This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails lately, complaining that I’ve been too liberal with my praise of recent films. But I can’t help the fact that the holidays are when Hollywood ushers out its prestige films, Oscar bait held until just before the Academy Awards so they remain fresh in voters’ minds. If there is a disproportionately large amount of truly good films that come out at the end of the year, it is because Hollywood has designed it that way. But have no fear. January is here. And thus begins a long, dark, cold winter of mediocrity and outright banality. Example number one: Bride Wars.

Liv (Kate Hudson, who is in desperate need of an acting intervention) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) are lifelong friends who have dreamed of June weddings at New York City’s famed Plaza Hotel since they were both little girls. Now in their late twenties, both women find themselves gleefully engaged but, thanks to a clerical error by iconic wedding planner Marion St. Claire (Candice Bergen, who also insipidly narrates), both are scheduled at the Plaza on the same day, at the same time. For Liv and Emma to participate in each others’ weddings, one of them will have to change their venue.

Liv is a high-powered lawyer who demands perfection and is used to getting her way. But even she is not prepared for how passionately simple schoolteacher Emma is willing to fight for her childhood dream. And fight they do. Shocking everyone around them, the best friends and brides-to-be turn on each other and engage in an all out war to settle their differences, doing everything in their power to sabotage the others’ big day. Will they remember how much they love each other before it is too late? Or is all fair in love and war?

I don’t know if it’s just me, but these days, every time I see a romantic comedy, I always find myself wondering what it would have looked and sounded like had it had been directed by George Cukor, Howard Hawks or Preston Sturges, masters of such screwball comedies as The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby and The Lady Eve. With some admitted exceptions, it’s not that these films were constructed around dazzlingly intricate plots or complex storylines, but that the filmmakers understood, far better than most any director working today, that truly classic comedy relies on a farcical slapstick married to, in the case of screwball, fast-paced repartee.

It’s not that Bride Wars is structured around a bad idea. Just because a plot can be summed up in a single sentence doesn’t make it a bad plot. After all, a film is judged on what the filmmakers do with the raw materials they are given, not the materials themselves. But more and more I walk out of romantic comedies like Bride Wars deeply disappointed, because the raw materials are never molded into anything more than haphazard, amorphous shapes lacking character, personality or, other for than a moment or two, anything approaching real humor.

Bride Wars starts off cleverly and goes steadily downhill from there. While there is the barest glimmer of originality at the end, the film still perpetuates the myth that even the most contented, successful women are utterly unfulfilled without a gaudy diamond ring and the man who goes with it. You and I both know the wedding industry is a shameless racket (someone had to say it). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not attacking marriage, just the commercialized ideal it has become, thanks to an industry that has managed to convince nearly every couple in America that a single day of bliss should cost as much as a luxury yacht.

Why have modern romcoms like Bride Wars become synonymous with trashy, clichéd, formulaic chick flicks? It was not always this way. Once upon a time, romantic comedies represented some of the very best Hollywood had to offer. Hollywood vaults swell with romantic comedies considered classics by anyone’s estimation. It is a shame that filmmakers and audiences alike have let romantic comedies devolve into trite mediocrity and banal predictability. The genre deserves far better than Bride Wars and its ilk.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.