Love, Weddings and Other Disasters

Jeremy Irons counts the number of blind jokes in the scene.

(2020) Romantic Comedy (Saban) Maggie Grace, Jeremy Irons, Diane Keaton, Andrew Bachelor, Diego Boneta, Jesse McCartney, Dennis Dugan, Todd Stashwick, Chandra West, Elle King, Melinda Hill, Andy Goldenberg, Caroline Portu, Richard Kline, Veronica Ferres, Levon Panek, William Xifaras, Ava Gaudet, Dennis Staroselsky, Rob Norton, Rachel Wirtz. Directed by Dennis Dugan

 

Romantic comedies seem to lend themselves to ensemble pieces, in which several different stories about a variety of couples finding love getting tied up with a nice, neat bow at the very end – which usually results in an ending. Far be it for the filmmakers behind Love, Weddings and Other Disasters to mess with the formula.

Jesse (Grace) is a pretty florist who has a type A personality, but became a reluctant viral video sensation when her fiancée dumped her in the middle of a skydive, causing her to dump him into a lake and sending her sailing into a wedding party on the adjoining dock. She became known around her native Boston as “The Wedding Trasher.”

Still, after stepping in to help plan a friend’s wedding, she is recommended to the fiancée of a Boston mayoral candidate (Staroselsky) to plan a big to-do for the candidate that will also score big political points. She takes on the job, much to the chagrin of Lawrence (Irons), the supercilious perfectionist of a caterer who is much in demand for the hoi polloi of Beantown. To make his day even worse, Laurence is set up on a blind date with Sara (Keaton), a photographer who is visually impaired and whose guide dog seems to have an unerring knack for launching her into things, such as the table with the meticulously set up champagne glass tower, sending it crashing to the floor. Even so, Laurence and Sara hit it off and after an actual date, he ends up spending the night at her place. While she’s asleep, he rearranges her furniture and then leaves her a love note. Laurence is a bit of a sadist, I think.

In the meantime, Jesse (remember her?) is trying hard to hire a rock band to play at the reception (the groom is a little bit classical, the bride is a little bit rock and roll – one is also tastes great, the other less filling) and she catches a band and is eager to hire them to do the wedding for which the guitarist (Boneta) is eager, but the front man not so much, leading to a rift in the band – and in the meantime, the guitar player falls in love with Jesse.

=And while all this is going on, a duck boat tour guide/captain (Bachelor) falls in love at first sight with a passenger with a glass slipper tattooed on her neck (Wirtz) and searches Boston for his Cinderella, becoming a cause celebre in the process, and the mayoral candidate’s goofy brother (Goldenberg) is appearing on the worst dating game show ever as contestants who are diametric opposites are chained together with the couple who lasts the longest winning a million dollars. Except instead of being a Harvard-trained lawyer that she claims to be, Svetlana (Hill) turns out to be a stripper with a mobster boss who wants to take a percentage of their winnings. And the hits keep right on coming.

For any screen romance to resonate with audiences, they have to invest in the couple and want them to get together. With all the different storylines going on, it’s nearly impossible to do that; all the characters and situations are woefully undeveloped and the plot, despite every attempt to make it edgy, is as predictable as the Kansas University basketball team having a winning season.

I don’t think this is the fault of the actors. Keaton is as wonderful as ever, and Irons is a pro as always, while Grace and Bachelor pour on the charm, but the writing is so tone-deaf, you end up looking up at the screen with jaw dropped and maybe even saying out loud “are you kidding me?” as the blind jokes are among the least offensive things going on in the humor department.

Still, those who love rom-coms will probably enjoy this because they are a particularly forgiving audience, and any chance to see actors like Keaton and Irons in action should be taken, even when the movies they are in aren’t so good. Just be warned, they are the bright spots in a movie that has few of them.

REASONS TO SEE: Irons and, particularly, Keaton are delightful.
REASONS TO AVOID: Standard, predictable rom-com anthology.
FAMILY VALUES: There is some profanity and sexual innuendo.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Dugan’s onscreen appearance as a game show host is his first screen appearance in seven years.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango Now, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube
CRITICAL MASS: As of 12/8/20: Rotten Tomatoes: 5% positive reviews, Metacritic: 10/100
COMPARISON SHOPPING: New Year’s Eve
FINAL RATING: 5/10
NEXT: Doin’ My Drugs

Grown Ups

Kevin James hangs on for dear life.

(Columbia) Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider, Salma Hayek Pinault, Maria Bello, Maya Rudolph, Joyce van Patten, Ebony Jo-Ann, Di Quon, Colin Quinn, Steve Buscemi, Tim Meadows. Directed by Dennis Dugan

The problem with life is that we grow up, we move on. We never have the kind of friends we had as children (I learned that as a child, but was reminded of it some years ago when I first saw Stand By Me) and even when we reconnect, we find that our childhood friends aren’t the same people they were when we were young.

The coach of a championship middles school basketball team has died. A gruff, genial sort, he had a major effect on the lives of the starting five, who gather for his funeral; Eric Lamonsoff (James), a beefy guy who is married to Sally (Bello) who still breastfeeds their four-year-old; Kurt McKenzie (Rock) who is now a somewhat whipped househusband with a dismissive wife Deanne (Rudolph) and the mother-in-law from Hell, Madea…I mean, Mama Ronzoni (Jo-Ann); Rob Hilliard (Schneider) who is on his third marriage, this time to Gloria (van Patten), a woman 30 years his senior and who along with him have embraced a New Age vegan lifestyle; Marcus Higgins (Spade), a womanizer whose women are getting younger as he gets older and finally Lenny Feder (Sandler), the star of the team who has gone on to be a super-rich Hollywood agent married to a hot (in every sense of the word) fashion designer Roxanne (Hayek Pinault).

