The Other Woman: Better Than Staring at Your Own Vomit

NPR’s Linda Holmes reviewed The Other Woman, the gal-pal comedy starring Leslie Mann, Cameron Diaz, Kate Upton, and Nicki Minaj and out this Friday. (A direct quote from the trailer: “Put the lawyer, the wife, and the boobs together, and we know how to do it just as shady as he does!” Here it is: the secret to Having It All.) Holmes delivers the sort of ethering that the Sex and the City sequel required:

It does not, however, manage to pass the Bechdel test, the laughably low bar that asks these questions: (1) Does a film have two women in it? (2) Do they talk to each other? (3) About something other than a man?

Yyyyyyyup. That’s right. The Other Woman is 109 minutes long, and at no time do any of these women — including Carly and her secretary, who only know each other from work — pause for a discussion, even for a moment, of anything other than a series of dudes: Mark, Kate’s brother, Carly’s father, the secretary’s husband, Carly’s other boyfriends … it is truly, no fooling, all they talk about for 109 minutes.

Plenty of burns therein, but the kicker is perhaps all we need to know about this funny-lady effort: “If you were on an airplane, The Other Woman might not be preferable to simply staring into your empty airsick bag, but it has enough nicely executed physical comedy that in the event you become ill, it is definitely preferable to staring into your occupied airsick bag. This is what we’ve got, girls. This is what’s on offer.” [NPR]