Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
I Recommend this Film, 18 Dec 2005
By A Customer
I think these 2 films are hilarious.They are really cool and make you feel embaressed yourself, which shows that it is a great film and i reccommend to every one i know.
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How can you not love Bridget?, 3 April 2006
With her almost flawless Upper-Class English accent, Renee Zellwegger plays a woman who really is the epitome of embarrassing, embarrassed thirty-something women. Bridget is such a compelling character, not least because she has Colin Firth and Hugh Grant hanging around! If you haven't seen it already, what have you been doing with yourself?
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
"Everyone Knows That Diaries Are Just, Full Of Cruhaarp!", 24 Aug 2007
Now, it is true to say that the iconography of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones isn't one to be taken too seriously. Beginning life as a newspaper serial whose captions would later constitute a worldwide bestselling novel, Fielding at once captured the humility, the optimism and every single wine stain of the modern day middle-class working girl in England, with barbed asides regarding celebrity culture and the dating game that bordered on the scabrous but that were also never less-than-funny. To turn the novel into a charming romantic comedy blockbuster proved to be a bit of a no-brainer for Working Title and Miramax, and thanks to a marketing push that enveloped the world much like Miss Jones's underpants did her tummy and waist, pubs became wine bars or cocktail lounges and the film made over $270 million worldwide. Even if its success is responsible for one of the most weirdly inept sequels in recent memory and it made it okay for every twentysomething professional to drink their body weight in cheap wine every other night, there was a time when Bridget Jones was the film of choice for every night in and it remains a lovely diversion in spite of the fallout since its success.
Even if it uses the required plot machinations, quirky supporting characters, obvious soundtrack cues and innumerable other cliches that have turned the romantic comedy into the pastiche that it is hastily becoming, Diary has plenty going for it to differentiate itself from both its progenitors and its (non)successors. Firsty, it is held into place by a troika of well-judged performances from its leads, who are each clearly having a ball. Renee Zellweger's accent doesn't acquit itself as well as her awkwardly amusing physicality in the role of an English woman uncomfortable in her own skin but neverltheless remains nothing less than utterly enjoyable with her little-girl-lost expression permanently plastered on her face.
Hugh Grant hurls as much of his prior "befuddled fop" persona out of the figurative window as he possibly can with a devilishly delicious role as Jones's cuckholding sleaze-of-a-squeeze and gets to savour most of the film's best lines as a result. However, Colin Firth registers with the film's most demanding performance, seeing as the character both in the film and the book references his past work as Mr Darcy in the BBC mini-series of Pride & Prejudice so frequently. That he manages to achieve this and still create a convincingly swoonsome romantic foil for Zellweger is testament to his subtle skills as an actor. When both of these suitors share the screen together, it provides many a juicy moment for the audience to enjoy, particularly the spectacularly non-threatening, Eton boy-style fisticuffs bout near the film's end.
Moreover, the flurry of supporting characters that populate Bridget's universe aren't as overtly quirky as latter efforts from the Richard Curtis stable of romantic comedy, even if the talented likes of Jim Broadbent, Gemma Jones, Sally Phillips, Felicity Montagu and Shirley Henderson are given unfathomably little to do. Curtis's penchant for highlighting pertinent yet otherwise uncomfortably evoked issues of third world hunger are kept to the required minimum for a romantic comedy about drunken, lovelorn idiots from middle-class London (i.e. none) and director Sharon Maguire, whilst not the most visually appealing of helmers, does well to make sure that the mise en scene and the overall package is professionally adequate throughout. It's quite clear she's a dab hand with actors, and with the help of a confident script, she oversees that Diary doesn't get too mired in its cynical contrivances to still deliver a peachy treat for the romantic at heart.
Unfortunately, any good idea that achieves gold at the box office deserves a sequel according to the production house, and thus Bridget Jones's Diary was to receive a companion piece called Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason. Now, Fielding had written a sequel to her novel herself, albeit one not as well-received as her previous one and something remarkably different from what the film becomes. In contrast to Diary, Reason is a sequel governed by no form of rational thinking at all. Essentially a repeat of the first film with the situations, characters and even key plot points blown up to such ludicrous proportions as to align itself better with a Looney Tunes cartoon than its predecessor, Reason sports as much charm as can be afforded to a misguided, cynical attempt at blockbusterdom, despite its stars still emerging with some dignity intact.
Barbed with five credited screenwriters compared to Diary's three, the most notable casualty to Reason is the fact that Bridget Jones's character has all of a sudden turned into a rather unattractive caricature of herself from the first film. Zellweger can be credited for some of the film's laugh-out-loud moments thanks to her proven mettle as a physical comedienne (the slalom episode down the Alps in particular is a highlight), but the writing and director Beeban Kidron push her performance into such overblown vapidity it's hard for the audience to accept that this is the same intelligent, put-upon young girl from the first film. It's bad enough that the sequel has to re-hash moments from the first film with nearly half the hilarity (the fight, the bum-to-camera embarrassment, Hugh Grant's reappearance), but to have the character blunder through them as if the first film never happened is borderline insulting. The most questionable episodes involve a placation of wronged Asian girls with self-help books and chocolate bars and the second least convincing screen lesbian in recent memory (see Sonia in Eastenders for the first place winner).
Thankfully, even when Hugh Grant is slumming it he's still effortlessly charming, even if the way in which his character is brought back into the action is one of the most shockingly lazy workings in the script. Firth is again saddled with the straight man role against Grant and Zellweger, though this time he isn't given nearly as many charmingly left-of-centre moments as his declaration of attraction to Bridget or his final line from the first film; here he's alternately staid or lovesick. Fans of the supporting players from the first film are also to be dismayed at the lack of material here also, which is off-putting considering how little they had last time. You have to ask yourself what kind of film would give as reliable a comedic actor as Jim Broadbent or Jessica Stevenson (who should have won the role of Bridget hands down if anyone who's seen her TV show Spaced would know!) less than a handful of lines!?
As a result, Reason wasn't as big a hit as its behemoth budget demanded it to be, especially in the US where it made roughly half of the modestly-budgeted Diary, but what remains is a prize example of how not to follow up a successfully charming movie with a built in sequel from its original source. As presented in this three disc special edition, each film receives substantial extra material on their respective discs that were previously available separately, but nothing insightful or entertaining can be found on Diary's extras. However, Reason's supplemental material fares much better, including an especially filmed scene of Bridget interviewing Colin Firth as himself (declared by many as a highlight from the second book but rather obviously excised from the film) a | |
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