This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
August and January get these bad labels in the movie industry. Those are months where the studios usually dump stuff they think isn’t going to perform well in theaters (dumpuary, for example). Personally? Those months for me have super high variance. Some are legit bad don’t get me wrong, but bad box office doesn’t mean bad movie. Take Bottoms, Emma Seligman’s follow up to Shiva Baby. This movie is so specifically weird and interesting that I couldn’t take my eyes off of it, even as I was wondering who might actually be going to the theatre to see it. This is my roundabout way of saying give Bottoms a whirl and see if you will laugh as much as I did as this wonderful end of summer comedy.
PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), the ugly untalented gays as heard over the loudspeaker, brush past that insult because this is finally their year. Mostly friendless virgin lesbians, the pair decide senior year is when they’ll pop their cherries. Josie pines for cheerleader and social icon Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) while PJ is after Isabel’s bff Brittany (Kaia Gerber). At the town fair, the pair help Isabel get away from her bigger football playing chauvinist boyfriend Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) by accidentally touching him with their car. Rumors spread about PJ and Josie and their “bad” reputation: essentially the world throwing them a social lifeline to start a self-defense club and help women protect themselves against boys, especially the rival school Huntington boys who are out for blood before homecoming.
Seligman and co-writer Rachel Sennott start from something everyone is familiar with: a couple of high schoolers trying to lose their virginity. From there, we go to outer space, methaphorically. It takes about 20-30 minutes to get on Bottom’s wavelength. It looks like any normal high school movie, but its about 20-30% untethered from reality on purpose. That goodness, because that untethering leads to some really funny, really weird joke telling. There’s a directness to everyone’s dialogue here that’s cuts right to the funny: Seligman has no time to wait. For example, a girl will talk about how this high school “fight club” is helping her grow as a person, then the next lady says she’ll use what she learned to “kill her step-dad” while blood curdling screams erupt from her body. This lunacy builds and builds to Bottoms’s glorious insane climax at the big homecoming game. Movies are at their best when they really go for it and commit to the bit, and Bottoms is so committed its willing to bomb everything in its way to get to where it needs to go. That’s literal by the way: there’s definitely a bomb in this movie.
Also committing to the bit is Seligman’s talented cast, hopefully on the precipice of some new super comedy group we’ll get to see lots of films from. Seligman’s friend/muse Rachel Sennott is the driving force here, as funny and charming as ever, proving she can also anchor a big studio comedy. Her partner in crime Ayo Edebiri gives us another wrinkle to the many characters she has played in recent memory: the totally awkward super shy girl. But it’s the mostly untested or unknown supporting cast that makes Bottoms Special. I loved watching Marshawn Lynch play football, but I think I might like him more as a supporting comedic performer, giving this movie some fun strange cool teacher energy as the sponsor of the girl fight club. Havana Rose Liu and Kaia Gerber could have so easily been cast as eye candy only, but they’re much more talented than that. Liu has some great emotional scenes, and one of the cringiest funniest laughing sequences I’ve seen in recent memory, and Gerber saunters in as an unholy cross between her mom Cindy Crawford and Rachel Bilson and just slays with her deadpan delivery and maybe the best porn joke I’ve heard in a movie. And last but not least, as much as I like him in Red White & Royal Blue, I now only want to see Nicholas Galitzine play over the top jock douchebags. He’s completely on Bottoms’s wavelength, so much so that in a movie of super funny women I couldn’t wait to see more of Jeff.
After taking bascially a decade off, absence has made my heart grow fonder for a great movie comedy. This summer really tried to bring it back, giving us a wacky 80s ripoff, an incredible sex comedy road trip, and now Bottoms, a super weird high school comedy. This summer also gave us Ayo Edebiri, prolific and incredible in all her projects. Seriously, if you haven’t seen TMNT, Theater Camp, or The Bear yet, stop what you’re doing and see those ASAP.