If you thought Barbie was the best whimsical satire about feminism and the harms of the patriarchy, featuring music from Charlie XCX, and a massive fight scene between warring factions, that just so happened to be made in 2023. Think again! Let me introduce you to Bottoms made by the comedic geniuses that gifted the world Pitch Perfect, starring Rachel Sennott as PJ and Ayo Edebri (the love of my life) as Josie. Bottoms brings back classic campy humor that highlights high school comedy perfectly. Not only that but this movie brings the gay representation I personally have been wanting, I mean lesbian Fight Club? Yes please. Enough with my rambling, time to actually review the movie. As always, spoilers ahead.
Bottoms follows two unpopular childhood best friends, PJ and Josie, and their complicated plans to “get the girl” and lose their virginity. So what’s the best way to do that? Come up with an elaborate lie and start a fight club, obviously. But once their lies get a little too elaborate and their fight club actually starts helping the girls of their school, PJ and Josie quickly realize they might have gone off the deep end. This movie is packed with so many amazing and characters but balances it well so it never feels like four different scripts crammed into one movie. And, no the plot debrief is not done yet, while PJ and Josie keep up with their lies and build their school’s fight club, the overly intense rivalry between football teams grows as the game draws closer.
If it isn’t obvious, I love this movie, and there is very little I have to critique on it. Not only does it bring back the humor from early 2000’s movies, a kind of humor I hold very dearly to my heart. But this movie is also extremely realistic in my opinion.es it’s goofy and campy, and at times even ridiculous, but that’s what makes the real and more somber moments of this movie so raw. Later in the movie, PJ finally makes a move on the girl she’s liked for years, Brittany, and gets the heartbreaking words “I’m straight PJ”. Rachel’s acting in this scene is phenomenal, you can see the heartbreak in her eyes and even to someone like me, who really didn’t like PJ for the majority of the movie, I felt such deep sympathy for her. I know so many who watched this scene could relate to it. What they did so well in this scene was allowing a space of sadness for PJ without making Brittany seem like an awful person for not reciprocating PJ’s feelings, this is something many movies fail to do.
I fully believe that most modern day movies have lost the authenticity that older movies, even ones from just ten years ago. Maybe it’s because movies are being made more cheaply for more profit, or maybe we’re just in a good movie drought. But there’s another theme I’ve been noticing recently in both movies and tv shows: movie producers think their audiences are dumb. That may sound harsh but I think a blatantly obvious example is the new live action Avatar the Last Airbender. I won’t talk too much about it because frankly that is not what this article is about, but in brief this remake is simply a live action retelling of the original animated show. Something that became glaringly obvious is they rushed to an extreme and told instead of showed. They put the plot of two whole episodes into the first. This not only takes away the impact and suspense, but they also included many scenes that explained everything the original series showed so well. Furthermore they took away an important arc where a character learns from his misogynistic ways, because they didn’t want to endorse that behavior. But what’s interesting is the original Avatar series did not endorse this behavior, they spoke against it and made the character grow from it. So why now, almost twenty years later, did they take away so many amazing aspects from the original show especially since it’s supposed to be for an older audience? Because producers think the audience is dumb. These producers are actively telling audiences what they think, they think audiences cannot put together complex stories or see that a character’s actions are bad without thinking the show endorses it. That long winded rant is to say, Bottoms does not do that.
Throughout the whole movie the two protagonists actively lie and deceive people close to them to get with girls, which is an arguably bad thing. They even do this to Hazel (my favorite) who only ever wanted to be their friend and be a part of the fight club that she ended up truly caring about. Not only that but like Pitch Perfect, all the characters say and do, at best questionable at worst awful, things throughout the movie. But of course the producers, writers, and everyone else on the creative team do not endorse the behavior many characters show the audience, I mean Hazel blows up a car at one point. Most of the behaviors that the characters in the movie present are actually very realistic to teenagers: snarky remarks, less than good motivations, and stupid ideas that quickly turn bad. Allowing teenage characters do teenage things creates authenticity to the audience, and to me personally makes the comedic moments much funnier due to the fact I can imagine hearing them in actual conversations at school.
Overall I highly recommend this movie and could talk about it for much longer then I already have. I really hope this sparks people’s interests for such an amazing movie.
