Bridget Jones and this Cinematic Weekend
Feb. 16th, 2025 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessPosting twice in a day, because this is time sensitive.
There were two big cinema releases in the UK this weekend (sorry Heart Eyes): Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth Bridget Jones film vs. Captain America: Brave New World. I have thoughts about this! I’ve got history with both properties, if you will, but I was on the comic everywoman’s side over MCU’s latest offering (sorry Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson, it’s not you!) Bridget Jones will be released on streaming in the US, but as she’s a Working Title Londoner, she got the full works here, and I hope she gets the better box office (although it’s a 15 certificate, so we’ll see how rebooted Cap draws in the boys and the other three quadrants.)
My rationale? Well, I read some of the original newspaper columns (in the school library) and the first couple of books. I went to see the movies, yes, even Edge of Reason, and I remember the first film certainly feeling like an event, where women of various generations went – an all too rare experience. I didn’t buy them on DVD, and I didn’t buy ‘Mad About the Boy’, instead I had a sulk that Fielding had SPOILER? killed off Mark Darcy /SPOILER? and was glad that ‘Bridget Jones’s Baby’ ignored it. (Since then I’ve learned that Keir Starmer was one of Mark Darcy’s inspirations, which puts a different complexion on things.)
Also, Hugh Grant was back in this one! And you could see what the plot was likely to be with young Leo Woodall and less young Chiwetel Ejofor and Our Bridge in the posters. Kudos to the marketing team for selling it as a Galentine’s Day film, meaning there was plenty of content in explaining Galentine’s Day as well as pieces about what Bridget Jones says about women now – the women who first read about her and the slightly younger women who first met her on the big screen.
My issue with the MCU is that it has got subsumed into Disney’s plans for Disney+ for which I never signed up and have been sulking with Kevin Feige for not putting Wandavision on DVD. So, I haven’t seen The Winter Soldier and the Falcon either. I might have gone to see this movie, I might yet, but an SFXd Harrison Ford as Red Hulk??????? (Thunderbolts because Florence Pugh as Yelena, yes.)
At the cinema, you could totally tell who was going to see which movie.
Still, the trailers before Mad About the Boy were instructive and depressing. Here you have an older crowd of women, come to see a film that they know is both weepie and romcom (older than the Wicked crowd), and what are the trailers? Two kids movies, Black Bag (okay, I was excited about Soderberg directing La Blanchett and Fassbender as married spies, but I don’t think many other people in the screening own Haywire), and, with a knowing intro featuring Danny Dyer…a film about a cocaine-snorting football hooligan trying to turn over a new leaf for his wife and son. Oh, and the arty The Last Showgirl…and The Salt Path, featuring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs which seems like a hopeful weepie.
YOU WHAT, CINEMA? Here we are, come out with our friends to see a familiar figure, expecting to laugh and cry and you have, what, one upcoming film that's likely to appeal to most of us!? That is absolutely hopeless of you and exemplifies why there have been so many ‘cinema is dead’ articles. You have given up the fight for this market and handed it to the streamers. Again.
Clearly, they didn’t expect this to have better pre-sales than Wicked had (Wicked! The film that saved cinema last year!)
As for the film itself, objectively, it is all over the place, from comedy (pratfalls and f-wordplay) to tearjerker (I cried twice, which is twice more than in We Live In Time) and wish fulfilment. I laughed out loud, mind (Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson do their scene-stealing things.) Zellwegger knows who this character is. There's too much going on - the romance subplots are underserved, but so are many other aspects, because there are so many callbacks to serve (some blatant, some only occurring to me later.) But it does have some authentic things to say about grief, growing up, the support that friends and colleagues can give and competitive motherhood. I was feeling things while also finding things to criticise, which is probably true of all the Bridget Jones films.
There were two big cinema releases in the UK this weekend (sorry Heart Eyes): Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth Bridget Jones film vs. Captain America: Brave New World. I have thoughts about this! I’ve got history with both properties, if you will, but I was on the comic everywoman’s side over MCU’s latest offering (sorry Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson, it’s not you!) Bridget Jones will be released on streaming in the US, but as she’s a Working Title Londoner, she got the full works here, and I hope she gets the better box office (although it’s a 15 certificate, so we’ll see how rebooted Cap draws in the boys and the other three quadrants.)
My rationale? Well, I read some of the original newspaper columns (in the school library) and the first couple of books. I went to see the movies, yes, even Edge of Reason, and I remember the first film certainly feeling like an event, where women of various generations went – an all too rare experience. I didn’t buy them on DVD, and I didn’t buy ‘Mad About the Boy’, instead I had a sulk that Fielding had SPOILER? killed off Mark Darcy /SPOILER? and was glad that ‘Bridget Jones’s Baby’ ignored it. (Since then I’ve learned that Keir Starmer was one of Mark Darcy’s inspirations, which puts a different complexion on things.)
Also, Hugh Grant was back in this one! And you could see what the plot was likely to be with young Leo Woodall and less young Chiwetel Ejofor and Our Bridge in the posters. Kudos to the marketing team for selling it as a Galentine’s Day film, meaning there was plenty of content in explaining Galentine’s Day as well as pieces about what Bridget Jones says about women now – the women who first read about her and the slightly younger women who first met her on the big screen.
My issue with the MCU is that it has got subsumed into Disney’s plans for Disney+ for which I never signed up and have been sulking with Kevin Feige for not putting Wandavision on DVD. So, I haven’t seen The Winter Soldier and the Falcon either. I might have gone to see this movie, I might yet, but an SFXd Harrison Ford as Red Hulk??????? (Thunderbolts because Florence Pugh as Yelena, yes.)
At the cinema, you could totally tell who was going to see which movie.
Still, the trailers before Mad About the Boy were instructive and depressing. Here you have an older crowd of women, come to see a film that they know is both weepie and romcom (older than the Wicked crowd), and what are the trailers? Two kids movies, Black Bag (okay, I was excited about Soderberg directing La Blanchett and Fassbender as married spies, but I don’t think many other people in the screening own Haywire), and, with a knowing intro featuring Danny Dyer…a film about a cocaine-snorting football hooligan trying to turn over a new leaf for his wife and son. Oh, and the arty The Last Showgirl…and The Salt Path, featuring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs which seems like a hopeful weepie.
YOU WHAT, CINEMA? Here we are, come out with our friends to see a familiar figure, expecting to laugh and cry and you have, what, one upcoming film that's likely to appeal to most of us!? That is absolutely hopeless of you and exemplifies why there have been so many ‘cinema is dead’ articles. You have given up the fight for this market and handed it to the streamers. Again.
Clearly, they didn’t expect this to have better pre-sales than Wicked had (Wicked! The film that saved cinema last year!)
As for the film itself, objectively, it is all over the place, from comedy (pratfalls and f-wordplay) to tearjerker (I cried twice, which is twice more than in We Live In Time) and wish fulfilment. I laughed out loud, mind (Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson do their scene-stealing things.) Zellwegger knows who this character is. There's too much going on - the romance subplots are underserved, but so are many other aspects, because there are so many callbacks to serve (some blatant, some only occurring to me later.) But it does have some authentic things to say about grief, growing up, the support that friends and colleagues can give and competitive motherhood. I was feeling things while also finding things to criticise, which is probably true of all the Bridget Jones films.
