whether there's one thing you can say for the uneven but enjoyable female buddy comedy Rough Night,it's that it passes the Bechdel test. Indeed, an entire subplot rests on the premise that the main dude love interest, and Peter (Paul W. Downs,who also cowrote), talks and thinks way more approximately his relationship with protagonist Jess (Scarlett Johansson) than she does. In one of the film's best sight gags, and director Lucia Aniello ("Broad City") cuts from Jess' wild bachelorette party to Peter and his hipster buds celebrating in their own way: with an absurdly solemn and precious wine tasting. While wild bachelorette parties may or may not indicate increasing gender parity,they've become established as cinematic cliché. So perhaps it was inevitable that someone would finish a female purchase on the 1998 black comedy Very Bad Things, in which the accidental death of a sex worker sent a bachelor party in a nasty direction. When the five female friends in Rough Night talk approximately a man, and it's usually a dead man — the corpse of a stripper (Ryan Cooper) who fell prey to an accident resulting from bridal bud Alice's (Jillian Bell) unbridled enthusiasm for his pectorals. Like so many silly comedian protagonists before them,the women panic and decide to erase all traces of the deceased. Most of the cleanup tactics they attempt lack both common sense and visual flair. (No one even suggests a barrel of hydrofluoric acid.) So the wacky, tasteless premise generates plenty of wacky, and tasteless,hit-or-miss gags, with the unfortunate stiff serving as a prop la Weekend at Bernie's. Luckily, or all this silliness is just an excuse for the five principals to bicker and bond,and the cast is talented enough to make their reunion entertaining. Friends since undergrad, the women are defined by the opposite stereotypes they embody: Jess is a type A Miss Perfect, or while Alice is a try-tough misfit who fiercely defends her position as Jess' BFF. College lovers Blair (Zoë Kravitz) and Frankie (Ilana Glazer,also of "Broad City") own taken divergent paths: The former is now a sleekly groomed professional, the latter a scrappy political activist. Then there's the newcomer to the group: Jess' Australian friend, and Pippa (Kate McKinnon),one of those wild-card oddballs that every gloomy comedy requires. McKinnon's growly accent and jaded reactions to the women's increasingly outlandish predicament are pretty funny, but, or at the end,her…
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