and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
Also, hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.
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Bad Moms – (Party Like a Mother) Movie 2016 - USA. 101 Mins.
This movie is Great Fun.
In this day and age it’s impossible to be a good mum. After a particularly bad day, Amy Mitchell admits to others in the PTA that she is tired of trying to be perfect.
When she is tired of being judged, Amy decides to run for PTA President. There are lots of rude words, and there is some fun partying, and there is some romance and there are some poignant moments.
MA 15+ Fun. It’s not for prudes, but this is well written and well made. There is no hate in this movie, it’s warm and it works, and if you like it the first time you will enjoy seeing it more than once.
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Bad Moms 2 - Movie 2017 USA 104 Mins
Not as funny as the original but entertaining just the same.
Bad Moms 2 follows the struggles of Amy, Kiki, and Carla as they deal with the challenges and expectations of Christmas. And as if creating a more perfect holiday for their families wasn't hard enough, they must do all of that while hosting and entertaining their own mothers.
Although this movie was numbered 2 and released in February in Oz, it was all about Christmas, and Christmas is really, really high on my list of stuff I find really, really yawny. To be honest, just about the only thing I really, really like about Christmas is sometimes hearing the word Christmas and realising I have managed to avoid thinking about it for a while.
That I freely chose to watch this sequel at all, given how much I hate Christmas, speaks volumes about how much I liked the original Bad Moms. The return of Wanda Sykes, and the addition of Susan Sarandon and Christine Baranski to the cast were promising, but sequels aren’t always as funny as the originals cos the element of surprise that makes the first movie in a series special is often gone.
After the very good laughs in the first five minutes, the next best thing about Bad Moms 2 was learning that Amy Mitchell was hoping like grim death to minimise Christmassing of the holiday period in her home. I guess Christmas was a logical excuse to bring all the mums together at the same time in one story. The competition to see who has the weirdest mother/daughter relationship stops this from being just a Christmas movie.
One night Amy’s mum takes the family carolling. I’ve seen that in U.S. movies before. It seems to be a real thing. (I loathe the sound of carols, and if being a Grinch wasn’t enough to keep me from buying presents, having to listen to crappy Christmas music in shops between October and New Year’s Eve would be enough to stop me.)
It would be a pity to try and single out one actor as funnier than the others, but the character of Carla (played by Kathryn Hahn) once again has the crudest lines, and she certainly has a talent for delivering them convincingly for huge laughs. On the other hand, Carla’s son Jaxon had a completely innocent line to deliver when opening one of his presents, and I think it was amongst the cleverest and funniest lines in the whole movie.
MA 15+ Rating – Crude language and sex references – very funny stuff.
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Lots of people complained these movies are all about “First World Problems”, “Privileged Moms” not “Real Moms” and blah, blah, blah. The Bad Moms Franchise isn’t “high” art, but there is an art to being entertaining without being at all hateful. If you’d rather bring yourself down by all means watch something else – but why not allow other people dealing with reality overload a chance to escape for an hour and a half?
