REVIEW: ‘Bride' marries gender myth and clichés

Colorado Springs is finally getting all the Oscar contenders that have been playing in Denver and other markets for weeks. But we'll find those astonishingly good films well-balanced by the usual parade of Hollywood mediocrity that marches through every January.

Example No. 1: "Bride Wars."

Liv (Kate Hudson, who is in desperate need of an acting intervention) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) are lifelong friends who have dreamed of June weddings at New York City's famed Plaza Hotel since they were little girls.

Now in their late 20s, both women find themselves gleefully engaged but, thanks to a clerical error by iconic wedding planner Marion St. Claire (Candice Bergen, who also insipidly narrates), both are scheduled at the Plaza on the same day, at the same time.

For Liv and Emma to participate in each others' weddings, one of them will have to change her venue.

Liv is a high-powered lawyer who demands perfection and is used to getting her way. But even she is not prepared for how passionately simple schoolteacher Emma is willing to fight for her childhood dream.

And fight they do. Shocking everyone around them, the best friends and brides-to-be turn on each other and engage in all out war to settle their differences, doing everything in their power to sabotage the others' big day.

Will they remember how much they love each other before it is too late? Or is all fair in love and war?

It's not that "Bride Wars" is structured around a bad idea. Just because a plot can be summed up in a single sentence doesn't make it a bad plot. After all, a film is judged on what the filmmakers do with the raw materials they are given, not the materials themselves.

But more and more, I walk out of romantic comedies such as "Bride Wars" deeply disappointed, because the raw materials are never molded into anything more than haphazard, amorphous shapes, lacking character, personality or, other than for a moment or two, anything approaching real humor.

"Bride Wars" starts off cleverly and goes steadily downhill from there. While there is the barest glimmer of originality at the end, the film still perpetuates the myth that even the most contented, successful women are unfulfilled without a gaudy diamond ring and the man who goes with it.

You and I both know the wedding industry is a shameless racket (someone had to say it).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not attacking marriage, just the commercialized ideal it has become, thanks to an industry that has managed to convince nearly every couple in American that a single day of bliss should cost as much as a luxury yacht.

Why have modern rom-coms including "Bride Wars" become synonymous with trashy, clichéd, formulaic chick flicks? It was not always this way.

Once upon a time, romantic comedies represented some of the very best Hollywood had to offer. Hollywood vaults swell with romantic comedies considered classics by anyone's estimation.

It is a shame that filmmakers and audiences alike have let romantic comedies devolve into trite mediocrity and banal predictability.

The genre deserves far better than "Bride Wars" and its ilk. 
 

Bride Wars

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Kate Hudson, Candice Bergen
Director: Gary Winick
Playing at: Hollywood, Tinseltown, Carmike, Chapel Hills, Cinemark
Rated: PG (for suggestive content, language and rude behavior)
Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes.

GRADE: C