A single woman who, after getting pregnant from a one-night stand, leans on her married best friend and mother of two to guide her through gestation and beyond.
- Released:
- Runtime: 109 minutes
- Genre: Comedy, Drama
- Stars: John Carroll Lynch, Kenneth Lucas, Sandra Bernhard, Oliver Platt, Hasan Minhaj, Stephan James, Ilana Glazer, Keith Lucas, Michelle Buteau
- Director: Pamela Adlon
Comments
- mark-67214-52993 - 7 June 2024
Sassy, Funny, Irreverent, Insightful
The tone of "Babes" in many ways parallels the personality of its director, Pamela Adlon: smart, profane, irreverent and insightful.
Eden (Ilana Glazer - "Broad City") and Dawn (Michelle Buteau - "Isn't It Romantic," "Survival of the Thickest") have been best friends since they were eleven. They have a variety of rituals that bind their friendship together, including going to a movie every Thanksgiving. Eden is a single yoga instructor. Dawn is a dentist with aspirations of becoming the next spokesperson for Invisalign™. After a meet-cute with Claude, an aspiring actor who has two lines of dialogue in a Martin Scorsese movie, Eden discovers she is pregnant. The twenty-nine pregnancy tests weren't wrong. Turns out, Eden can be a little obsessive. When she decides to keep the baby, Eden expects Dawn to become her one-person support system, even though Dawn's married and has two young kids of her own, including a newborn.
"Babes" is the feature film debut for Director Adlon (acting roles in "Better Things," "Californication," 2018 Emmy nomination for voicing Bobby Hill on "King of the Hill"). She has the self-confidence to let Glazer and Buteau fully inhabit their roles. This hands-off approach offers several benefits as the story unfolds. The result is a film that avoids easy categorization. While it navigates some of the tropes of a romantic comedy and avoids the worst instincts of the genre, the central action is the deep platonic friendship of two women who have been through everything together.
It's ironic that as Co-Writer of this film, Glazer creates the more appealing role for her counterpart. Buteau's Dawn is a consistently appealing character who's also given the opportunity to show her skills at some very funny bits of physical comedy. Eden, on the other hand, is a curious mixture of sassy independence, self-absorption, vulnerability and neediness that never really worked for me.
Full disclosure: this is a film I may not be properly qualified to review. I'm male and I've never had kids. From my perspective, some of the dialogue and content seemed simultaneously smart, skillful and sophomoric. The multiple references to breast pumps were simply mystifying. And while I'm familiar with solids, liquids and gases on the periodic table, I was previously unaware that all three could be expelled - violently and regularly, apparently - from the female body during pregnancy. You live, you learn.
What blindsided me was the catch in my throat and some unusual moisture around my eyes as this film moved to a fairly predictable conclusion. It surprised me to feel so deeply at the end of a film where I never felt fully engaged. Your experience may vary. - Rendanlovell - 14 May 2024
Stomaching this is harder than birth.
The problem with this mushy, over ripe, often stale pregnancy comedy isn't the onslaught of suburb leveling, ear splitting "humor" or the insufferably blue collar approach to the filmmaking. No, the worst part of this is that it takes a potentially awesome premise and does so little with it, moms everywhere should feel insulted. It carries on with this "they didn't teach THIS in school" attitude that feels incredibly misguided when the new single mom to-be can casually buy $500 sushi that doesn't even go to the desired person. It's gross and stupidly low effort for a movie that will absolutely have an audience that says, "men can't have opinions about this one." - kwsfmshgf - 14 May 2024
Absolute trash
One minute into this disaster of a movie I knew it was going to be impossible to get through. Poor acting, over the top profanity at the most unnecessary times, and overall garbage. I left the theater wondering who would pay a penny to produce this horrible excuse for a movie. The characters are not endearing at all and the plot is just plain stupid. Curse Regal Cinemas for tricking us into this $5 mystery movie. I would literally rather work overtime than have to endure this painful experience ever again. For anyone who has ever seen "The Room" which is one of the lowest rated movies on IMBD, you would be better off watching that 3 times before watching three seconds of this film.
