Bridget Jones’s Baby: The Diaries Katie Law | The Evening Standard – October 21, 2016 Why Bridget Jones is still very funny. To
have Daniel played by another actor would have been unthinkable, and yet,
could he be written out of the movie? The answer was yes, as we know.
Instead we were introduced to handsome American dating expert Jack, played
by Patrick Dempsey, with whom Bridget had a one-night stand just nights
after doing it with old flame Mark Darcy. The tug-of-testosterone that
ensued between the two love rivals when Bridget announced she was pregnant
was brilliantly played out, with the best man winning. Obvs. In
the book, meanwhile, which is a prequel to the already-published Mad About the Boy, with Bridget in her early 40s, Daniel is not only
alive and shagging, he also has the best lines. The funniest revolve
around his new novel, The Poetics of
Time. “Conceptually, it’s Time’s Arrow in Reverse. The
characters believe time is moving backwards but it’s actually moving
forwards,” he tells Bridget. “But wouldn’t that just mean time is
moving in the direction it normally does move in?” she replies. Again
and again he comes up with smutty one-liners that steal the show and make
you wish Grant could have been in the film, entertaining as it was without
him. “The point is, if we’d done it up the arse like I wanted to, none
of this would have happened,” he says during an argument about her
pregnancy. Fielding
also nails the pretentious absurdity of the London literary scene, with a
great sketch set at the fictitious Archer-Biro Prize for Women’s
Fiction, where Jung Chang, Pat Barker and Annie Proulx fight over cabs,
and Daniel introduces Bridget Jones to Julian Barnes as “his niece”.
Nor does she skimp on some home truths about single women in their
thirties being brainwashed into thinking they have to play so hard to get,
that they don’t in fact get until it’s too late. I
was expecting a lame retread of the film but I couldn’t have been more
wrong, I realised, as I turned the pages, crying with laughter. Bridget
Jones is as relevant and funny today as she has always been.
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