Girls Trip

Rated: MA 15+Girls Trip

Directed by: Malcolm D. Lee

Produced by: Will Packer, Malcolm D. Lee

Screenplay by: Kenya Barris, Tracy Oliver

Story by: Erica Rivinoja, Kenya Barris, Tracy Oliver

Starring: Regina Hall, Tiffany Haddish, Larenz Tate, Mike Colter, Kate Walsh, Jada Pinkett Smith and Queen Latifah.

After 5-years apart, four lifelong female friends reunite for a wild weekend in New Orleans, unleashing their Class of 95 sisterhood, ‘the Flossy Posse’, older and wiser, little do they suspect just how wild and unwise unleashing their former selves will be.

Before the posse join the reveling hundreds of thousands, the throbbing mass of the Essence Festival crowd – where every temptation is overripe for the plucking – they are led into prayer – before their sins begin – by the provocative insanity that is Dina (Tiffany Haddish) a shameless, man crazy, hothead with anger management issues.

  ‘Dear God, my heart is so full of joy for these women right here. Lord please make sure that Lisa don’t get an STD and nobody has kidney failure because we plan to get messed up. And let me get pregnant by somebody rich. Amen’.Girls Trip

Sweet divorcee Lisa (Jada Pinkett Smith) doesn’t get an STD, but does get a man endowed with an appendage the size of a third arm. How she overcomes the colossal feat of fellatio with grapefruit requires audience tissues, not for crying but for snort out loud laughter that is wet and uncontrollable in a cinema full of strangers.

At the movie’s heart is the tale of Ryan Pierce (Regina Hall) A svelte, successful, self-help author, selling her soul to uphold a marriage now stripped of love but needed to maintain celebrity image and fortune.

And Sasha (Queen Latifah) towers as the Judas character, a celebrity gossip blogger tempted by the fortune she could make by exposing her friend’s marriage to the world before the weekends over.

With an insanely relatable quartet of women, Packer dramatizes his characters alive not with the traditional single-woman qualities of cute man-pleasing sexiness but with women aware of their beauty, outrageous in their partying, their crowd surfing pantyless libidos and their criminal if convicted brawling. And he throws in just a few explosive public golden urine showers over innocent revelers to keep them dangerously unforgettable.Girls Trip

Dina is by far the most outrageous and controversial and in some scenes her motives teeter dangerously between pure funny wrong and pure wrong.

In one scene, she threatens to glass Ryan’s unfaithful husband with the broken neck of a wine bottle and in another she spikes the ‘posse’s’ cocktails with a heavy pour of 200-year-old absinthe – their night turns out hilarious and hallucinogenic but the concept of spiking one’s girlfriend’s kind of breaks that momentum of sisterhood.

In just over two hours, the movie edit could be tighter, but its outrageous moments will propel the word of mouth success of, Girls Trip.

In America, the film grossed over $85 million dollars making Packer 43 one of the world’s most prominent African American filmmakers with 26 movies grossing over $1 billion.

Packer has an innate sense of what his market audience wants and he delivers just that.

 

Bad Moms

MA15+Bad Moms

Directors: Jon Lucas; Scott Moore

Writers: Jon Lucas; Scott Moore

Starring: Mila Kunis, Kathryn Haln, Kristen Bell, Christina Applegate, Jada Pinkett Smith, Annie Mumolo, Oona Laurence, Emjay Anthony, David Walton, Clark Duke; Jay Hernandez.

I just had a Bad Mom moment.  Leaving my notebook in the cinema.  And not realising until I started drinking a glass of red wine and then fluffing in my handbag, looking for it.  That’s about the extent I related to Bad Moms.  The sense of panic.  The humiliation if someone had started reading my scribbly notes.  Like someone else finding your child and having to pick them up from a stranger…  Jeez, it’s like pulling teeth.

If you’re not a mother, relating to Bad Moms is difficult.

Ami (Mila Kunis) is trapped in a world of kids, work, looking after her infantile husband, PTA meetings and everything that life can throw at you.  When she finally gets knocked unconscious at her kid’s soccer match, to then be late (again) to the PTA meeting, and then be volunteered by everything-must-be-perfect super mom, Gwendolyn (Christina Applegate), to be the ingredients police at the upcoming bake sale, it’s enough.

Ami decides she’s sick of trying to be the perfect mom.

Now, along with fellow mothers, Carla (Kathryn Haln) and Kiki (Kristen Bell), she decides it’s time to be… A Bad Mom.

Thank goodness for the comic relief of Kiki and her cheeky, loud-mouth antics.  It wasn’t that the acting was bad, there just wasn’t enough comic relief.

I had an expectation of many laugh-out-loud moments, and there were a few, but coming from Jon Lucas and Scott Moore as the writers and directors (the guys who co-wrote The Hangover I and Wedding Crashers) I expected there to be wider appeal.

I hear stories from my sisters and I can see how much pressure parents are under these days.  Women have to work and keep: home, family, kids and society in general happy.  Our mothers have worked hard for equal rights and now there’s this need to be able to do it all.  Perfectly.  I get that.  And Bad Moms is a surprisingly insightful film.

Watching the girls getting into it because they’re sick of having to be perfect was a lot of fun. But to me?  These girls needed sleep.  For a week.  So unlike The Hangover and The Wedding Crashers, I found this movie painful, and not in a funny way.

I can see a group of mums going to Bad Moms, to escape the house and kids for a couple of hours with glass of wine in hand and the relief that they’re not the only ones feeling the pressure of motherhood.  And I congratulate Bad Moms on shining a spotlight on what a modern-day mother has to go through.  But as a film, Bad Moms is made for a select audience.

Subscribe to GoMovieReviews
Enter your email address for notification of new reviews - it's free!

 

Subscribe!