Lenny decides to rent the same lake house the five were taken to by the coach to celebrate their championship back in 1978. All of them are bringing a good deal of baggage with them, much of it residing in their relationships with their wives and children. Maybe all it takes is a weekend recapturing the magic of youth when a summer day seemed endless, the Fourth of July was a reason to celebrate and the possibilities were unlimited.

That’s basically all you need to know about the plot. The good news is that this is a pleasant movie that really isn’t offensive, despite some of its attempts to be as in Sally’s milk-spray into Deanne’s face, or Marcus taking a header into a pile of dog poo. The bad news is that the movie tends to settle into a rut of pleasantness, taking the bite out of comics who ten years ago would have made fun of efforts like this.

The movie is somewhat uneven; there were places where I was laughing out loud and others where I was rolling my eyes. The comics seem to be going for a juvenile kind of humor where calling each other fat in some imaginative way is the height of wit. Not that I have anything against that sort of thing – that’s what guys do after all – but it runs through the whole movie.

Nearly all of the movie’s best moments come at the hands of the five leads, which makes a bit of sense – after all, that’s who people are paying to see. Unfortunately, that leaves a lot of lesser characters vying for screen time and making the movie feel a little bit crowded. One of the better moments was a speech that perennial TV guest star Joyce van Patten makes near the end of the movie during the obligatory confessional revelatory scene; it might well be the best moment in her distinguished career. Unfortunately, it feels like it should be in another movie.

If you like all these guys individually or collectively, you’re going to see this regardless of what I say. Fortunately, you won’t be disappointed. It’s not the best work of any one of them by any means, but it certainly won’t leave you feeling like you didn’t get your money’s worth. I saw this over the Fourth of July weekend which is the ideal time to see this; what can be more American than a bunch of friends getting together in a bucolic location to relive the glory days and fix what is broken in their lives?

 REASONS TO GO: Five of the best comedians of the 90s all together in the same film. Hayek and Bello are a couple of hotties. There are some pretty funny moments here.

REASONS TO STAY: The movie is wildly uneven and relies a little bit overly much on juvenile humor and pratfalls.

FAMILY VALUES: Some scatological and sexual humor as well as a few male rear ends on display; while nothing I wouldn’t flinch at, you might want to think twice about letting the younger kids see it.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Dugan has a cameo as the referee in the opening basketball sequence; Sandler’s real-life wife and daughters also make an appearance as the wife and daughters of Tardio, the cannoli guy. “Amoskeag Lake” doesn’t exist, incidentally; the movie was filmed at Chebacco Lake in Massachusetts; Amoskeag refers to a dam on the Merrimack River in New Hampshire near where Adam Sandler grew up; a number of businesses in Manchester were named after it.

HOME OR THEATER: This will work just as well at home as it will in a big theater; however, this is the type of comedy meant to be enjoyed with a crowd so keep that in mind.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

TOMORROW: Igor

New Releases for the Week of June 25, 2010

There is no "I" in team, but there are two of them in "idiot."

GROWN UPS

(Columbia) Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Kevin James, David Spade, Rob Schneider, Maria Bello, Salma Hayek, Maya Rudolph. Directed by Dennis Dugan

Five childhood friends, all members of a championship youth basketball team, gather some years later to honor the passing of their former coach. Now married and with kids of their own, they get together at the same lake house on the Fourth of July weekend where they celebrated their championship win years earlier. However, getting older doesn’t necessarily mean growing up and the bickering and childishness that plagued them years earlier begins to resurface.

See the trailer, clips and interviews here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Rating: PG-13 (for crude material including suggestive references, language and some male rear nudity)

Knight and Day

(20^th Century Fox) Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard, Viola Davis. It’s hard enough to nurture a romance in this modern world of social networking, dating websites and instant gratification. It’s doubly tough when you’re being chased around the world by professional assassins, attempting to uncover a deadly secret and you’re not sure if the man accompanying you is a heroic spy, a traitor to his country or just plain whacko.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and promos here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Rating: PG-13 (for sequences of action violence throughout, and brief strong language)

Mother and Child

(Sony Classics) Naomi Watts, Annette Bening, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson. Three intertwining tales involve three women whose lives have all been touched in one way or another by adoption; one woman who gave her child up for adoption year earlier, another who was herself adopted and a third looking to adopt a child for herself. This first opened in New York and Los Angeles on May 7.

See the trailer, featurettes and clips here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Rating: R (for sexuality, brief nudity and language)

Solitary Man

(Anchor Bay) Michael Douglas, Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito, Mary-Louise Parker. A New Yorker who once owned a successful car dealership is on the verge of a comeback. His out-of-control libido and bad personal choices helped derail his career and end his marriage. While he still hangs out with his daughter and grandson, the latter who adores him without question, she break off the relationship when she discovers dear old dad is seeing one of her friends romantically. Can a solitary man pull off the comeback of the century, or will the demons that caused his downfall in the first place rear their ugly heads? This first opened in New York and Los Angeles on May 21.

See the trailer and clips here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Rating: R (for language and some sexual content)