Bridesmaids

[mount_oregano]

I saw the first poster in mid-July in the subway Prague, where I was on vacation. "Šeny Sobě" means something like "Women Themselves" in Czech, according to Goggle Translate. (Sorry for the bad lighting. It was shot from an escalator.) (Prague was great. See photos here.)

A few days later, in Vienna, I saw this sign on a bus stop near our hotel. "Braut Alarm": "Bride Alarm." (See Vienna vacation photos here.) "Sexy, laut und nicht zu stoppen": "Sexy, loud, and unstoppable."

Finally, there was this poster on a shady street near my home, "La boda de mi mejor amiga": "The Wedding of My Best Girlfriend." "¡La comedia que arrasa en todo el mundo!": "The comedy that's swept the world!"

So I went. The movie "Bridesmaids" is supposedly set in Milwaukee, where I grew up. I even had an apartment on Kinnickinnic Avenue a few blocks north of where the star, Annie, supposedly lived, a building I've gone by thousands of times.

Beyond a few exterior shots of Milwaukee and Chicago, though, the movie contained little particularly Milwaukeean — or Chicagoan, for that matter. Even the street names were sometimes wrong, which could have been easily corrected. I heard more foreign accents than Midwest accents. In sum: the movie was set in Hollywood.

Since we saw it in Madrid, the scene where Annie tries to speak Spanish got the biggest laughs. Overall, the plot lost its focus at times, and savage humor gave way to authentic tenderness. A funny movie, if a bit uneven, and you can see it all over the world.

— Sue Burke