Bottoms (2023)
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Bottoms Movie Review
Bottoms is a 2023 teen sex comedy film directed by Emma Seligman and starring Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri. This is at times quite funny, but often overly strange teen flick.
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“Could the ugly, untalented gays
please report to the principal’s office?“
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Unpopular best friends PJ and Josie start a high school fight club to meet girls and lose their virginity. They soon find themselves in over their heads when the most popular students start beating each other up in the name of self-defense. Teen comedies and unfortunately comedies in general are rare nowadays, so I was quite excited to see this one. I am all in favor of bringing back that style of ‘Superbad’ and similar such films, but make it more modern by focusing on different groups and/or communities.
Bottoms is about two lesbian friends, but my issue here was that the movie wasn’t particularly specific about anything. Not only do we not see much talk about lesbian sex, but we also don’t witness it. For a movie that is touted as being horny, it’s anything but that, further proving to us all how sexless Hollywood really is.
With that being said, the characters worked to a larger degree. PJ is an insufferable human being, but there are awful people like her all around us, so I respected them for actually showing that. Josie is the more likable of the two and two shared a well realized, believable friendship.
Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri were both very good as our leads, but a lot of praise should also be directed toward Marshawn Lynch, who was genuinely hilarious as one of the school’s goofier teachers. The fact that he is not a professional actor and that he improvised most of his lines was astounding. Others are all solid, though not as well developed. I liked Hazel quite a bit, but what they did to her in that one fight scene was horrendous, unfunny and just unnecessary.
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Speaking of such scenes, Bottoms is a very strange movie, and I couldn’t quite wrap my head around what these filmmaker’s intentions were with these odd choices or whether or not I enjoyed or respected what they brought to the table. What I detested was that ridiculous ending that played like a dream sequence how implausible it all seemed.
But what I loved was the humor, at least to a certain degree. The movie has that weird mixture between realism and absolute absurdism where the students and even the teachers would say the wildest sentences possible, something that you would never hear a teacher say in real life. A lot of cursing was present here for instance. Some of those scenes certainly worked as they made the movie unexpected and funny, but at some other times they did not work as they seemed too silly and stupid.
Bottoms also has a very strange tone throughout, not to mention that its intentions are quite puzzling. It wants to be feminist, but it also eschews feminism in favor of hilarity and satire, which led to this confounding mix of ideas that simultaneously felt both typically progressive and surprisingly politically incorrect. The tone was odd for sure, but the overall filmmaking from these talented writers and directors was somewhat original and admirably daring. The soundtrack is a lot of fun too. I just wished for a stronger and more cohesive second half as it felt disappointing in comparison to the much more energetic, witty and genuinely hilarious first half.
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Bottoms is a modern teen comedy, which is something that we do not get much of these days, so its existence alone makes it worth a watch. It’s a lesbian comedy that doesn’t have all that much to say about them nor is it ever as horny as it touts itself to be, which is a typical problem for Hollywood movies that are almost always sexless. There is a lot of hilarity to be found in the movie’s excellent, energetic and wildly entertaining first half. The acting performances and characterization are uniformly strong and the dialogue can be quite good. But the second half lost its momentum by both introducing predictable plot beats and some admittedly original, but overly strange ideas with the ending itself being ridiculous. Bottoms is a different kind of beast and the filmmakers should be applauded for their vision here, even if it often did not work out. It’s a film that is somehow simultaneously progressive and surprisingly politically incorrect while its tone ranged from realistic and believable to downright ludicrous and absurd.
My Rating – 3.5
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