Revisit: The Unmitigated Brilliance of Bridesmaids and Kristen Wiig.
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If I were to have made a list of the best films of the 2010's Bridesmaids would be on it. It’s a movie that drew comparisons to Todd Phillips “The Hangover” , but this was a very superficial connection. Todd Phillips is a very immature director and I mean that in the classical, traditional sense. His films always feel far too driven by impulses with little composure, edge for the sake of itself. The things that happened in the hangover films felt like they came from a point of view, or direction that was like “Michael Keaton egging The Joker on in Tim Burton's “Batman”. “You wanna get crazy?! Lets get crazy!!” Its message and approach to male bonding is basic, juvenile, and much like “Joker” over simplified and barely connected to the story, as in it feels like watching those very violent Saturday morning cartoons like G.I. Joe that had the little message at the end where they said something like “Stay in school,” followed by “Yoooooo JOE!” ...at that point who cares. Bridesmaids is actually from beginning to ending about the absurdity of expectations, the ones we put on ourselves, on our growth, on our relationships, the shit we get ourselves into because of it, and how to step out of it. It's emotionally authentic, and mature, and even the ancillary characters have motivations that feel rooted in truth as well as farce. This is an incredibly thematically acrobatic and difficult feat, one this film accomplishes with an ease similar to 1984's Ghostbusters. Along those same lines, for many of those same reasons, if I were to pick the best scenes of this past decade, the airplane scene from this film would also be amongst the best. It's outrageous, it's temperamental, its hilarious, and it’s phenomenally structured…
The scene is the pinnacle of Bridesmaid's genius. It’s edited brilliantly to show an upward staircase of unhinged anxiety. Cuts from one part of the plane to another are slowly but surely increased with a frequency that increases as each member becomes more frantic, until it spreads and pops. No one is trying to upstage anyone. Ellie Kemper and Wendi McLendon-Covey could almost form their own movie based off the conversation, improvisation, and chemistry they construct and erect in this scene. Melissa McCarthy is off on a quest for the holy grail of focused zaniness, Rose Byrne's giving a smug smarmy sermon from the book of comedy revelations, and Maya Rudolph is just there trying to keep it all together in a straight man role that shows off her range, and her intellectual, instinctual understanding of comedy. Everyone is on 10, actually no.. Spinal Tap's “11”. But Kristen Wiig, my God Wiig. I've seen this movie several times, and it was still INCREDIBLY hard to watch this without losing it the entire time. It's small things like in the interaction between her and the (actually great) flight attendant when she puts the shades on. He confronts her, and with an overload of wispy caricature, Wiig simply replies “Ummm no". To big large obvious things like "There's a colonial woman on the wing!”.
It is one of the most farcical and hilarious things I've heard in my life , I can just sit and think on it over and over again and laugh forever. There are levels to it, the first being you recognize the reference (The famous Twilight Zone episode) which already (at least with me) puts a smile on my face. Then she takes it somewhere you wouldn't expect in a million years, ( She was churning butter, I saw her!”) and yet, if you think about the context of the anxiety, and what it is she might ultimately be afraid, where this comes from, what the institution of marriage, and the expectations anchired to it - it makes pretty damn good sense. Then there's the commitment to the idea, to resonance, to some true objective with every comedian but Wiig just seems to find levels under the pre-existing levels contorting her face, twisting her mind to slip past the boundaries. Here she ultimately mines a similar level of paranoia as displayed in Shatner's episode. "There's something they're not telling us!" is the encapsulation of the terror in the seminal Twilight Zone episode, but funneled through Wiig's energetic, frantic, ridiculousness, it gets me every time. Wiig is so connected to every action, every word no matter how far out they are- it bends reality. With Will Ferrell (who in his prime was also incredibly brilliant to me ) I laughed knowing the farce. Knowing it couldn't happen, wouldn't happen, with Wiig, (because she's always adds a dash of genuine emotion) right at the site of where the seed of the absurd will grow - I laugh because I believe it could, despite knowing the likelihood.
Two amazing Women, Johnny Gill and my writer's block.
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I recently started writing again after a good six or so month "break". it was really more-so a break down caused by the intense feelings of stagnation and overall unremarkableness of my life so far, never mind that during that time nothing on TV or film moved me to write, and when those that did would appear, I'd be in the middle of working on a piece about them, see someone else write something better on the matter I was writing on, in a very similar fashion, and be like.."There you go....unremarkable". Comparison truly is the thief of joy…
I promise this is not a pity party, and in actuality I not only know I’m a damn good writer, I know I belong here . I am no more bereaved at this than New Edition losing Bobby Brown and gaining You guessed it ..Johnny Gill. I just believe quite plainly that there is a point where a subject has been covered, and that it’s okay to say sometimes “Hey, they see this more clearly than I have and there is no need to expound any further”. The opposite of this belief in my mind gives rise to insidious behavior like man-splaining. The loss of joy is in actuality over the loss of my artistic child, given up for adoption to a parent who proved they could better care for it than I could at the time. I assure you most days when I don’t look at it sternly in the face. When it doesn't all hit me at once I'm pretty fucking happy with my life, my acting (when I get to act), my writing, and with myself. Most days I like me. I like the way I think, the way I dress, look, commune, and most importantly the way I empathize with others. Which is integral to my writing which I happen to think is pretty damn good. The prophets once said “Sunny Days, everybody loves them but tell me can you stand the rain”. The fact that I am able to empathize with people whose point of view may irk me, (like people who say”Denzel is pretty much the same in all his movies” or who reduce Quentin Tarantino to his use of the N word in movies) people with whom I may not f*** with on any “real” level , don’t abhor, but rather don’t see eye to eye with - It's probably my favorite part of me. That little voice in my head that says "Well you know, think about it from the their point of view", when I'm in my head cursing someone's name for some sin or the other against me, or done in the general vicinity of my nerves. That voice keeps me honest, humbles me, and gives me my best perspective by challenging me to challenge my own ideas. I digress...funny enough this post isn’t about me, it's about the two people that helped lift me out of my slump without lifting a hand..by merely existing, writing.
