I love the Bridget Jones books and quite liked the first movie, but the sequel took all the little things I disliked about the first movie and magnified them, while leaving out all the stuff in the books that I liked.
Things I disliked in the first movie:
Yes, our Bridget is a bit dim, but she isn’t a complete moron. The movie made her way, WAY dumber than she was in the book.
Mark was too damn snooty. The first book was a knock-off on Pride and Prejudice – the point was that Bridget thought he was a dreadful stiff, but he was really a pretty cool guy, albeit a bit formal. In the movie (both of them, but it was worse in the sequel), Mark really was a dreadful stiff and was changed by Bridget’s love, or some damn thing.
Stuff I liked in the second book that they utterly left out of the movie sequel:
The second book was a knock-off on Persuasion – incidentally my favorite Jane Austen novel. No faintest resemblance to Persuasion remained.
The book Rebecca was a great villain. I won’t even tax your intellect (or bother with a spoiler box) to tell you what became of Rebecca in the movie.
My daughter liked the movie, though – she hasn’t read the books. And Hugh Grant (who had only a brief scene in the book, but was around quite a bit in the movie) was yummy, as was Colin Firth.
My girlfriend tried to get me to see these movies. I told her that I’ve taken a solemn oath to never see a movie with Hugh Grant in it. She said it was rudiculous to swear off his movies without even having seen one. I told her it was rudiculous for orthodox Jews to have never tried pork without having tried it. Its like a religious thing I have.
I wake up screaming from nightmares that someday Hugh Grant will be in a movie I actually want to see. Like getting cast in The Hobbit if they ever make it into a movie. It would be like offering a starving Hindu a delicious cheese burger.
So in short, I hope the keep him busy with Bridget Jones sequels.
You’re in luck, Malodorous - I just read the other day that Hugh Grant has said that BJ2 was his last movie. Seems he’s never really liked “acting” that much, anyway. (I can’t stand him, either.)
I agree. I hated the movie too, and I was really looking forward to it. It seemed every other joke was look at Bridget’s butt, it’s big, ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha.
I’m not quite sure why so many girls in America have eating disorders, but ha ha, look at Bridget’s butt. Ha ha.
Haven’t read the books, but I did catch the first movie through the magic of airline travel, and it really left me wondering something.
Women actually like these? The idea of a woman enjoying this film made about as much sense to me as a black person really grooving on an Al Jolson routine. I’d have thought the entire gender would take to the streets and demand the directors head on a pike.
Shows what I know, I guess.
Still, it had two things going for it: Rene Zellweger is amazingly hot, especially when she’s supposed to be “fat” (not enough rolleye smilies in the world for that one), and it had a Salman Rushdie cameo. Other than that, the only thing that gave me the strength to get through to the end was the dim hope that, as implausible as it might be, in the final reel somebody would run up and beat all three main characters to death with a shovel.
Agreed. That’s a really silly oath, regardless of its solemnity.
And I don’t just refer to “About a Boy” which is great, or “Sense and Sensibility”.
All of his romantic comedies are among the best out there. There aren’t many people who can really act and do comedy so easily. You shouldn’t cut one who can out of your viewing over some “oath”.
If you want to take an oath off someone, make it Ben Affleck or some two-bit hack like that, not a real actor.
I love the first movie and was really looking forward to the second, but it’s scoring about 25% on the Tomato Meter. I’m still gonna go see it, but from what I’ve seen on their website, the trailer, and Ebert’s review, it looks really disappointing. I know! Let’s take three talented, appealing actors we want to like and put them in a ridiculous plot that seems to not understand what the first movie was about. Now poor Bridget is some kind of Lucille Ball for the 21st century. As Ebert said, “In the first movie, things happened to Bridget. In the second movie, Bridget happens to things.”
As soon as I heard they were reprising the fight scene - the best single scene in the first movie - I had a hunch that TPTB didn’t quite know what they were doing.
When I saw the first “Bridget Jones” movie, I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was. Stunning. Her body looked great and she was prettier than usual. In every other movie I’ve seen her in she looked ugly, especially “Chicago,” in which she appeared to be dying of starvation.
Speaking as a, er, woman, I loved the first movie. The whole message was that Mark Darcy loved her “just as she is,” and that all of her attempts to “fix herself up” were both unnecessary and undesireable. Same with the second book, and Rebecca (although not the second movie, ugh, what a nonsensical twist). Here’s this outrageously attractive, smart, successful woman vying for Mark’s attention, but he doesn’t want her, because she’s not the woman he’s in love with.
Bridget Jones herself, as a side note, strikes me less as an Elizabeth Bennet than as an Emma Woodhouse.
– Plus Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones are just transcendent. Their falling-out and then patching-up of their marriage is one of the most romantic arcs I’ve ever seen in any medium. I mean, they were criminally underutilized in Edge of Reason, but in the first movie, it was all there.