SANTA CRUZ (February 6, 2009) -- Dear Kate Hudson, Congratulations! I hear that you served as both co-producer and actress in the new comedy Bride Wars. It’s always great to see a woman taking on the male-dominated Hollywood culture. Which is why, on behalf of women and mothers everywhere, I have to ask, what the #%@^ were you thinking with this misogynistic mess?!

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s 2009 not 1959. Getting married is not the single most important life goal of my eleven-year-old daughter or her friends. Unlike your young protagonists, they don’t dance around the attic playing wedding nor do they dream of spending their life savings on a pretentious, over-the-top reception. They’re too busy planning for the day when they’ll play soccer in the Olympics, manage their own businesses, or run for president. Seating arrangements are not high on their current to-do lists.

But making and keeping friends are. Do you have a best friend, Kate? Can you, in your wildest dreams, imagine treating her the way the supposed lifelong pals treat one another in Bride Wars? Yeah, yeah, you were creating a movie, not an Oprah talk-it-out. You needed intrigue, calamity, a dramatic story line. Instead you gave us grown women who are too stupid to figure out what to do when their weddings are mistakenly planned for the same day. What a conundrum! We can go to medical school and broker ceasefires, but we lose our silly heads when it comes to managing our social calendars.

Instead these ninnies turn on one another in a sorry cat fight fueled by half a dozen anti-feminist stereotypes. They question one another’s sexual reputations. They sabotage each other’s appearance. The high-powered lawyer is demoted because she’s simply undone by the complexities of flower arrangements and bridesmaid gifts. We’re treated to a parade of weary fat jokes, because lord knows the worst thing that could ever happen to a gal, married or single, is to gain a few pounds. In short, your delightful duo personifies every stale mean-girl stereotype. What fun!

Granted, I didn’t have to invite my daughter to sit through this drivel. No one expects a PG-rated comedy entitled Bride Wars to be Shakespeare. But I assumed it would be funny, harmless fluff. Wrong on both counts. In fact, Bride Wars is symptomatic of a bigger problem in Hollywood. My daughter loves to go to the movies, for the same reasons that cinema thrills the rest of us. She loves the anticipation of sitting in the darkened theater with a bag of buttery popcorn. She loves the larger-than-life images that you simply can’t experience from a home video. But at eleven, she’s too old for the animated, singing animals of Disney and too young for the mature themes of adult films. Is it too much to ask that you Hollywood honchos create a decent movie for preteen girls with strong female role models and a believable plot line?

But hey Kate, thanks for the teachable moment. Thanks to you -- and the long drive home from the theater -- my daughter now knows that most public school teachers in New York City probably can’t actually afford a Vera Wang wedding gown. She knows that rope dancing in a bar is probably not how most women celebrate their engagements. Most importantly, she knows that real friends, no matter what their age, don’t throw away their relationship over anything this silly.

Sorry Kate, but I'm advising my friends and fellow parents to say "I don't" to Bride Wars.