BEFORE: More wedding hijinks tonight - and linking from "Barney's Version", Dustin Hoffman was in "Runaway Jury" with Gene Hackman, who was in "Reds" with Diane Keaton. Heck, you can probably link to any two actors through Gene Hackman...
The TCM roadtrip hits the Midwest and Texas today - "Meet Me in St. Louis" is already on my list, and I'm going to pass on "The Public Enemy", "Some Came Running", "Red River", "San Antonio" and "Boom Town". But I will pick up "Abe Lincoln in Illinois", because I want to fill up the DVD containing "1776", and that seems like a good double-feature.
THE PLOT: George and Nina Banks are the parents of young soon-to-be-wed Annie. George is a nervous father unready to face the fact that his little girl is now a woman.
AFTER: This film had two speeds - dead stop, which at times just featured people talking (yawn) about wedding plans, and full speed ahead, with silly accidents and slapstick. It's like a comic farce Frankensteined together with a wedding show from the Style Network. And because the planning/decoration scenes weren't very comical, or even entertaining, they had to add additional narration over these scenes, which is a really bad sign. Often the narration would describe the EXACT same thing as the visuals, without providing additional insight. That seemed unnecessary - show, don't tell.
Someone didn't trust enough in the visuals, obviously - or maybe there's just not enough comedy gold to be mined here. Without the benefit of Hollywood 6-act structure, the storyline has to walk a difficult balance - if the planning of the wedding is too much of a disaster, it would be no fun to watch. And if it goes too well, it won't be interesting, and we're just watching a re-creation or fantasy of someone's perfect day.
The word "lame" gets overused these days, having come to stand for anything that's not up to par. But this film is "lame" in the original sense - any entertainment value is crippled by its own parameters. The parents of the bride can't be too rich, or we'll just hate them, and there will be no conflict with the wedding planners, and they can't be too poor, or they'll have no chance of paying for anything. This was noted by using the groom's parents as foil characters - they have a giant mansion, give cars as gifts, etc. By comparison, the Brooks family is upper middle class, so they can swing the wedding, but George also then gets to freak out at how much everything costs. So they don't go to Europe next year - what a shame.
In his own way, George Banks is just as irascible a character as Barney was last night - but again, they didn't go too far in any one direction. He overreacts, but only sometimes? I guess if he overreacted ALL the time, the audience would come to hate him? Plus, is he a cheapskate, or just frugal? Because weddings DO cost a lot of money, and there ARE ways of saving. As a screenwriter, you've got to try and have a point, and then eventually get around to making it. Pick a horse, and then run with it.
NITPICK POINT: Are we really still going by that old chestnut of making the bride's family pay for everything? Especially when the groom's family is super-loaded? This seems like a cultural tradition stuck firmly in the 1950's. And flying in the groom's family from out of town - in modern times, no one would reasonably expect the bride's family to pay for that.
Starring Steve Martin (last seen in "Mixed Nuts"), Diane Keaton (last seen in "Baby Boom"), Kimberly Williams, Kieran Culkin (last seen in "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"), Martin Short (last heard in "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius"), BD Wong, with a cameo from Eugene Levy (last seen in "Going Berserk").
RATING: 4 out of 10 china patterns
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