Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025)

With little attachment and minimal memory of the characters, I watched Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy with the deck stacked against it. I didn’t yet know the credits would feature a nostalgia-bait slideshow of highlights from the original films, but I could tell this new entry demanded institutional memory. I recognized faces from other shows—like the Finnish Prime Minister from VEEP—but who they were to the titular Bridget, I could not fathom. The whole thing exhausted me, so much so that I stopped watching. Twice.

I’m glad I returned to it. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is every bit the rom-com you’d expect, full of zany antics, wish-fulfillment fantasy, and bold declarations of love uttered intimately in falling snow, but it’s simultaneously a wise film that meditates on grief. With several truly profound moments, this is not some legacy sequel cash-grab. It’s a warm, reassuring film about aging, losing, and growing.

Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) long ago became Mrs. Darcy, but Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth) has died, leaving Bridget to raise their elementary school-aged son and daughter alone. She has help, including the womanizer Daniel (Hugh Grant), whom she once fancied, but there’s a hole in her life. When her support system cajoles her into action, soon she’s producing a talk show, volunteering at the school, frolicking with the much younger Roxster (Leo Woodall), and resisting what might be interest from her son’s stubborn science teacher, Mr. Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

Regarding the rom-com bonafides, the fourth Bridget Jones movie qualifies as funny, although more smile-and-nod than laugh-out-loud. Bridget’s monologue gravitates between engaging and distracting, but Zellwegger nails this distant look while staring at her late husband's image in her mind: there’s so much warmth there it’s haunting. Per usual, Bridget ends up in compromising positions in public, but each instance ends warmly. That is, the film is generous to our heroine.

It’s also generous to its audience: over and over, it nails the small stuff. Bridget dates in a modern world here, and while she calls herself a Luddite, the film never lets her play dumb. Bridget is whip-smart, so she learns the lingo, integrating modern vocabulary knowingly rather than cringingly. Trust me—that’s an achievement.

 

But it’s not just the legitimately well-written dialogue. There’s a scene at a talent show near the end wherein the family’s nanny, an invited guest, records a notable performance on her phone, and it makes perfect sense for a character written to be almost cruelly thoughtful. That character—Chloe, played by Nico Parker from 2024’s Suncoast—is a minor one who appears in maybe four scenes, yet she’s consistent from start to finish. Everything is like that here. I could tell the film had me when a relationship’s dynamics shifted suddenly: rather than grumble, I interpolated for the movie, imagining absent interstitial moments to smooth its rockier lurches. I overlooked flaws because it had earned my affection.

Despite its focus on grief, I would still call Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy a romantic movie, but maybe not in the way you’d expect. True, there’s romance in Bridget’s two dalliances, but I’d argue that this is a romantic film about community. We always find Bridget surrounded by people who love her, care about her, and prioritize her wellness. Those eclectic personalities do indeed yield hijinks, but there’s this hardy current coursing through the film endorsing company as the cure for what ails the heart. The cynic in me wants to bristle at such warmth that even the ghosters return to apologize, but I adore the message. The requisite Cupid bits are fine, but the joy of a fourth Bridget Jones flick is visiting all those we met before and discovering they all remain in our protagonist’s orbit.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy might be a lot for those dealing with grief, loss, and mourning, but I’d consider it an excellent candidate for so-called “cinema therapy”. This isn’t a perfect movie, but it’s a really good one.

And not just for a legacy sequel, either.

Emma. (2020)

 Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on February 14, 2025

The degree to which I love Emma. is irrational. It doesn’t make any sense. My Austen experience extends to reading Pride & Prejudice after my little brother ranted about it during Ms. Karl’s class, I typically bristle at costume dramas, and I have no particular affection for any player in this ensemble. And yet, I love it. I tear up in eight places. There’s a specific scene I count as a formative creative inspiration. Whatever the wavelength of this proto-rom-com, I vibrate at it. I adore Emma.

 

Amateur matchmaker Emma Woodhouse (Anya Taylor-Joy) haughtily flits about the countryside doing expensive things and feeling in control. When Emma takes a shine to the new girl in town, Harriet (Mia Goth), it becomes her mission to arrange for her a proper marriage. Despite warnings to tread lightly from her father’s young friend, Mr. Knightley (Johnny Flynn), Emma schemes and lands Harriet in all manner of messes. Still, things look promising for Emma when the object of her personal fancy, Frank Churchill (Callum Turner), arrives. But is the pompous Churchill really the match for Emma?

