Hey everyone,
I am DELIGHTED to share two absolutely excellent movies I watched recently. While by pure coincidence these films share some major thematic similarities, they also differ dramatically aesthetically. Yet both fully deliver in enjoyment and emotional uplift.
The two movies are:
"Bottoms" (2023) tells the story of Josie (played by Ayo Edebiri) and PJ (played by Rachel Sennott), high school best friends who are both gay. They hatch an elaborate plan to start a girls-only fight club, which they tout as a self-defense/feminist self-empowerment group, with the ulterior motive of climbing their school's social hierarchy from the bottom of the barrel (hence the movie's title), and to thereby gain greater access and appeal to the two popular cheerleaders on whom they have crushes.
What follows feels like "Booksmart" (2019) meets "Kill Bill" (2003) with a hit of acid. The world PJ and Josie live in is just surreal enough to feel like a weird parallel universe version of ours, in which rivalries between high schools turn literally bloodthirsty and hero worship of the football team's histrionic and entitled quarterback is unabashedly and in equal measures zealous and thirsty in an altogether different way. The movie only barely acknowledges its own strangeness, which feels like a massive compliment to its audience; you feel cool for being along for the ride without needing it explained to you why Marshawn Lynch's history class is only 5 minutes long.
Thankfully, another way in which "Bottoms" leans into its surreality is through the relative cartoonishness of its violence. While people do get bloodied and bruised--it needs to be clear that the blows these girls land hurt--the movie isn't all that graphic, which makes it easier to watch and also to not miss the point of the movie.
"Wicked Little Letters" (2023), on the other hand, is set in post-World War I suffragette-era England and centers on an opposites attract friendship gone awry in the wake of particularly vulgar poison pen letters. Edith (played by Olivia Coleman) is an unmarried woman living with her elderly parents under extremely strict religious and gender role expectations imposed by her domineering, sexist, and humorless father. Rose (played by Jessie Buckley) could not be more her opposite: she is an unrestrained and loud single mother who is fully at ease with a range of profanity and prioritizes playing darts, drinking, and sleeping with her devoted boyfriend over wasting her time with tedious housework and maintaining propriety simply to appease her nosy and uptight neighbors. The trouble is, her neighbors are Edith and her parents.
When Edith receives the latest in a parade of libelous anonymous letters, her father finally decides to involve the police in pursuing Rose as their suspected author. While at first she attempts to refuse to participate in the investigation for fear of taking the judging role she attributes only to her god, Edith eventually relents under her father's pressure and suddenly becomes the unintended victim-heroine in a highly publicized and swiftly escalating poison pen scandal. As the stakes quickly rise for all concerned, it becomes increasingly clear that Rose might not be the actual culprit.
"Wicked Little Letters" matches the surreality of "Bottoms" with a comparative realism, down to the outhouses and shared washbasins that were typical of the era in the UK. It is nevertheless leavened with a heightened silliness, often telegraphed through the highly communicative facial expressions of the group of women that form the heart of the film.
Taken together, these superficially different movies center on the same powerful core themes, including friendship and solidarity between women, the power and protection that can be drawn from found family, and the revelatory liberation that follows when women openly, even violently when necessary, flout restrictive gender and sexuality norms. They're also both extremely funny, well-acted, and well-constructed movies that move along briskly and thrive in no small part because of their excellent scripts--and they're both directed by women: Emma Seligman directed "Bottoms", while Thea Sharrock directed "Wicked Little Letters".
I loved both of these movies so much, and I highly recommend them to anyone looking for a good time and affirmation for being a misbehaving woman. I gave them both a 5.
{Heart}
