Bridesmaids

If you've ever been a bridesmaid, this movie is simply hiliarious.  Since I've been both a bridesmaid and a maid of honor, I'm still laughing at it.  In fact, I have several bridesmaid veteran friends that I'd love to go back and see this with again.  What's even more impressive about Bridesmaids is that not only did it prove that women are capable of making a successful gross-out comedy, we can do that and include a geniunely sweet story as well.

Bridesmaids stars SNL's Kristen Wiig (who wrote the film along with Annie Mumolo) as Annie, a down-and-out baker who is asked to be the maid of honor in the wedding of her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph).  Annie has had no luck in recent months, having lost her novelty bakery to the recession, which cost her a boyfriend as well.  She shares an apartment with two lazy British roommates (Rebel Wilson and Matt Lucas), has a nagging mother (Jill Clayburgh, in her final film), and the lowest point, has an awful relationship with an obnoxious hunk (Jon Hamm) who just uses her for sex. 

Planning a wedding might have come as a welcome distraction, but it quickly turns out to be anything but as bridesmaid egos clash, plans go devastatingly wrong and budgets go overboard, all of which threaten the survival of Annie and Lillian's lifelong friendship.  The wedding-from-hell also risks Annie's chance at love again when a cute Irish cop (Chris O'Dowd) takes an interest and tries to get her motivated out of her current misery.

Wiig was funny as hell in this - if you're a fan of her on Saturday Night Live, you'll love her here, especially her drunken meltdown on a flight to Las Vegas.  But the scene stealer was Mike & Molly's Melissa McCarthy as bridesmaid Megan, the no-nonsense sister of the groom who has so many deadpan one-liners (among them: suggesting that the bridal shower have a Fight Club theme) that I can't imagine how many alternate takes they must have of some of her scenes.

Like I mentioned earlier, the movie is also totally gross.  I'm not always the biggest fan of gross-out comedies, but the infamous food-poisoning scene was insanely funny - again McCarthy steals the show here, in ways you don't even want to imagine. 

The movie wasn't perfect, I thought it ran a little long and some of the characters seemed a bit underdeveloped.  And I can't wait to see Jon Hamm in a movie when he's not playing a prick.  But it was still a hilariously funny movie.  I've heard it called the "female Hangover," but I would compare it more to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which was also a raunchy comedy covering for what turned out to be a sweet story in the end. 

So Bridesmaids is definitely worth checking out, even if you've never been in a wedding.  It's even worth checking out if you're a guy - it's still that funny.