Movie Review: BOTTOMS Tops The Best Comedy List of 2023!
Bottoms feels like Heartstopper made an X-Rated trip to fight club and landed straight into American Pie. It feels ripped from the /90s/80s era comedies like, Risky Business, Not Another Teen Movie, Heathers, or Can’t Hardly Wait, that made adolescence feel outlandishly fun and crazy, which I think a lot teen shows miss. Somewhere in the 2000s, perhaps Gossip Girl, being a teen became extremely dramatic and has stayed that way, which made films like, Superbad or Booksmart feel like rare gems instead of their once commonality. There are moments when I feel so plain watching teen shows. I was not chased by multiple boys, nor did I have fellow classmates that wanted to murder me, drug me, or start a rumor that I did either. Everything felt so banal in Salsa Club. Yet, that does not mean all those things do not, in some fashion, happen in Bottoms.
Written and Directed by Bottoms´ uniqueness lies in the insanity and oddball sweetness of its two leads. For however raunchy and dirty things get in jokes, or absolutely demented, there is an embedded warmth that is founded in the friendship between Rachel Sennott´s PJ and Ayo Edebiri´s Josie. These two gals unite forces to lose their virginity to cheerleaders by inviting them/ seducing them via a self-defense club that really becomes an all-out fight one. The Popular Girls like Kaia Berber’s Brittany and Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), join in and spend their filmed journey wondering whether their high school experience has stunted their growth instead of launched it. The result is a hilarious, raucous nosedive into sexuality, queerdom, and whether love truly is love. The irony is that for being ¨popular¨ they feel as outcast as the very ¨losers¨ trying to woo them: Josie and PJ.
It is strange to be an outcast in the world/ high school. It might even be too easy to think that being isolated and bullied, automatically, makes you a saint or a victim WITH a good heart. Part of why you like Bottoms, and tussle between big laughs and shock at its crudeness, is that PJ and Josie can be a little maniacal. They kind of have that Pinky and The Brain energy, of two animated figures that, for all that they are locked in by cages, really dream of taking over the world . Hence, the real fun and old-school energy of Bottoms, and why many compare it to a twisted version of Revenge of The Nerds, is that it is not oftenyou see, anymore, teen movies or shows where the teens want to take over the world and feel like they could. Instead, they feel overwhelmed by it. Yet, if Josie and PJ have to strap a bomb on the douchey, popular boys car while he listens to 80s pop…. Well… a girl has to do what a girl has to do. Bottoms is Out NOW In Limited Theaters.
