By Armond White

27 Dresses
Directed by Anne Fletcher


What is currently the most frightening movie genre? Serial killer? Iraq panic? Frat-slobs? Dysfunctional family? Thrill ride? How about the sexually ambiguous chick flick? 27 Dresses cobbles ideas from The Devil Wears Prada, The Wedding Planner and Runaway Bride, but it’s actually more like last year’s obnoxiously cute Juno and bizarrely flirtatious P.S. I Love You.
Each film features a heroine who is not like women you know but an unbelievable woman you’d hate to know.

Katherine Heigl, direct from the frat-slob Knocked Up, portrays Jane, a chipmunk-cheeked New York career girl moonlighting from her dot.com job as a wedding planner, hustling until the day she’ll walk down the aisle (attended by a retinue of grateful multiculti clients). Her combination of girly wishfulness and cut-throat careerism is unsettling and mechanical. Jane’s banal dreams get foiled when her younger, prettier sister Tess (Malin Akerman) comes to town and steals the dot.com boss Jane secretly loves. Meantime, Jane is stalked by a newspaper society reporter, Kevin (James Marsden), whose own specialty is wedding coverage.

Like Juno, these contrivances stem from unexamined class and ethnic privilege. Jane never compromises the way most thirtyish working women must. Like P.S. I Love You, her romantic escapades are a blur of gender relations: she’s always odd man out and her destined love-match is a gay stereotype. Such falsity is what makes this genre essentially unappealing. The filmmakers try entertaining us with nonsense.

From its chirpy music score to the manufactured dialog Jane has with her slutty best friend, Casey (Jane Greer), 27 Dresses plays like one of those TV series where gay male attitude hides inside female exploits. 27 Dresses is spawn from Sex and the City, Pushing Daisies, Ugly Betty, Six Feet Under where frivolity passes for realism. The Chick Flick as Bad Camp.

Check the key scene where Jane tries on her closet full of 27 hideous bridesmaid gowns so that Kevin can disapprove each one with hairy-forearmed acuity. It’s one of those Princess Diaries montages, meant to thrill the budding fashion sense of tween girls but it’s also, clearly, a Queer Eye tangent. Although not as ridiculous as the P.S. I Love You scene where Hillary Swank pays homage to Judy Garland (like innumerable husband-hunting heterosexual females!), this condescending mini-fashion show exposes Hollywood’s basic disrespect for feminine experience. Fashion-expert Kevin’s most memorable line isn’t seduction but his description of “the taffeta ghetto.” 27 Dresses was written by Aline Brosh McKenna, screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada, the Bad Camp movie of 2006.

In Kevin’s second most-memorable line, he summarizes the scene where Jane jealously humiliates her kid sister: “I saw what you did in there; I thought it was amazing!” Like an outtake from Savages, it’s one more example of Hollywood sanctioning bad behavior; absolving Jane from the moral sense of one of the last sane chick flicks My Best Friend’s Wedding. Harsh fact is, 27 Dresses is totally phony. Call it a chick flick, but it’s fag hag formula—product aimed at women who don’t know they look terrible in that Sundance-Hollywood frock.