For an amalgam of "John Tucker Must Die" and "The First Wives Club," "The Other Woman" sure includes a lot of crap. Maybe it's the "Bridesmaids" effect: That film, produced by Judd Apatow (whose wife Leslie Mann stars in "The Other Woman"), included an epic bathroom meltdown which concluded with Maya Rudolph defecating in the middle of a street.
"We all debated if it was too far," Apatow said of the scene in 2011. "I just said to Kristen [Wiig], 'If it works we'll keep it, if it doesn't work there's no need for it in the story.' I wanted her to really go for it. And I thought it was important that four or five times in the movie that the place would go completely shithouse."
"Shithouse" could be an alternate title for "The Other Woman." The comedy, directed by Nick Cassavetes and written by Melissa Stack, includes not one, but two moments of fecal-based humor. The first, early in the film, is tonally jarring: Following a night of drinking and best-friend montages, Kate (Mann) and Carly (Cameron Diaz) watch as Kate's giant dog poops on Carly's pristine apartment floor. Cassavettes' camera doesn't shy away from the incident, filming the dog's act as if it were frozen yogurt being dispensed at 16 Handles. (Lo, to be the CGI artists who worked on this scene.)
Later, after Kate and Carly team up with Amber (Kate Upton) to get revenge on Mark (Nicolas Coster-Waldau), Kate's cheating husband and the film's chief antagonist, Carly slips him a laxative. The result is a scene that comes right out of "Dumb and Dumber" and "American Pie," with Coster-Waldau affecting the body contortions of someone who is almost literally pooping their brains out. (Chris Traeger would have two words for this part of the movie.)
"That Cassavetes or whatever other powers that be thought it necessary to throw in some scat humor is an unintentional indictment of Hollywood’s stale quadrant thinking," Vanity Fair critic Richard Lawson wrote about the scene. "Presumably, all this gross-out stuff is for the boys in the audience, the hooting dopes who can’t sit through all this lady business for too long without someone shitting all over themselves."
Indeed, there might be some merit to that broad generalization. When asked why men should see the film during a recent video interview, Mann said "because the man that you bring along will look at Mark and think, 'Wow, I am awesome compared to that guy. I've never done anything as bad as that guy.'"
"And there's poop jokes," added Upton. So many poop jokes, Kate. So many.
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