Amy Nicholson... The Problem is You

For the second entry in a row, we're gonna play my favorite game: Completely Unfounded Political Message Extrapolation! Except this time, we're gonna confront something an awful lot of people are saying about Slumdog Millionaire. And it's not actually a political message, but it's close enough.

I didn't like Slumdog as much as most other people, but I certainly liked it a lot better than Amy Nicholson,, who we last found gushing over Bride Wars.

Heavy Slumdog spoilers are abound.

John Carpenter, the first grand prize millionaire of the USA’s Who Wants to be a Millionaire was showered with (momentary) fame. In Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan’s noisy fictional drama, India’s parallel 20-million rupee winner Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) was tortured for the implausibility of being a bottom caste brain when his superiors bottomed out at 60K.

This is a noisy intro, but whatever. Ha, dude's name was John Carpenter. More like Big Trouble in Little Millionaire!

Complicating things, Jamal isn’t particularly bright—a credibility deficit screenwriter Simon Beaufoy overcomes by showing precisely which traumatic events etched random facts about movies, religion, and British geography into his mind--

Yes. I'm certain Beaufoy's train of thought was this exactly: "Ah jeez, I really wanna make a story about a slumdog who wins the millionaire game, but how do I do it?? I know! I'll think of the actual premise of the movie!" Yes, it's the premise of the movie, and you're gonna call it a copout. If there's any point to the fact that he does so well, it's simply to show the dichotomy between tuition and experience. It's one of the central themes of the movie. Because it's the premise. Of the movie. Well, half the premise, anyway.

coincidentally, in the chronological order game show host Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) will later ask him as questions.

GET OVER IT. Everyone who dislikes the film has used this argument. There has to come a point when you're watching the movie and you realize that the Indian Regis is an evil and cunning villain. It's at this point where you also realize that you're not really supposed to take this movie so seriously. It's a fable. It's a fairy tale set against a modern backdrop. It's not supposed to be believable, just like Cinderella isn't supposed to be believable.

There's also the fact that there were like four or five questions he either didn't know or he used his cleverness to figure out. Jerk.

In these scenes (for which child actors Tanay Chheda and Ayush Mahesh Khedekar play the younger and youngest Jamals), MIA’s “Paper Planes” blasts, adopting the credibility of desperate, money-hungry street living it didn’t get when layered over Seth Rogen toking up in Pineapple Express.

Oh jesus, come on. What?
1. "Paper Planes" never played in Pineapple Express. It was only used in the trailer.
2. Who the fuck cares about the song's credibility? Review the movie you're reviewing.
3. Why is 16% of your review about an MIA song?

This should be a furious story about strata; instead it tries to sell us a bogus romance between Jamal and his childhood love (Freida Pinto), now the mistress of the gangster who employs his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal). When they kiss at the ending, we roll our eyes—that’s not going to solve the problems that now infuriate us. Why, when Boyle has for half a film been such a devastating purveyor of social class suffering, would he turn as glossy as a Disney cartoon?

GAAAAAAAH.

What the hell was with the ending of Cinderella? All that happened was she got to live happily ever after… but there were no new laws passed about stepmother meanness! Nothing!

Amy, and everyone else who argues with this argument, stop it. It's a movie about a guy who faces insurmountable odds to be with the woman he loves. That's his one goal, throughout the entire movie. It's a love story. Remember love stories? And how they're allowed to exist? Bride Wars is somehow plausible, but this… this is an outrage! What should Danny Boyle have done? Change the script so Jamal and Latika become king and queen of India and bring fairness and prosperity to all the land? He actually could've done that, and you still would've hated it, because it's unrealistic enough as it is. We don't roll our eyes, because it DID solve the problem—Jamal and Latika were in love but could not be together. They eventually got together. Along the way, bad things happen, and in the end, Jamal finds a way to overcome the bad things that happen to him, because of his love for Latika and the fact that "it was written," and, you know, everything else about the movie.

This is a real problem in criticism, I think. Critics who just want the movie to be something that's the complete opposite of what the movie is. Slumdog Millionaire is a fairy tale romance set against a violent backdrop. Like Romeo and fucking Juliet. A critic worth their salt would be able to judge it for what it is, and how successful it is at achieving what it sets out to achieve. A bad critic would look at it and say YOU KNOW, I REEEEEALLY WISH IT WAS ABOUT SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT or IT REALLY DIDN'T MAKE ME LAUGH ENOUGH or WHAT WAS WITH THE STRANGE LACK OF TALKING ANIMALS? Amy Nicholson, you are a purveyor of this awfulness, and it's a problem that now infuriates me. Prepare to be solved.

