By Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY
Funny how men and women are different. Especially when they are trying to be funny.
By Dan MacMedan, USA TODAY
McLendon-Covey, left, Kristen Wiig, Ellie Kemper, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne and Melissa McCarthy star in the comedy Bridesmaids, out Friday.
By Dan MacMedan, USA TODAY
McLendon-Covey, left, Kristen Wiig, Ellie Kemper, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne and Melissa McCarthy star in the comedy Bridesmaids, out Friday.
When Jason Segel of TV's How I Met Your Mother was encouraged by Hollywood's comedy kingpin Judd Apatow to write his own starring vehicle, 2008's racy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the actor decided to open the film with a squirm-inducing display of full-frontal male nudity.
Segel's own full-frontal male nudity, that is. For several very long, awkward minutes as he blubbered through a humiliating breakup scene.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, fellow Apatow prot�g�e Kristen Wiig somehow resisted the urge to go au naturel in her first scene as Annie, the so-called maid of dishonor whose life is on a downward spiral in Bridesmaids, opening Friday. Instead, the Saturday Night Live regular ? who co-wrote the script with pal Annie Mumolo ? is gleefully trapped in a kind of Jon Hamm sandwich during an outlandish bout of acrobatic sex with the yummy Mad Men star.
Most noteworthy: Her bra stays put while furry-chested Hamm is the one who goes topless. True, he plays a wealthy cad whose idea of post-coital pillow talk is telling his sex partner, "I really want you to leave right now." But at least our heroine is getting some satisfaction in the sack.
"She is sexual and likes sex," says Apatow, who produced Bridesmaids while his colleague from TV's Freaks and Geeks, Paul Feig, directed. "He clearly doesn't respect her. But at least she is enjoying sex. That's not something you see very often in movies."
However, Annie's choice of an inappropriate bedmate foreshadows her poor decision-making as she navigates through her duties as her best friend's maid of honor, all the while testing the limits of the audience's sympathy for her underdog.
Whether she is intentionally making a shambles out of a ridiculous Paris-themed bridal shower complete with chocolate-spewing fountain and live puppies as party favors or drunkenly mocking a stern flight attendant with a Hitler salute, Wiig proves as gutsy as any male counterpart in an Apatow farce. "This is a nervous-breakdown movie," Feig explains. "Kristen's character has to go through fire to rebuild herself."
The box-office response to Bridesmaids just might answer a question hanging over several adult comedies coming out this summer: Can a woman get away with R-rated humor that is as raw, rude and foul-mouthed as any male-dominated romp and not alienate moviegoers? Signs point to yes. The critical score at Rotten Tomatoes: 89% positive.
But back in 2002, the answer was a resounding no. That is when Cameron Diaz, Selma Blair and Christina Applegate attempted to do a gender-switch version of an explicit buddy comedy with The Sweetest Thing. Moviegoers were put off by the prospect of watching party girls sink to guy levels of trashy behavior. As a result, female-dominated R-rated comedies by major studios have been all but shelved, save for the now-saggy Sex and the City franchise.
"People still bring up The Sweetest Thing and it was so long ago," Apatow says. "It's surprising that there has been such a gap." Until now. The difference these days? Women no longer feel the need to ape the opposite sex. They can monkey around on their own terms.
In Bad Teacher, opening June 24, Diaz returns to her dirty roots that began with that hair-gel disaster in 1998's There's Something About Mary. Only this time, she doesn't just play the object of desire. She is the main attraction as a slutty middle-school instructor who sleeps in class, curses in front of the kids, smokes dope in the parking lot and is out to snag Justin Timberlake's straitlaced substitute because he has money.
"It is an unusually edgy part for a female movie star," says director Jake Kasdan (Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story), who got his start working on Apatow's TV shows Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. "Cameron is fearless. She is completely comfortable going for any joke. Part of that comfort comes from being good at it."
Timberlake also pops up in Friends With Benefits, a July 22 release whose premise echoes an earlier comedy this year, No Strings Attached: Two pals decide to give up on emotional attachments and use each other for sex.
This time, it's Mila Kunis of Black Swan being upfront about her physical needs. Director Will Gluck (Easy A) assures that the humor is more sexy than raunchy.
"I tried to make an updated version of a romantic comedy, where real adults talk about sex as friends," Gluck says. "It is funny and emotional. There are no gross-outs and only semi-nudity (namely, Timberlake's behind). There is no swearing just so you can hear swearing."
But in Bridesmaids, these salty sisters are doing it for themselves. Unlike many romantic comedies, such as the recent flop Something Borrowed, that involve two women vying for the same guy, men hardly matter. Husbands are barely seen let alone heard. The groom might as well be played by Where's Waldo. As for that cute little boy in the trailer, even he has been lost in the editing room.
Bridesmaids has been labeled "the female Hangover," because both films involve events leading up to a wedding. But, as Wiig notes, she and Mumolo started writing their screenplay in 2006, long before that 2009 smash became the highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all time with $277 million.
Their goal: do a comedy they would like. "We didn't set out to prove anything or make a statement. It wasn't a response to anything like women don't get to do this. We thought, 'Let's sit down and laugh, make something funny.' I hope that conversation will go away."
Mumolo describes their motivation this way: "Let's do this the way we know how, from our point of view and from our experiences and with our friends. Let the girls out of the cage.
One major difference from typical chick flicks was the emphasis on the friendship between Wiig and the bride-to-be, ex-SNL regular Maya Rudolph, whose engagement throws her already downtrodden buddy into a further tailspin.
It's not an uncommon situation. For a woman, at least. "It can be a big shift in a relationship," Wiig says. "It changes how much time they spend talking on the phone and sharing what's important. Without getting too sentimental, the film shows how that loss makes my character look at her own life."
No, Bridesmaids is not a bittersweet melodrama, although Wiig ? who is much more reserved than her on-camera SNL shtick would have fans believe ? can make it sound that way. Feig comes off much more rah-rah than the movie's scribes about their efforts.
"We were looking for an alternative to bromance," he says. "A 'womance.' What's important to Judd and me is that this stuff has to have an emotional core. You can't just string a bunch of jokes together. You would wear the audience down."
Wiig freely admits that Apatow was right when he suggested that they should ditch a Hangover-style trip to Vegas that was already shot and instead add what is now the movie's most talked-about sequence: An outbreak of food poisoning, caused by Annie's questionable choice of a luncheon spot, erupts into a gastrointestinal nightmare for the six ladies as they shop in a snooty upscale bridal store.
That is when Feig learned there is a divide between what audiences will tolerate humor-wise from men and women. While male actors might have gotten away with going heavier on the sound effects and visual evidence of bodily distress, he decided to leave more to the viewer's imagination after a test screening proved his suspicions. "It's not as much fun to watch women lose their dignity and end up being humiliated like that," he says.
Besides, what is funny isn't the fact that one bridesmaid ends up vomiting on the head of another as they crowd the shop's lone toilet. It is that the women simply refuse to admit they are ill.
"They won't acknowledge that going to a cheap restaurant was the reason," Apatow says. "Kristen is sick but she is fighting so hard not to be."
The result? "The audience goes bananas," he says. "It has the biggest laughs of any of my movies."
Feig, for one, would be pleased to see more actresses engaging in frisky business. "I could happily work with women for the rest of my career," says the director, who is known to be a bit of a dandy when it comes to his wardrobe. "They like that I always wear a suit."
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