 

It’s silly: we know all along in Emma. who’s right for our heroine, yet the unfolding leaves me spellbound. Seriously: everything about this adaptation works on me. All the dresses and long coats are stunning perspiration generators, but each garment’s folds and flourishes fascinate me. A haberdashery houses four scenes, but I watch each one like it’s the Super Bowl. I yearn to bake the lavish pink pastry with a porcelain elk protruding from its top. When director Autumn de Wilde needle drops in an Irish chorus, my ears perk up. Screenshots from this movie appear in my desktop background at school.

 

Ahem. Sorry. For those less enraptured by nineteenth-century British choreography—that I definitely don’t pantomime in my living room, how dare you accuse me—let the impressive cast draw you in. Taylor-Joy is a Taylor-Joy as Emma, putting her expressive eyes to work blending dignity with immature exasperation. Flynn’s great as well, his Knightley a withholding presence reeking of paternalistic self-importance until he finally cracks and melts your heart, and of course, there’s Goth light years from becoming the notorious Pearl, but there’s something fun about watching her knowing the axe she’d soon be swinging. If that’s not enough, Bill Nighy’s Mr. Woodhouse steals several scenes with alternating wit and sentimentality, and for the Challengers fan in your life, there’s a Josh O’Connor preacher 600% less slick than he thinks is who’ll have you squirming and squealing in turn.

 

I’m wholly aware that your mileage may vary with Emma. Perhaps I’ve inflated its stature—it was among the final films I caught in theaters before COVID closed them down, so it carries extra nostalgia, and I do spend more intellectual energy imagining 1800s dresses as Calvin Klein shirts and New Era A’s hats than the average person. My brother loathed all things Austen; he hated this film. It might not be your cup of tea, either. But it shouldn’t be my cup of tea, yet I swear the chemistry pops off the screen, the laughs flow freely, and the story sparkles. I also swear this immaculate period piece only missed its acclaim due to the pandemic.

 

Romance isn’t my thing, but watching with bated breath as stuffy Brits dance a waltz defibrillates my heart. It gets me every single time. Emma. electrifies me.

 

I take the movie Emma. as my Valentine. Maybe you can enjoy it with yours?

While You Were Sleeping (1995)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on February 7, 2025

 

 

In the afterward to Sweet Appeal, I explicitly thank thirty-seven people. I also credit one book series, one play, and two movies. One of those movies is While You Were Sleeping.

My mom rented While You Were Sleeping from Hollywood Video in 1995, and it became my first favorite movie. Third graders typically don’t fall for romantic comedies, particularly ones as gentle and dialogue-happy as this, but my early affection points to the film being unique in spite of its conventions.

While You Were Sleeping follows Lucy Moderatz (Sandra Bullock), a lonely public transit worker crushing on handsome attorney Peter Callahan (Peter Gallagher). When muggers throw him on the train tracks on Christmas, Lucy leaps down to save him, but a mix-up at the hospital leaves comatose Peter’s family believing she is both his guardian angel and future wife. Try as she might to extricate herself and tell the truth, she’s thwarted and discouraged at every turn, which leads to escalating tension, particularly when Peter’s brother Jack (Bill Pullman) appears and immediately clicks with Lucy.

Although the film is a romantic comedy full of the requisite laughs and heart, While You Were Sleeping excels outside its awkward love triangle. Set in snowy Chicago during the holidays, the movie is warm and cozy, like a favorite sweater fresh out of the dryer. Lucy’s love story is as much about Jack as his family: the Callahans absorb her into their lives and home, gifting an affection-starved woman who buried both parents the connection she needs. Among the many feats of Jon Turteltaub’s film are the cross-talk scenes of family meals: they’re packed with snappy comedy dialogue but maintain a wholesome authenticity. Combined with an exceptional cast of side characters—my favorites being her exasperated boss Jerry (Jason Bernard) and her slimy neighbor Joe Jr. (a delightful Michael Rispoli)—While You Were Sleeping is well-acted by all players.

Still, this is Bullock’s and Pullman’s film. The former’s star would grow three sizes with Speed soon after, leaving this and Hope Floats as relics of the homely, understated character actress she wouldn’t be again. Lucy is demure and kind, a generous pushover with simple goals, but her heart is in the right place. Buried in oversized sweaters and selling discomfort with rigid posture and bashful eyes, Bullock’s Lucy is as instantly lovable as any rom-com protagonist. Meanwhile, Pullman, though far less expressive than his co-star, is a flawless fit for woodworker Jack. He’s a K-Mart denim jacket to his brother’s Armani suit; he’s handsome and rustic and funny, but Pullman imbues him with this little brother hesitancy that makes watching him fall for Lucy a delight. Theirs is tender, believable chemistry, a vital achievement for a movie built on innocent deception.

