BEFORE: Chris Rock carries over from "2 Days in New York" and as long as I'm in the middle of a Chris Rock triple-play, I'm going to try to watch his latest stand-up special, "Tamborine", on Netflix, right after this film. Anything that clears a title off of the Netflix list at this point is a positive step. I got the list down to about 120 or so titles, but I think that's largely due to at least 5 movies I wanted to watch this month being dropped from the service. Since it's too late for me to change the chain, that's going to cost me some extra money if I have to watch all of those films on iTunes now.
Before I get to this latest installment in Adam Sandler's Netflix deal (I'm assuming...) here's the Oscar-themed line-up on TCM for tomorrow, February 7. The main theme is "Prison Movies", followed by the head-to-head matchups of "Favorite Joseph L. Mankiewicz Double Win (Writing & Directing)" and then "Favorite Swashbuckler". Make sure you have your swashes buckled:
6:15 am "Weary River" (1929)
8:00 am "The Big House" (1930)
9:45 am "The Criminal Code" (1931)
11:30 am "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" (1932)
1:30 pm "Caged" (1950)
3:15 pm "I Want to Live" (1958)
5:30 pm "King Rat" (1965)
8:00 pm "All About Eve" (1950)
10:30 pm "A Letter to Three Wives" (1948)
12:30 am "The Mark of Zorro" (1940)
2:15 am "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938)
Damn, once again I'm only hitting for 2 films, having seen only "All About Eve" and "The Adventures of Robin Hood". Things better pick up when I hit screwball comedies and classic musicals. Another 2 out of 11 added to my total brings me to 32 seen out of 80 films, exactly 40%.
AFTER: OK, now this is really good scheduling on my part, because a lot of elements carry over from "2 Days in New York", along with the presence of Chris Rock. Perhaps these are coincidences, but I'm just going to say it was sharp thinking on my part, or perhaps just a happy accident. First off, there's an inter-racial couple at the center of things, and if you've been watching TV lately, and paying attention to the commercials (Super-Bowl and otherwise) then you might have noticed that they're all over the place, perhaps to the point of exaggeration. Don't get me wrong, I've got no problem with inter-racial couples existing, I just don't think there needs to be one in EVERY commercial now - I noticed during the Christmas season that nearly every major commercial for the big stores had such a couple in it, and then once you notice that, it's very hard to NOT notice that, like if you see three ads in a row with multi-racial families, it starts to feel a little forced, like the ad agencies are just doing this to be trendy or P.C., not because they believe that they're accurately portraying the current racial make-up of the country. I get it, if you've got white people, black people, Asians and Latinos in the same commercial, you've just doubled or tripled the target audience, but I'm just saying, dial it back just a little bit if you want me to take your advertising seriously.
The other theme that carries over is the comedy that comes from relatives coming to visit, in this case to attend the wedding, and crashing at the house of the lead characters, and then all the "comedy" that arises from family members annoying each other in close quarters. Yesterday's film had three houseguests staying in a New York apartment of a blended family, so three guests plus four family members added up to seven people sharing an already too-small space. Today's film has, I don't know, it feels like 50 family members who sleep over in a small Long Island house. It seems impossible, like how do you even have enough floor space for all those people, or enough air mattresses - and here it sort of gets extended into the realm of impossibity and ridiculousness.
But that's the best thing I can say about this film - some of the jokes land, and some don't, but at least it was swinging for the fences. If three people sleeping over is funny, fifty must be funnier, right? Well, that's the theory, anyway. And why have just a few things go wrong with the wedding when you can have nearly everything go wrong, at some point or another? The only problem with that is that we've seen this sort of thing before, in films like "Betsy's Wedding" and "Bride Wars" and, most recently for me, "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past". Hey, at least nobody here ruins the wedding cake by falling into it, but nearly everything else goes wrong. There are problems with the hotel (caused by the bride's father trying to impress the groom's father), which leads to all those people sleeping back at the house.
The hotel is also the venue for the wedding reception, though - so the ceremony itself is in jeopardy too. Then of course there are going to problems with the caterer, the beverages, the bachelor party, and the guests range from a teen just out of rehab (with a long list of "triggers" that must be avoided) to a couple of African-American guys who were just walking by the house and got mistaken for family members. About the only thing that didn't go wrong were the things the bride was responsible for, like the dress and flowers and such. (In this sort of film, that kind of represents leaving money on the table...)
So I gotta call a NITPICK POINT on something, even if it's played for comedy here. I know that a bride's father might feel an obligation to pay for the wedding costs, like the reception and the tuxes and all that, but I've never heard of a case where the bride's family felt an obligation to pay the hotel costs for all the visiting guests. That seems more than unlikely - both times I got married, the invitations included a number of hotel recommendations, and I think perhaps a group rate, but the guests were expected to book the rooms themselves, that's just how it's done. And if someone can't afford the hotel, chances are they just won't attend then, c'est la vie. A family paying for so many hotel rooms seems way out of line here, even if he got the best rate.
It all depends, I suppose, on how much you like slapstick, and Sandler's particular brand of it. If someone thought that it's funny for him to not know how to open a wheelchair, then you can bet that's going to come up about a half-dozen times. I confess that I found it slightly charming once everything that had possibly gone wrong had finally gone wrong, and they forged ahead with the wedding anyway. Hey, with any wedding some things are gonna go right, and some things are gonna go wrong, and you just have to be flexible and roll with the punches. This is perhaps the most extreme depiction of that, and they could have fixed things easier if Sandler's character didn't let his pride get in the way, but it is what it is.
I could have used a little more romance, to justify putting this in the February chain - I feel like a lot of potential sentiment got very lost in the shuffle here. But there's no way I could have known that going in - and what was I going to do, hold this one back just to link it to "Hotel Transylvania 3", which is more of a Halloween film? Nah, that wouldn't make as much sense.
Also starring Adam Sandler (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)", Rachel Dratch (last seen in "Winter Passing"), Steve Buscemi (last seen in "Time Out of Mind"), Allison Strong, Katie Hartman, Jake Lippmann, Scott Cohen (last seen in "Jacob's Ladder"), Melanie Nicholls-King (last seen in "Going in Style"), Noah Robbins, Maury Ginsberg, Liz Larsen (last seen in "Keeping the Faith"), Patricia Belcher (last seen in "Flatliners"), Teddy Coluca, Jim Barone, Roland Buck III, Garry Pastore, Rob Morgan, Germar Terrell Gardner, Chuck Nice, Kenajuan Bentley, Joel Marsh Garland, Chloe Himmelman, June Gable, Suzanne Shepherd (last seen in "Mystic Pizza"), Christian Cappozzoli, Nasser Faris (last seen in "Jarhead"), Jackie Sandler (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Jared Sandler (last seen in "Goosebumps") Andrew Polk, Jorge Luna, Rachel Pegram, Max Chernin, Liz Samuel, Griffin Santopietro, Alex Song, with cameos from Dan Patrick, Robert Smigel and Ronnie "The Limo Driver" Mund.
RATING: 4 out of 10 bats in a sack
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