Something Borrowed [Blu-Ray]

In case the cutesy double-entendre of the title and cover art, with couples embracing, didn't drive home the notion that this Emily Giffin adaptation was an antiquated, counter-feminist chick flick, there's a mid-movie choreographed dance to Salt-N-Pepa's "Push It" and a later dance-off wherein Ginnifer Goodwin pulls a vagina muscle to really drive it home. But while most fluffy, pink taffeta-strewn girl movies feature a moderately identifiable, if inhumanly sweet and kooky, brain-dead central protagonist, Something Borrowed has no problem making its characters somewhat realistic and disgustingly unlikable, which is oddly juxtaposed with the usual musical montages and happily-ever-after tropes. When the film opens, Rachel (Goodwin) is celebrating her 30th birthday just as her best friend, Darcy (Kate Hudson), is readying herself for marriage to shockingly unappealing empty vessel Dex (Colin Egglesfield). After a few drinks are consumed and Darcy insults Rachel's shoes (gasp!), Rachel and Dex take it upon themselves to get pelvic, leading to a series of awkward encounters and close calls while flashbacks contextualize this seemingly horrid act, making Darcy seem like a selfish, hypocritical bitch. Now, if television director Luke Greenfield had stripped this down to its unflattering humanitarian core, revealing the oft-competitive nature of female relationships and self-definition by a male counterpart, this actually could have been a moderately thoughtful criticism of modern feminine hypocrisy. But instead, he covers everything up with montages, music and cartoonish periphery characters to make goofy something that is ostensibly disturbing. The result is a sluggish and exceedingly problematic cinematic text that fails in just about every sense. The Blu-Ray supplements don't touch on tone, instead dividing up a series of interview snippets into different three-minute puff pieces. But at least there's a gag reel where people flub their lines and say inexplicably dirty things.