Bridget jones diary… what are ur thoughts????

[Emblue1981]

So over Christmas I watched Bridget Jones for the first time.. yes I know, where have I been for the past 20 years.

Anyway, all my friends love the book/ films so I decided to give it a go and can’t believe how disappointed I was. In summary she’s sexually harassed at her work place (Hugh Grant character) which subsequently leads to her leaving her job, she's portrayed as stupid ( political scenes) fat shamed ( she weighs 9 and a half stone for goodness sake !) not to mention the creepy uncle who continuously makes sexual comments to Bridget.

In 2022 do people still really like this movie or is it more a case that, it had its place at the time but let’s move on???

My massive issue to do with the films was this article that changed first to second after one complaint. The person who complained posted it on Twitter. Article updated immediately with apology.

'Bridget Jones 's Baby might be making history as the second female-directed movie trilogy ever made (Lana and Lilly Wachowski directed The Matrix series), but it almost didn't.'

Wachowski siblings came out as trans after directing matrix trilogy.

Bizarrely the complainant, on getting the alteration they wanted.

Said hold on! I do think that the first trilogy cis women is worth celebrating!

Clearly ... Uncomfortable with single handedly relegating them to second by an off hand tweet.

www.bustle.com/articles/183525-bridget-joness-baby-is-the-second-movie-trilogy-with-all-female-directors-but-thats-just-one

'Editor's Note: A previous version of this article mistakenly ignored the fact that Lana and Lilly Wachowski directed The Matrix trilogy.'

Bridget Jones is one of the reasons why we have had a cultural shift in the last 25 years.

Don't underestimate its impact on our national psyche.

@Gardeniafleur

As a feminist, I think it is a work of comic brilliance, and because it was written by a woman, and is about women’s lives, it was and is massively critically underrated as ‘just’ ‘chick lit’.

Also everyone always forgets that it came on the back of a generation of shoulder paddy blockbusters of women being/doing/having it all a la Barbara Taylor Bradford and Jackie Collins etc, so was a refreshing change to all of that, that women could just go to work and go to the bar and hang out with their mates. Like men did.

Highly commended comedy runner up: The Undomestic Goddess.

The Sophie Kinsella book?

The book was a satirical look at modern day city life for women v funny. The film whilst I thought it was sweet (I probably haven't watched it in 15 years) didn't quite get the point across. And now I'm sure it must be out dated.

I love Bridget Jones' Diary and watch it regularly.
It's funny and a good watch.
I don't think of it as misogynistic, I just watch if for what it is, a comedic film.

I love the first two Bridget Jones books. The hole in the wall and her useless builder was so funny. I identified from my first house. I loved the films too, the first one more. They're just funny light-hearted films. Just take them as they were intended and enjoy her hang ups. They're not an instruction manual on how to live your life. But there are women out there who want to lose weight and get married. 😱

@Emblue1981

So over Christmas I watched Bridget Jones for the first time.. yes I know, where have I been for the past 20 years.

Anyway, all my friends love the book/ films so I decided to give it a go and can’t believe how disappointed I was. In summary she’s sexually harassed at her work place (Hugh Grant character) which subsequently leads to her leaving her job, she's portrayed as stupid ( political scenes) fat shamed ( she weighs 9 and a half stone for goodness sake !) not to mention the creepy uncle who continuously makes sexual comments to Bridget.

In 2022 do people still really like this movie or is it more a case that, it had its place at the time but let’s move on???

So do you think nowadays that women are never fat shamed/pressured by society to look a certain way, sexually harassed or made to feel intellectually or politically stupid? Have we really 'moved on'? Are those themes no longer relevant? That's not my experience

Hugh Grant up until then (happy to be corrected) had played nice, bumbling posh boy (also v good looking) - so this was a funny change. Wasn't it a sort of spoof of Pride and Prejudice? Splashing about in the lake..... have things changed that we can be horrified by it - at least young people weren't having plastic surgery, just moaning about their size /look, I remember doing that when a young slim teen.

Good point re Hugh Grant playing the bastard!

I didnt like the films particularly. They had the mother completely wrong. But the books were very funny.

Oh and the Colin Firth trick! She obsesses over Colin Firth in the book because it was the 90s and bbc Pride and Prejudice. Getting him to play Mark Darcy was vg.

As others have said, it is of its time.

Twenty years ago I worked in an office an there was always diet chat among the women. There was always some bloke perking over the young pretty ones. Lots of people made light of the pervy uncle in their family.

The fight scene between Hugh Grant and Colin Firth is the best film fight scene ever.