Amy Nicholson on "Bride Wars"

Let's get right into it:

Leave it to two men—director Gary Winick and screenwriter Greg DePaul—to make the most empathetic and sincere female-helmed romantic comedy I’ve seen in years.

Everyone, please store this away in your "statements that will be proven utterly pointless by the end of the paragraph" folder.

(Chick filmmakers still nattering on about bridezillas and Manolos need to take a stilleto heel to their laptops—yeah, I’m looking at you 27 Dresses.)

So, I'll admit to having never seen "Bride Wars," and to never planning on seeing "Bride Wars" in my life. But I have seen the trailer. And unless this is one of those trailers that screws the whole movie up in an attempt to reach the romantic comedy demographic (when in reality it's a movie about a little girl dying), I'm confident in saying that this movie is exactly what you're saying it isn't, Amy. Isn't this, like, the movie version of the reality show "Bridezillas"? What the hell happens in this movie that effectively cancels out every single scene in the trailer?

For legitimacy's sake, here's part of the professionally-written, unbelievably-encyclopedic synopsis from the movie's Wikipedia page:

"Now, at age 26, they're both about to get married; they're about to realize their dreams; and they're about to live happily ever after. Or maybe not. When a clerical error causes a clash in wedding dates--they're now to be married on the same date!--Liv, Emma and their lifelong friendship are put to the ultimate test. Liv, a successful lawyer who is used to getting what she wants, including the perfect job and the perfect man, won't settle for anything less than the perfect wedding she has dreamed of for years. Emma, a schoolteacher who has always been good at taking care of others, but not so much in looking after herself, discovers her inner Bridezilla and comes out swinging when her own dream wedding is imperiled. Now, the two best friends who'd do anything for each other find themselves in a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners struggle that threatens to erupt into all-out war."

Even Wikipedia, mankind's ultimate purveyor of truth and reliability, includes the word "Bridezilla."

How the hell did the lifespan of the word "Bridezilla" last more than a few seconds in what I assume was the mind of a nine year-old boy?


Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson play childhood best friends passive Emma and bossy Liv who get upended when their weddings are scheduled for the same day. The shocker isn’t just that their chemistry is legitimate, but that they’re real, dimensional humans, not wedding-obsessed fembots.

"Dimensional." They are "dimensional" human beings. Meaning, they consist of one or more dimensions. She doesn't specify exactly how many dimensions, so they may be extremely offensive, one-dimensional caricatures.

She also could've written, "I found that the characters in Bride Wars were not only real people that I've met in real life, but they are also sided."

Or, "The characters contain one or more characteristics that make them characters."

Or, per Max's suggestion, "Time and space are mere playthings for the characters of Bride Wars."

And that's just one word!

The thing is—and I know this because I've both watched a trailer and read a Wikipedia entry—they are wedding-obsessed fembots. The fact that they are wedding-obsessed fembots is the driving force of the plot. They each want to have the perfect wedding, and they spend what I guess is the majority of the film sabotaging their best-friendship because they are wedding-obsessed fembots.

IT'S CALLED "BRIDE WARS" YOU DUMB SHIT

In contrast, it feels almost perversely deliberate that their grooms-to-be, Brian Fletcher and Chris Pratt, are interchangable [sic] bros with buff shoulders, blank faces, and expensive button up shirts.

This does not help your argument in any way.

Co-written by comediennes Casey Wilson and June Diane Raphael,

So long, relevance of the first sentence of the review!

This makes it so the first sentence is basically like saying, "Leave it to Hitler's dogs to know when to commit suicide!" Also I just decided that Fire Lisa Schwarzbaum will employ Godwin's Law in every entry.

the script is more in tune with the hows and whys of their escalating outrage then the next pratfall; it’s about the Cold War of misunderstandings.

Yes, but is this because it was written by a man or because it was written by two women?

Come 2010, I might not remember Bride Wars, but it’s a damned decent start to the year.

you are like hitler