Bottoms (2023)

September 2, 2023 7:19 PM

Unpopular best friends PJ and Josie start a high school fight club to meet girls and lose their virginity. They soon find themselves in over their heads when the most popular students start beating each other up in the name of self-defense.

The end of the review from rogerebert.com gets to the essence, I think:

“Bottoms” pokes fun at the high school movie, the kind where the actors all look like they’re in their thirties (because chances are, they are), and there’s supposed to be some coming-of-age lesson to be learned by the soon-to-be grown-ups. PJ and Josie do learn a valuable lesson but at the expense of bruised faces, bloody noses, and more than their fair share of cuts and scrapes. “Bottoms” dropkicks John Hughes movies on their ass and lets the girls take charge—not just as pouty wallflowers or broody misfits until someone gives them a makeover. They are the weirdos; they are the nerds. They have every right to fail, be crass, make crude jokes, and shed blood.

Stars Rachel Sennott (who previously collaborated with director Emma Seligman on Shiva Baby, previously on the purple), Ayo Edebiri (lots of things), and Marshawn Lynch (football).

posted by Halloween Jack (17 comments total)

I went to see this on a whim and it turned out to be delightfully deranged. Sort of "But I'm a Cheerleader" meets "Heathers".
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 8:22 PM on September 2, 2023 [8 favorites]

It's fun to decide a notional Venn diagram for the movie; my initial one was "Fight Club meets Heathers meets Booksmart." (I haven't seen But I'm a Cheerleader, but I did note that the diner is called But I'm a Diner.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:02 PM on September 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm on "Red White and Royal Blue" TikTok, and everybody there wants to see this movie solely for Nicholas Galitzine. The kid has range!
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:01 AM on September 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Interesting! Galitzine seems to have a legit sports background; during the film, I started theorizing that Jeff couldn't actually play football (or not nearly as good as he was promoted to be), and that his rich family would end up paying off the rival team to throw the game... which of course was not at all what happened.

Also, Punkie Johnson is in this, but I didn't recognize her because I don't watch SNL very often and I don't think that I've watched anything else that she's been in.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:09 PM on September 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

This was so stupidly funny. Our theatre was howling. At the end of the show my daughter made a comment about the penis on the mascot. I hadn’t even noticed it, there was so much other ridiculous stuff to hear and to look at.
posted by Cuke at 12:38 PM on September 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

Really enjoyed this! Does a great job of being a superb parody of the thing while also being an expert version of the thing. I loved, loved, loved all the background jokes: the aforementioned huge dong on the mascot, all the football players always in full uniforms with pads and everything even to the point where the one “evil” football dude had a backpack that would be impossible to put on or take off by yourself, the random football player in a metal cage in the back of the classroom that nobody really noticed, that insane Sistine Chapel mural in the lunchroom, the list goes on and on. Production design and art direction were so good, can’t wait for this to come out on streaming so I can pause and try to catch everything.
posted by ssmith at 10:36 PM on September 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's super fun, highly recommend it to anyone that grooves on this genre.

Booksmart is the closest match, but Bottoms is both simpler and so gleefully more unhinged. I'm not sure every scene made total narrative sense but it honestly doesn't really matter.

Weirdly it's a period piece. I don't think they ever mention it directly but this movie takes place in the early 2000s.
posted by mcstayinskool at 6:52 AM on September 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Weirdly it's a period piece. I don't think they ever mention it directly but this movie takes place in the early 2000s.

Wait, seriously? Did they make no effort to adjust fashion, or has it just not changed that much? Like if they made this movie in 2003 and set it in 1982 that would be blazingly obvious?
posted by rhymedirective at 1:22 PM on September 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

It felt unmoored in time to me. Parts of it felt very late-90s/early-00s, and parts of it felt very 2023.

90s fashion is back among the Kids Today, so the clothes are less of a help than it might be.

People didn't have their noses buried in their smartphones, but that could be a stylistic choice; a friend remembered a character having a flip phone.

I thought I remembered Punkie Johnson's character listing past incidents during every-20-year games against Huntington High and including something that happened in '03, which would put the movie at present day.

Conclusion: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 4:41 PM on September 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I saw the movie with my 18yo daughter, and she claimed the fashion was very early 2000s. Of course I, an old person, saw nothing different about what they were wearing.

No smartphones, ever. And a flip phone.
I saw no current model cars, but tbh wasn't focused on that.
posted by mcstayinskool at 8:04 AM on September 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Add Strangers with Candy to the Venn diagram. The surrealism throughout, the detachment and inappropriateness of the teachers, the caged wrestler, the prison talk— it felt like a spiritual successor.
posted by condour75 at 8:10 PM on September 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is idiosyncratic, but I appreciate the omission of drug use (something I felt spoiled Booksmart).
posted by channaher at 5:54 PM on October 11, 2023

Oh this was a lot of fun.

I saw a quote from Ayo Edebiri that being stupid is a political act, and that seems pretty apt. I love who this movie refuses to resolve things in non-stupid ways.

The humro reminds me a little of the first bit of Beau is Afraid. Not in story terms, but how it's riffing so hard on expectations that it's creating an absurd reality and not backing down from it. I love it.
posted by fleacircus at 10:42 PM on October 20, 2023

Holy shit, I laughed so hard through most of this. The central friendship is awesome, I loved Marshawn, the club was awesome. Just overall a beautiful movie.
posted by Carillon at 11:15 PM on November 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh my god, that was great.
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:27 PM on December 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Man, that first punch that Ayo Edebiri throws at the first club. I mean, I knew what it was going to be like from the previews, but just a great way to set the tone.
posted by Gorgik at 8:17 PM on January 1

Dunno how I managed to not watch this one until today, but it's so absolutely up my alley that I feel like I've been robbing myself of it for the past several months. My favorite bit of set-dressing might have been the poster reading "You're prettier when you smile! He may be looking at you right now!" I love a movie that leans hard into its hyper-reality, which this one does to a manic degree.

Heathers is probably the closest point of comparison, Booksmart I think mostly because of the central relationship but not much beyond that. Way, way more deranged than Mean Girls for sure.
posted by Navelgazer at 4:45 PM on January 12 [1 favorite]