The Movie: Babes
The Director: Pamela Adlon
The Cast: Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau, John Carroll Lynch, Stephen James, Hasan Minhaj
The Story: It tells the story of Eden who becomes pregnant from a one-night-stand and leans on her married best friend and mother of two to guide her.
The Rating: 7.5 / 10
The Review:
Sometimes a comedy comes along that just nails the right vibe and the right topic at the right time and director Pamela Adlon has done just that with her first feature film. Ilana Glazer, who you might know from the Broad City TV series and she also co-write this movie, is pretty freaking funny as Eden, a young woman who chooses to manage life's ups and downs during an unexpected pregnancy.
Meanwhile Eden's best friend Dawn, played by First Wives Club alum Michelle Buteau, opens the film by giving birth which sets her life into a completely new direction and sets the stage for a lot of the emotional punch between the two characters. Forcing the duo to come to terms with how their lives are going through drastic changes both indivually and as friends creates a good balance between the over the top moments of hilarity and the more emotional sides of the story.
That's really the heart of the whole story and is what makes the whole thing so relatable on a surprisingly universal level since most of the issues that come up are from the two women coming to terms with adulthood and trying as hard as they can to resist the inevitability of it all. If you want a movie to give you all the emotions you can thin of then this is definitely the one for you. The story is genuinely funny and it ends up being a very heartwarming tale of friendship thanks to the performances and chemistry between Glazer and Buteau.
I mentioned over the top hilarity and that's where Glazer really shines as she manages to push her comedic moments as far to the edge as possible without coming off as too goofy or unrealistically cartoonish. Knowing where to push and where to pull back when it comes to getting a good laugh is not an easy thing to do and her performance shows that she is a truly gifted performer and is a reflection of her writing skills as well. We also get great performances from Hasan Minhaj as Dawn's relentlessly dedicated husband and John Carroll Lynch as Eden's very patient doctor.
I really hope this movie has a lot of success in theaters, it really deserves to be seen by a wide, mainstream audience. It definitely feels like the type of movie that we need right now and hopefully some box office success will help it give birth to more great female driven comedies.
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