Hangover Girls - Best Night Ever

When is Hollywood going to realize that five things are necessary in good cinema: great camera transitions and camera work, a good soundtrack,interesting sets,a convincing premise-one that enables you to suspend disbelief, and good acting. A camera artist can suggest someone making love by a slow pan to a window sill,can change sets by panning to a tree. Camera work is an art and one that I especially enjoy in movie entertainment. It's time to throw the young turks with their belief that you can make good cinema with a handcam out on their ears. Good camera transitions have identified good cinema since.....Citizen Kane. And even light romcoms benefit from good camera work.

A good soundtrack establishes how you FEEL during the scenes and are especially important to the finale of the movie. Interesting sets can make the dullest movie more enjoyable. And a good premise combined with good acting can enable you to suspend disbelief in the wackiest movies- can make you believe in elves and dragons for a short time. Just saying-throw the handcam away....or give it to a family with a kid and get back to REAL cinema where the sum of each artists work is revealed in the whole.Anyone that makes movies any other way is wasting their time and yours.

Found footage has its claws everywhere by now. Even with this comedy, about a group of girls trying to party and celebrate the night before one of them is going to get married. Fittingly (if you want to see it in a positive light) the German title of the movie became "Hangover Girls" (with "added" 3D effects for some odd reason too).

Not every joke is hitting the spot (if you'll excuse the pun), but it has some nice drive to it or maybe its the charm of a B-movie that surrounds it. I thought it did well to hide the fact that it didn't have enough money, by making things appear as story elements (we can't go there, because ... something or other). Of course this can be seen as cheap too (which it literally is), but I'm not holding that against it. I've seen worse but obviously also better movies ...

I like movies like Bridesmaids and the To-do List where the girls put it down like the boys in these raunchy comedies. Remembering the time when Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett, put down the slapstick better than their male counter parts. Now we have giants like Kristen Wiig and Melisa McCartney setting the bar high for the ladies that try to follow them.

Perhaps a little too high for this late night comedy about four women on a bachelorette party that goes out of control. The film had it's moments, like in a role reversal situation where the girls are penalized for accidentally touching a male stripper, whose becomes offended by it.

But the movie still feels like more talk and less action with their attempts to be on the same level of wildness like you would see in the Hangover. In all fairness though it is a direct-to-video B-movie, so how much could they do?

The movie's down point was the found footage point of view angle, with one of the ladies always holding a video cam. Whenever this approach is done badly, it really degrades a movie that had potential.

The whole movie felt like it was written for dudes to star in but then rewritten poorly to have the roles be female. I give it an A for effort in my book, but there better flicks to watch than this.

From the makers of Disaster Movie and the likes comes a new low.

The story is a failed rip-off from The Hangover where 4 women: the rich neat sister, the weird one, the loose one and the one about to be married head to Las Vegas for a bachelorette party, their booking went all wrong so they just go out to get as drunk as they possibly can. What follows are seemingly random scenes akin to the stories my wannabe hip uncle tells at birthdays.

Still, if everything else was great it could have been saved. Unfortunately this isn't the case. The acting ranges from bad to mediocre. The editing only makes it worse, where sometimes people respond 2 seconds too late to shocking news. And the camera is horrible, they went for the handy-cam way of shooting the movie which makes for crappy quality and constantly gives you the feeling that you're watching some embarrassing home video that didn't quite make it to the funniest home videos show.

If after all of this you still want to see it, watch the trailer instead as anything remotely funny or worthwhile is in the trailer.

I think that after seeing 'Bridesmaids,' and 'Bachelorette,' I went into this film a bit tired of bachelorette party movies. I love soon to be married women going crazy as much as the next guy, but I think enough is enough. 'Best Night Ever," which is by far the most far-fetched and over the top of the three movies, follows Claire (Desiree Hall) as she heads to Las Vegas with her two friends and her older sister. Unlike its two predecessors, this movie is shot in a pseudo home movie found footage way, which makes it more annoying than unique. It was irritating when 'The Blair Witch' Project did it, and it is irritating now.

I deemed this movie watchable because it does have a story line that flows well, and trust me, you won't get bored. The film certainly had its moments, most memorably a situation where roles are reversed and the women are punished for touching male strippers. Although there are some humorous parts of the movie, it is a far cry from an intellectual comedy. This is what I have referred to as a "pee your pants comedy," but it falls short of others that I have previously watched. I challenge you to watch the movie and not laugh, but I also challenge you to tell me its merit outweighs its flaws.

Writer/director's Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer are known for writing "spoof" comedies, and this one doesn't seem very different. 'Best Night Ever' is a movie that seems like it would attract a female audience, but it is certainly made for men. The four main characters are constantly challenging themselves to be as immature as possible, and to keep the party going. This movie reminds me that girls just want to have fun, and guys just want to watch.