Sheila O’ Malley (Left) and Angelica Jade Bastién …Writers Supreme.
I knew nothing about writing before Angelica Jade Bastien and Sheila O'Malley. I started writing seriously maybe five years ago, first read Shiela double that amount of time on I believe Ebert's site (could've been shorter, my memory looks like a burnt out cops desk in the movies). Writing was the furthest thing (No Drake) from my mind before Angelica and Sheila... and sometimes to this day is still the furthest thing from my mind. BUT every time I read Angelica and Sheila - Masters of their craft, top of the Heap, Kings of the Hill - I'm infatuated with their writing. I'm enamored with it. In awe of, obsessed by, and intoxicated by it. I feel inferior in the presence of it, but not in that way that actually makes one feel sad, or pathetic, more like a Wayne, Garth, and Alice Cooper way. What Angelica and Sheila are able to do with words.... I don't have the words for. But they do so look, listen an read for a moment…
“For The Matrix, the Wachowskis coaxed a genuinely transcendent performance from Reeves, while also successfully synthesizing a host of inspirations (from cyberpunk literature to anime classics to various strains of philosophy detailing our notions of consciousness). The results profoundly rewrote the expectations of what an action star could be. Neo’s mournful, curious gaze and joyful compulsion as he learns about the real world brought to the fore the idea that more soulful, willowy folks could carry a hidden lethality — a suggestion new to the American landscape, which often preferred its action stars’ powers conscripted to immensely muscled bodies, with true emotion either nowhere to be found or wrapped in slickly delivered sarcasm. Reeves suggested that an action star should feel, at full tilt.”
This isn’t a kerfuffle of words crashing into each other while competing for superiority of thought, no this is an A-team formed of the best an most concise word usage for the job, on a mission to re-route the discourse of our understanding of one of our greatest action stars ever. Cue the last two notes of the Mission impossible theme, which have always been in my mind a stand in for Mission accomplished “duhh daaaaaaaaa”.
“It is only in the director’s cut of Aliens that we learn Ripley’s first name is “Ellen.” All business, she charges past the injured Hicks, before stopping to say in an almost hopeful tone, “See you, Hicks…” When he says, “Dwayne. It’s Dwayne,” in gigantic close-up, the subtext turns text. Weaver, caught in his gaze, in the shattering of rank, in the rise of something being acknowledged, says, without prompting, “Ellen.” Eyes glinting with flirty mischief and intimacy, he sends her off with, “Don’t be gone long, Ellen.” It’s as though they’re suddenly in bed, in a world where they could be who they want to be to each other. As father-figure to the abandoned child Newt, as husband-figure to Ripley, Hicks is essential in creating the “found family” of the reproduction-obsessed storyline of Aliens. It’s impossible to imagine the film without him.”
I haven’t seen Aliens in years, but I might as well have seen it yesterday, and the way Sheila so aptly, so masterfully described what goes on in a scene that makes you feel like you knew it the whole time even though you’re just now seeing it that way because Sheila just said it…Thats her magic. I read her work, especially her scene breakdowns like this and it feels a bit like being in the room with the pre cogs of Minority Report, when they’re thoughts flash on that big screen providing insight to a scene you weren’t even sure you knew existed yet. These two don’t always write about film, both also write personal essays, and if you think either of them lose any of their magnificence in this particular arena, well…
“He and I had many moments in alleys accompanied by dramatic weather:
1. Freezing black ice-drenched night. Orange light from the street lamps. Slushy, grey, cold. Scrawny prowling stray cats. We stepped from iceberg to iceberg, suddenly shy with each other in the silence. His soft voice, “Sugar, step this way.”
2. A rainy night. We sat in his parked van. Speckled fogged windshield. We drank beer, played a tape, and sang along. Harmonizing. He said later, “That was the night it started for me.”
3. Downpour. Wooden stairway. Darkness. Our first kiss. Which was actually more like a nature program on the Discovery Channel than a kiss. Biting, scratching, shoving. Each one of us struggling to grab the reins, and dominate. Kissing to kill. His hand clamped round my throat.
4. Heat wave. Muggy hot close air. We rubbed ice cubes over each other’s faces. He lifted me up, placed my feet on top of his feet, and then danced me around the alley, holding me in his arms.
5. Tornado watch. Huddled against the van, huddled against the wind. He was getting married in a week. Not to me. Standing in the massive wind, pressing our cheeks together, not talking. For once, we were not talking. No other body parts touched. My cheeks wet with tears. His cheeks were dry. But when I pulled back, the look in his dry eyes was worse than weeping.”
“I was always an odd child, prone to health issues and anxiety. I had a nervous tic of looking at my shoes when I walked, leading me to careen into door frames and people, as if facing the world with a direct gaze was too much to bear. By then, my mother noticed that my natural oddities had given way to something darker, and my suicide attempts and musings landed me in a mental hospital just as the holiday season was in full bloom. I still can’t see Christmas lights or smell a traditional Thanksgiving dinner without my heart seizing in my chest. I was in the hospital for over a month, and by the time I left, I was not the girl I was when I entered. My mental traumas in the years following that first hospitalization grew deeper. Even though my diagnosis shifted over the years — depression, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type II — one truth remained: I have tied my identity to my madness so fiercely, I don’t know who I am when I’m not ill.”