy of the full version online, I fulfilled my vow to see A Serbian Film legitimately in an actual theater. It looked for a while as if the only theater near me playing it was in Brooklyn (and not just Brooklyn - Bay Ridge Ave., which is about as far south as you can be in Brooklyn without being on Coney Island); I very likely would have chickened out if Cinema Village on 12th hadn't finally put their one showtime up. I'm not sure why they waited so long - perhaps they were afraid of attracting the attention of the law? (If that sounds far-fetched, the director of the Sitges Film Festival recently had criminal charges brought against him for screening the uncut version of the film. Yes, really. Don't ask me the charge - it's Red Pill territory.) This was, I'm almost certain, the version that was edited for the BBFC with nearly five minutes cut from it. It was heavily edited, anyhow, and if you know the plot of the film you can probably guess the two scenes that got the most cut out of them. Srdjan Spasojevic is a gifted enough filmmaker that he can still make it work fairly well, but though it's still pretty intense it feels neutered and incomplete with that much gone. Still, I'm pretty amazed any version of this film even saw the inside of an American theater in the first place.
There were a couple of interesting conversations going on after the movie, mostly consisting of people who had seen a pirated copy of the uncut version telling their neighbors what was missing and urging them to look up the real version. :P There were about twenty people in the audience tonight, and I was grateful to see that I was not the only woman among them.
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