So I feel like ranting for a little bit. Yesterday I saw Bad Moms with my sisters and mom. FYI: turns out it's not a very family friendly movie.
Anyway, the humour was alright. Though you should be warned that literally 1/4th of the script is either the word vagina, tits, or Fark. It's pretty low-brow as far as most of the humour goes. But it's a chick flick, so that's to be expected.
What annoyed me was how the movie was just about pandering to women, largely at the expense of men. I mean, it's a chick flick sure, but holy shit it pandered hard.
For starters, literally every male character exists to either service women, or is weak/useless. That's it. Literally every one.
A) The main character's husband is a literal manchild.
b) The main character's love interest is sexualized by every woman in the movie, and seems to exist solely to benefit them. He has no goal besides getting with the main character.
c) The main character's son is an underachiever (in contrast with her overachieving daughter).
d) The main character's boss is a dick who does a complete 180 and grovels to her later in the movie.
e) The main character's friend's husband is a dick (sort of) who does a complete 180 and grovels to her later in the movie.
f) The main character's friend's son is just a big dumbass.
g) The gym coach at the school is another manchild.
h) The principle is just sort of there to do the bidding of the women in the movie.
Hell, even a random cop that tries to stop them when they wreck a supermarket quivers and runs in fear when one of the three main characters slightly moves towards him.
And that's all the male characters. The worst offenders were the son and friend's husband though.
So the son is the opposite to the daughter. The main character (his mom), currently does everything from making his food to doing his homework for him. She does this for the daughter too, but the daughter actually has aspirations. At one point, she stops, and tells him he's entitled and should stop acting that way. And he does. It's actually decent character development. The thing is...the daughter is probably worse than the son in personality, yet instead of getting reprimanded, she gets a day at the spa, and some bonding time with her mom. While the son moans a bit during the movie, the daughter literally tells her mom she hates her, and that she's a terrible mom, and many times acts like an entitled brat. What does the mom do? Apologizes profusely and begs for her daughter to tell her what she can do to be better.
Like holy shit, what? Why treat them so differently?
Then there is the friends husband. So this friend is a stay at home mom of 4 kids, with the husband at work. At one point they're out and he approaches her and is like "why ain't you watching the kids, it's your job, go watch them". She acts really submissive and agrees and hurries home, much to the scorn of the friends. Later on the husband (for whatever reason), has agreed to watch the kids and is like "you have to come back I can't do this". Pretty reasonable, given there are 4 kids, and presumably he's never watched them alone before. As someone who has watch 3 kids before, I know you can get overwhelmed pretty damn quick. Her response is to angrily respond "find a way to make it work", then hang up.
Whatever, that's fine. We're lead to believe he's been a dick to her for a while, so her being empowered or what have you here makes some sense. The part that makes no sense is the following day, when the two of them, with their four kids, walk to the school, and he's been made her bitch. Like, he carries everything, and she smugly asks him if he forgot something, to which he says yes, and she's like "well it ain't gonna get itself, go get it", and he listens to her and timidly walks back to get it. She then walks over to her friends to discuss how they want to relax today.
But why? She's the stay at home mom. It's literally her job to watch the kids. Why the Fark is she acting like she's in charge now? Why couldn't they just respect each other and acknowledge each other as equals?
Main character also annoyed me at the end. So her boss is a dick, like mentioned before. Rather than be a big girl about it, she simply decides to just stop coming into work for a while. She's then all surprised and upset to find they fired her when she actually decides to show up. End of the movie the boss has gone the way of all the other men, and is now begging for her to come back because the company is falling apart without her, claiming he'll do anything.
Does she ask for what she deserves and graciously accepts it? Haha, no of course not. She makes a list of demands, then when he says okay and asks if she can come in right away, she's says great and that she'll show up sometime next week when she feels like it.
Moral of the story? Men are useless, women run the world, and all you have to do to succeed is act like the world owes you something (because apparently if you're a woman, it does). Ironically, the world not owing you something is the very argument the main character had with her son to get him to smarten up.
Man, that was a longer rant than I expected.