As Sweet Appeal can confirm, I love the mistaken identity trope, and While You Were Sleeping executes it masterfully. Where Dear Evan Hansen sweats to keep its unwitting fibber self-aware, the script by Daniel Sullivan and Fred Lebow sees Lucy obsessed with doing the right thing. She attempts a half-dozen confessions—it’s her boss and Peter’s godfather (Jack Warden) who warn her off the truth. Per genre norms, While You Were Sleeping concludes with a kiss, but the inevitable confession speech that precedes it counts among my favorite scenes in any movie.

It’s impossible to capture a film as formative as this in a few paragraphs. While You Were Sleeping provided my first vocabulary for love, but it’s a modest movie, a quintessential 90s rom-com before they became formulaic, with a future megastar winning our hearts for the first time. This is a film to watch while snuggled under a fluffy blanket and sipping fresh cocoa.

And hey, if you like it, I’ve got a novel you might be interested in…

Atropia (2025)

 

The first movie I saw in theaters without any adults was The Truman Show. Matt and I spent an ungodly sum on food and then gave the rest to donation collectors from the Roy Rogers Foundation. That was an iconic movie for me, so invoking its artificiality to talk about Atropia, another movie focused on simulation, would tickle me to no end.

Unfortunately, as I got deeper into Atropia, comparisons with The Truman Show no longer felt apt. In Atropia, everybody knows the world is fake—there’s no Jim Carrey unwittingly sincere in the face of artificiality. Medina Wazl is a training facility populated by actors and veterans. There’s no hiding from the unreal: announcements implore responsibility for blood bags while an artist paints fake limbs for the amputee actors to “lose” during "skirmishes". Most of the “insurgents” speak Spanish, not Arabic. Private iPod provides pop songs a cappella.

Set in 2006, there’s a war in Iraq underway, which motivates the war games, but those who take the exercises most seriously draw eye rolls. That intensity comes from different places: Fayruz (Alia Shawkat) sees these episodes as a springboard to Hollywood; she urges authenticity from her team to maximize her chance of being discovered. On the other hand, there’s Tanner (Callum Turner), who recently returned from a tour in Iraq but is itching for another round. He’s intent on coaching up those soon-to-be deployed boys who aren’t ready for the real war in the Middle East. With conflicting goals, Fayruz and Tanner grate on one another at first before a spark ignites between them. Pretending to be terrorists, they wreak havoc on would-be soldiers less committed to the bit, lording over their fake Fallujah between intimate whispers and saucy jokes.

But who are these two people really? Is their chemistry genuine, or is it another fake explosion from the simulation? Both want out of Medina Wazl and both center their lives on an Iraq ravaged by United States military efforts for…well, nobody’s able to articulate why exactly. That weighs on them, too, but that weight isn’t felt through the costumes and fake blood inspired by actual cultural garb and the very real violence and death happening a world away.

If this sounds like a heavy premise, I’ve misled you: this is a funny movie. More dark comedy than outright laugher, Atropia satirizes the American military’s involvement in Iraq with plenty of humor, much of which lands. Some elements don’t—a subplot involving a constipated reporter feels like a silly plot contrivance, and an early celebrity cameo dials things up a little too much—but most segments bring bite. In particular, every scene with Tim Heidecker and Chloë Sevigny as dispassionate commanders overseeing the "operation" underlines the insincerity of the cause, and Chekov’s tortoise amused me every single time. Atropia is a cinematic throwback to my college years when Hollywood churned out anti-war films, but it has a defter touch than the satires did during the actual conflict. 

Moreover, Atropia ‘s scope exceeds the Iraq War. This is a film about self-deception, about performance and simulation and slipping into roles so deeply that we surrender some part of ourselves to them. Shawkat’s Fayruz embodies that dissociation from an acting perspective, but Turner’s Tanner feels the weight of his deployment; playing Abu Dice in a phony conflict feels more real than anything else. Forget The Truman Show: Atropia’s cinematic parallel is Synecdoche, New York, but with the intellectual self-seriousness limited to subtext scribbled on a port-o-potty wall.

The challenge of Atropia for writer-director Hailey Gates was juggling everything. To ask one film to be an anti-war critique, a commentary on simulation, and a convincing romance, all while maintaining the lightness of a comedy while edifice and construction intrude on every scene, is a tall order for a directorial debut feature. But she succeeds: Atropia is a joy to watch, rich with surprises until the very end and a brilliant vehicle for Shawkat to wield her full range of talents. Is it a tad over-ambitious? Probably. But it requires incredible touch to posit Charlie Kaufman-esque existential questions without forfeiting accessibility or warmth—and Gates does it. I can’t wait to watch what she does next.

Of course, Atropia has no release date yet; I’m not even sure it has a distributor lined up. But I still have a few hours with it available through the Sundance app. I might start it up again.

That’s the highest praise I can give the film.