So, a couple of weeks ago I see the following line in my local cinema’s newsletter: “Emma Seligman’s highly anticipated Bottoms finally punches its way on to the big screen.”, so I click though, and the description looks odd and interesting so I look up the trailer:
And it made me laugh a lot so I kept an eye out for when it opened. And then it sold out over the weekend and I caught the evening showing last night instead. And it’s fucking hilarious.
The plot is incredibly by the numbers - PJ and Josie aren’t hated because they’re lesbians, but because they’re untalented and they’re desperate to get laid before they start college so when a minor altercation with the school’s star quarterback coincides with them sardonically saying to a friend that they were in juvie over the summer break, their sudden attention leads them to start a self-defense club to try and attract the cheerleaders they fancy, and insanity follows. And that insanity is what makes the movie great while the story unfolds exactly as you’d expect it.
The humour is brash and uncompromising, there’s so much weird shit happening in the background in the school scenes. It takes all the tropes of the teen comedy and ramps them up to ludicrous levels and had the whole audience in the cinema laughing all the way through. The people I was sitting beside were repeating their favourite jokes before the credits have finished rolling. It’s also a very good example of how comedy can be absolutely filthy and still staunchly feminist, pushing back against the bizarre narrative that feminists are scolds about this kind of content. Well worth checking out, it’s already hit streaming in the US as it came out there in August, but will probably be in cinemas on this side of the ocean for another week or two.
