This week’s theme was “You Are Cordially Invited To The Wedding Weekend Of The Year”. Wordy title. Anyway, I was a bit skeptical about this week, because weddings are not my favourite things to watch. I have seen plenty of stupid romcoms where a woman is trying to get her wedding ready and she falls in love with the best man or some other bullshit like that. Plus weddings in general are pretty boring. But we figured we’d trust Marc Fennell’s judgement and watch two of the five.
We started off with Rachel Getting Married. Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is getting married to a guy who happens to be the singer from TV on the Radio. They’re all cool and musical, their friends are cool and musical and exotic and their families are most likely rich and happy and everything seems perfect. Rachel’s sister, Kym (Anne Hathaway), is just out of rehab to take part in this wedding. Subsequent dramas unfurl as everyone deals with the history and issues that arise from Kym’s presence.
For some reason we decided that the best way to start the weekend was with a Sunday Movie (Sunday’s suggestions are normally fairly intense compared to Friday’s suggestion which is an easy intro to the theme.). We’re not quite sure why we thought this was a good idea. I remember when this film first came out people were talking about how it was one of Anne Hathaway’s first real serious roles. And she did very well. My main issue with this movie was the wedding itself. A white lady and her African American fiancé have an Indian themed wedding (with the ladies wearing saris, but the guys wearing Mandarin shirts), with a Christian celebrant, and repeatedly saying a Yiddish term. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more ridiculous they had a Brazilian dance troupe at the reception. Maybe it was supposed to be the most ridiculous wedding on purpose, but it really distracted me from the movie on a whole. Because of that I also noticed the camera focussing on one character’s chest as she danced at the reception and then other instances of that kind of thing with other characters.
We were talking about it later and came to the realisation that the whole film is showing how this family is so fractured compared to their seemingly perfect façade. At first look there are seemingly well off, with a loving group of extended family and friends, with this perfect wedding all happening along. But when you look a bit closer there is much more going on there. You have Kym who has her myriad of issues. Her and Rachel’s father who seems to be overcompensating for things by obsessing over his children. Their mother, who is very distant and seems to have been that way for a while. Rachel herself seems fairly bitter about having to look after Kym all the time because of said distant mother but still does so. They all have their own issues which is sort of tied together with one particular situation in their past (which is kind of a spoiler so I’m not going to be any more specific) There were a few really poignant scenes where they all seem to be a happily functioning family when they are suddenly reminded that they were actually kind of dysfunctional and it was pretty sad. That was a good sign of quality film making, and it was definitely a good film, but it was not a nice light-hearted friday night film.
On Sunday we intended to watch The Wedding Banquet. We tried to play it on the Xbox and the subtitles didn’t work. We Then tried the dvd player and the sound worked but the video resolution “wasn’t supported” which doesn’t make sense. Then we plugged one of Ben’s computers into the tv and tried using that, but it didn’t have the proper codecs to support the film so it wouldn’t play at all. We figured after three goes it was a lost cause and watched Futurama instead. I might watch it some time throughout the week, but probably not. The other movies we didn’t watch were Muriel’s Wedding, The Princess Bride and Monsoon Wedding. Be sure to tune in next week though, because it should be a cracker!