The other day Raydon and I went to the movies, and because neither of us was in any mood to do any deep thinking, we chose the girliest thing on the table: Bride Wars.  So we sank into our seats, totally prepared to engage ourselves into a rather silly movie.

The movie ran for 89 minutes, which was surprising, as nothing really ever happens.  These two best friends get proposed to, try to book The Plaza for a June wedding, and ending up fighting for the slot because of a screw up made by an intern working in the wedding planner’s firm.  Only, I found the characters a little two-dimensional and predictable; it was as if they were just names and characters lifted up from some book but nobody really bothered to be research them.

Anne Hathaway played Emma, a schoolteacher who has problems with saying ‘no’ to people.  She’s basically the human doormat of the movie, which would have been fine, really, had the concept not been trite and overdone.  She acted out the part in a so-so way; you can practically feel her thinking ‘I’m just doing this stupid movie so I can hit my box office quota for this year’.  What bothered me about her was the fact that she’s really slimmed down.  I mean she was lanky before, but now her eyes were sort of popping out and her cheekbones jutted out of her face in an unflattering angle, I think.

Kate Hudson played Liv, a lawyer who was both gutsy and ballsy.  So yeah, she was the go-getter and independent woman in this film, which was great, because Kate Hudson looked totally believable as the frazzled New Yorker (maybe because she was a New Yorker?).   Ah, what happened to Kate Hudson’s acting abilities?  She showed so much potential in ‘Almost Famous’, now the string of movies she’s putting out nowadays continually disappoints me.  It’s just that whenever I see her on screen, I don’t think of her as the character she’s playing, but as Kate Hudson, because there’s really no effort to distinguish between the two personalities.

The supporting cast was suitable enough.  Candice Bergen as Marion St. Claire, the upper east-side wedding planner, was funny because underneath all that lace and perfection and pinkness there was that hint of cynicism that had festered throughout the years of having to deal with all the frivolities of weddings.  Michael Arden as Kevin, the sexually ambiguous assistant to Kate Hudson’s Liv, was effective as a plot mover, but since he wasn’t outright gay or straight, I haven’t developed any attachment to the dude.  Kristen Johnston as Deb played Liv’s overbearing and self-centered co-teacher, a role that only a few other actors could’ve played as well as she did.  The last time I saw her was on ‘Music and Lyrics’ where her character ran a weight clinic.  I was totally shocked to see her ribs poking through her dress in this movie!  What the heck did she do to lose all that weight??

All in all, it was entertaining enough.  Memorable lines such, as “You don’t alter a Vera Wang to fit you. You alter yourself to fit into Vera Wang” and “‘Be aggressive! ‘B-E aggressive!’  God, these girls should learn that there’re other ways apart from aggression to deal with things” occasionally pop up throughout the movie, making it for at least a funny ride.

My only problem with this flick was that because a man had directed it, some of the things that were supposed to be easy to accept as a girl became quite difficult to swallow.  Gary Winick also directed ’13 Going on 30′, which actually explained a lot; it was the same thing all over again- here was the perfect lay out for a possible heart warming movie, but because of wrong turns taken during production, all that was produced was a movie that leaves you detached from the characters and uncaring of their fates.

One of the screenwriters of the film was a female, which explained how the movie understood just how catty females could be. I was expecting a lot more violence during said catfights though; the actions taken in the movie were underhanded enough and unscrupulous enough for females to do, but still, I felt that it could’ve gone lower.  Much lower.

Another thing that bugged me was that it made these successful, independent career women wedding-crazy and obsessed at the thought of having that June wedding.  To me, the underlying thought was that you, as a woman of this world, should not feel completeness and happiness as long as you stay single and unmarried, no matter how fabulous or fulfilling your job is.  I get that getting married in June at the plaza was a childhood dream for these two girls but I can’t, for the life of me, imagine anybody holding onto a dream that you had when you were eight and compromising every single aspect of your life for it.

On the upside, thank God somebody thought of creating a movie about friendship.  It was high time for a movie like this and many more should follow in its footsteps.  Well, not those that led to the bad part.

Rating: 6/10 because even when I was expecting it to be bad, I was still surprised at how bad it really was.