Bachelorette (2012)

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fisher, Lizzy Caplan, James Marsden, Kyle Bornheimer, Rebel Wilson, Adam Scott

Director: Leslye Headland

Genre: Comedy

Rating: B

What do you do when your "fat friend" gets married before you?  This is the problem presented in Bachelorette, as three friends, Regan (Dunst), Gena (Caplan), and Katie (Fisher) come to terms with the impending marriage of their "fat friend," Becky (Wilson).  Regan, the maid of honour, has always thought that she would be the first to marry, and is particularly devastated.  Gena, is insecure in her life, possibly addicted to drugs, and not yet over her ex-boyfriend, Clyde (Scott), who will be at the wedding.  Gena, really, is just a bitch.  After a fight with the bride the night before the wedding the trio get drunk and do cocaine, lament about their lives and the wedding, and decide to play with the wedding dres.  This all goes horribly wrong when they manage to rip the dress in two, and the night is spent in a mad scramble to try to fix it.

Going into this, I wasn't particularly sure about the film.  The three leads aren't exactly likeable, and I found the humour to be more offensive than funny.  Then the dress rips and the mad scramble starts and things really start to fall into place.  I really enjoyed the mad scramble and I found that with a goal in mind the characters all really seemed to become more likeable.  I never really wanted to embrace Isla Fisher's Gena - at the end, she was still really just a bitch, although I must say I didn't outright hate her or anything.  I loved Lizzy Caplan, though.  At the start she was the only character who I thought I might like, then I didn't, then I absolutely loved her.  Hers was the journey that made the most sense and was the most fun - but then, anything that includes "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by The Proclaimers is awesome.  In the end, though, I found Dunst's character to be the most intriguing. It's really your typical story of a girl who appears to have everything, but really has nothing, but I still like what they did with it.

This movie gets a lot of comparison to The Hangover and Bridesmaids.  In my opinion it's a far better female equivalent of The Hangover than Bridesmaids ever was.  Where Bridesmaids is about women hating each other and fighting over whose the best bridesmaid, The Hangover series is about guys getting drunk and having an adventure before a wedding, with hilarious results - while Bachelorette does have a good amount of infighting among the bridesmaids and with the bride, the key element here is the pre-wedding adventure, with hilarious results.  It's a movie centred around a wedding, but also not centred around the wedding, and that's really why I enjoyed it.  It was fun.

Pitch Perfect (2012)

Starring: Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Brittany Snow, Anna Camp, Skylar Astin, Alexis Knapp, Adam DeVine, Ester Dean

Director: Jason Moore

Genre: Comedy, Music

Rating: A

"Nothing makes a girl feel more like a woman than a man who sings like a boy."

 I was really excited about this movie.  I figure it would be a lame comedy that I would love, just another one of those bad movies that you watch and really enjoy but know are bad.  I was really wrong: this ended up being a really amazing movie that I absolutely loved, and despite the fact that it was a cheesy comedy it was also legitimately good.  I laughed so hard during Pitch Perfect, despite the film's inclusion of period moments of bodily fluid humour.  I'm not sure if I've said it before, but I'll say it now: I hate humour that involves some sort of human waste or bodily fluid.

Pitch Perfect follows Beca (Kendrick), an anti-social music lover who dreams of being a music producer but is being forced by her father to attend Barden College, where he works.  While at first she fulfils the anti-social requirements eventually she is pushed into joining the Barden Bellas, one of the campus' four acapella singing groups - other groups include the Bellas' primary rival, the all male Treble Makers, lead by Bumper (DeVine).  The Bellas are lead by seniors Aubrey (Camp), who believes that the group can win it all using traditional methods, and Chloe (Snow), who's more inclined to make some changes.  Rounding out things is Treble Maker and fellow freshman Jesse (Astin), who very quickly takes an interest in Beca.

The thing I liked most about Pitch Perfect was that this movie knew exactly what it was and just went with it.  It was a lame comedy and never once tried to be anything other than that.  There were a few more dramatic moments - notably when it came to Beca's relationship with her father - but for the most part it was one liner after one liner. Rebel Wilson and Elizabeth Banks in particular were awesome, with just about everything that the two of them said being a joke.  What I really liked about the humour, though, was that there were a lot of moments where the joke completely took me by surprise and left me thinking "wait, what'd they just say?" then laughing once it sunk in - and I wasn't the only person in the theatre reacting like that.  The other thing that worked about it was the fact that even in the more dramatic moments, or even just the singing, they did a lot of cutaways to other jokes.  Elizabeth Banks' character, very minor role, is one of the commentators of the competitions and one of my favourite moments is a cutaway to her and the other commentator rocking out to the song.  It was just perfect.

One thing that has the potential to take away from the overall film is the fact that a lot of the characters fill a stereotype of some sort.  I found that it worked and I didn't personally need more development on any of the characters, but I'm sure that others might have a problem with this. Jason Moore took some stereotypical people and had fun with them, and I applaud it.