I loved the book, butfound the film meh. In the book Bridget comes across as misguided rather than thick, as we have her internal monologue which is often very perceptive and funny.
It’s also explicit that she is not actually fat - when she gets down to her target weight her friends think she looks ill.
I haven’t read it for a very long time but some things stuck with me like the bit where her friend says “don’t you need x calories just to stay alive” and she realises she’s been thinking of all food as bad as if we only eat at all because we are weak-willed. The description of Christmas presents as a ‘pointless taste of others exam’; a hangover: ‘must not move and disturb pheasants and bits of machinery inside head’.

And yes, that fight scene was the best thing in the film!

She wasn't meant to be fat, she was meant to be normal. Bear in mind it was coming off the back of the 90s, when Kate Moss was the aspirational figure and famous women were really, really thin. JLo was a revelation. I was a teenager and used to gaze at a print of Kate Moss in an art shop window and wish desperately I could be skinny.

I loved the book, it was brilliant. The film is funny too but in a different way. I don't think the world has changed that much that it's unrecognisable - women are still judged for their weight and date awful men even though they're horrible to them. But I don't think you see nuance in big Hollywood films so much anymore - if a character is meant to be good then they're often wholly good, rather than being partly good and also a bit shit, like normal humans.

I remember reading the book for the first time when it came out and feeling like I was reading my own diary. The angst about not being good enough, thin enough, successful enough and feeling like everyone else had was much more put together.

Seeing it all written out made me feel less alone. Because the point is she isn’t fat, she has a career, good friends. But she has the inner monologue of not being good enough which leads her to make more faux pas.

There’s a bit where she describes all the effort she puts into getting ready for a date that is then cancelled and feeling like it was a waste of time waxing her legs and I could definitely relate to that feeling.

There was loads of articles at the time about her being a bad role model for women which was really annoying because it’s a comic novel. A portrait of a women doesn’t have to be a role model. Adrian Mole was a hilarious angst-ridden diary novel without having hand-wringing articles about him being a bad role-model for men. We just enjoyed it and laughed.

The films are ok, (I’ve only seen the first two) but they do miss some of the essence of the book.

The book is a work of comic genius (albeit of its time), but the film is a bog-standard romcom which dumbed Bridget down and entirely missed the point about her weight. We weren’t supposed to think 9 stone was fat; we were supposed to see that Bridget was deluded about her weight, because she is an unreliable narrator. When she does finally get to 8 stone in the book, all her friends imply she looks ill and tell her she looked better before!

I like it, the book particularly. I don't get the notion that films must present an idealised version of life.

Women do get sexually harassed and fatshamed etc. It's a diary written from a female perspective- its main character is going to encounter this stuff.

@borogovia

Tbh, I'd be delighted if young women couldn't relate to Bridget Jones because they were mystified by the idea of being obsessed by your weight or having to negotiate your way around pervy bosses and predatory boyfriends. But I get the impression we're not quite there yet.

Definitely.

I read it at 16/17, saw the films, everything was so relatable. Like others said the fact that she isn’t perfect and doesn’t have the perfect right on feelings is annoying to some people. For me I don’t think my inner monologue has changed that much, I just have an extra layer of guilt and over-thinking when I wish that I had a flat stomach that I’m not loving myself enough or proud of my body enough .

Yes the mother is far more sinister in the books than the films.

I'm another one who loved the book. It was just very funny. And of course the weight thing was a running joke. I remember a friend of mine saying, very seriously, "I don't like that she talks about being fat when she's only 9 stone." And I said, "BUT THAT'S THE POINT!" In fact there's even a bit of the book where she loses weight and feels thrilled with herself, only for everyone to tell her how ill she's looking.

The book is also funny for the various coinages such as smug marrieds, emotional fuckwittage etc - though those terms have entered the language so people reading the book now might not realise that they were Fielding's invention.

Sorry, I just saw that bookworm made exactly the same point about Bridget losing weight.

It infuriated me that the films made her fat.

I thought the book was fab and the film was dire. The book had me laughing with Bridget. I couldn't believe it when I saw the film and realised I was expected to laugh at her. I think it's one of the worst, most cloth eared adaptations I've ever seen.

Yes agree with all the others that the book is genius and the films completely missed the point. I was also really cross that they made her fat in the films as she only thinks she's fat but in fact she's isn't! And her friends in the film are much less funny and true to life. Her internal monologues are so similar to mine when I was in my 20s and living and working in London. The day where she works from home and keeps being distracted by changing her outfits, doing her nails etc, and her fantasies about minibreaks are just so on point.

I think the problem with making her thin in the film would be that it would be easy for people to misinterpret it, as some people have with the book. It's easier if you think of the film showing Bridget as she sees herself, rather than as others see her- in the film, the first thing we see her write is, 'weight- 136lb' which is less than 10 stone.

I think the book was much more about Bridget's state of mind and how she perceived herself than about the plot. Always hard to translate that into a film.

I agree the Colin Firth and Hugh Grant casting choices were clever and yeah, the fight was the only thing in the film that made me laugh.