Love, Weddings & Other Disasters

Year 14, Day 56 - 2/25/22 - Movie #4,058   

BEFORE: OK, now that I finally, for once anyway, got my work movie schedule to synch up with my home movie schedule - and God knows, it may never happen again, Jeremy Irons carries over from "House of Gucci". Yesterday's film put me behind one day, but since I don't have the next holiday planned, it doesn't matter that much.  Based on the length of the romance chain now, I'll probably miss St. Patrick's Day, so the next holidays to think about will be Easter on April 17 and Mother's Day on May 8. Both seem like a LONG ways off, so I guess I'll get to the end of romance chain, work in an Oscar-nominated film or two, and then work in that Nicolas Cage chain and try to come up with a film for Easter - there are maybe only two potential candidates on the list, one is much easier to link to than the other. Then I'll worry about getting from Mother's Day to Father's Day, and I've got several paths from there to July 4 mapped out already, which involve a month's worth of documentaries. 

THE PLOT: A multi-story romantic comedy about the people who work on weddings to create the perfect day for a loving couple - while their own relationships are outlandish, odd, crazy and far from perfect. 

AFTER: God damn, but this movie was a struggle to get through - but only because it bears no resemblace to any real-world relationships, ever.  It's a bit like some alien who'd only been observing Earthlings for a day and a half tried to write a screenplay, without really understanding human interactions or relationships or how people talk. Does that make sense?  

Right from the start, every little detail of every interaction is a struggle - things just aren't like that in the real world, where (most of the time, anyway) people are generally forgiving and accepting when they interact with each other, there's give AND take, people both listen AND respond.  But the opening scene here shows a couple on a skydiving adventure, and really, it's painful.  Here's some sample dialogue: 

HIM: "I don't want to jump!"

HER: "But you said you would jump!"

HIM: "Yeah, but I don't want to jump!"
HER: "Oh, but you're going to jump!"  (She pushes him out of the plane, which isn't cool.)

HIM: "I'm falling and I hate this, so therefore I hate you!"

HER: "You have to learn to relax while you're falling to your death" (She slaps him, again, not cool.)

HIM: "This relationship isn't working, because you pushed me out of a plane!"
HER: "Are you breaking up with me?"
HIM: "Yes, because you're clearly not a nice person, and you can't accept my choice to not jump out of a plane!"

HER: "What do you want me to do about it, should I pull your ripcord?"

HIM: "No, I want you to leave me alone, even if that should mean my death!" (She pulls her chute open, and basically saves his life, despite the fact that she pushed him out of the plane in the first place...)
HER: "See, isn't this great?"
HIM: "No, I hate this, I want to be on the ground as soon as possible!" (She drops him in a lake. Super not cool.)

There is simply no occasion on this planet where any of this conversation makes any sense - it just would not play out like this, any interaction between two human beings.  I'm paraphrasing the conversation, but only a little bit, watch this if you don't believe me, it just can not possibly represent a real-world situation.  Bear in mind SHE still loves him, even if he's having second thoughts about the relationship, so if she cares for him, why does she push him out of the plane?  Why can't she respect his sudden change of decision to NOT jump out of the plane?  Yes, maybe he did promise to jump, but people are entitled to be scared, people are entitled to change their minds, and she should respect that.  Maybe she is a horrible person, and maybe they're not cut out for each other, maybe this is all a metaphor for relationships, we're all just falling to our deaths together and some people are OK with that and some aren't, some people are calm while others are freaking out, there's no one way to get through it all, but at the very minimum, we have to learn to listen to our partners and respect their decisions, even if they're not being rational in the moment.  Still, that's a terrible point to make. 

The man lands in the lake, the woman lands on the pier but manages to disrupt a wedding ceremony taking place there, all the while talking too much about how she loves weddings, she plans weddings, and it's very ironic that she should be ruining a wedding at this moment.  Which is not something anybody would say in that moment, because who cares?  They only care that the bride's about to wind up soaking wet on her special day.  The WHOLE FILM is like this, people making clumsy mistakes, falling down, breaking things, and saying things that nobody would ever say and doing things that nobody would ever do.

Another example - there's a reality show that involves two people being placed together as a couple, connected by a chain that's connected to two electronic devices, one on each person's waist.  The couple that stays connected the longest wins a million dollars, and there are at least a dozen reasons why this scenario wouldn't work, for starters it's a nationally broadcast show that seems to be based in Boston, so that's a contradiction, plus a local reality show would not be able to give away a million dollar prize, you can't have camera crews follow people 24/7, into their bedrooms and bathrooms, and then the show doesn't even seem to follow its own rules, like one of the couples is just an Arab guy and a rabbi, both men and they're not gay, it's just a cheap racial joke. NOTHING about this scenario works, would happen in the real world, or is even remotely funny, it's just something for two of the characters to do, and then it places one obstacle after another in their path, from her being a stripper to a local Russian mafia guy trying to fix the show so they'll win, and then the guy is the brother of one of the candidates for Mayor of Boston, so it's a chance for either scandal or publicity that ties in to the main plot, but still finds a way to not really work from that angle, either. 

Everything sort of ties back to that mayoral candidate, his campaign seems to unite all the stories, sort of - only, who's the other candidate?  He seems to be running unopposed, so he's got this in the bag, right?  And why is he getting married in the middle of a campaign, that doesn't make much sense, either, wouldn't he NOT schedule his own wedding during an election year?  Seriously, whoever wrote this crap, did you even think for TWO SECONDS about how people run their lives or function on a daily basis?  No, I'm guessing that you did not.  Anyway, they already have a caterer for the wedding, one of the best, but then they also need a wedding planner, and for some reason, they hire the woman who destroyed that OTHER wedding when she crashed her parachute.  What a terrible decision, and then everyone agonizes over that decision, and whether it's a bad one or a terrible one, for the WHOLE rest of the film.  Do you go to your job every day and second-guess every little thing you do, including whether you should be working there?  For your own sake, I hope you don't.  

That caterer gets set up by his friends on a blind date - with a blind woman.  I honestly can't tell if this is an ironic story point, or a play on the double meanings of some words, or maybe some screenwriter actually thinks that blind people go on "blind" dates.  I guess for blind people, maybe they all are?  Except they're not, because "blind" in that sense means unplanned, with no advance knowledge of the other person, and it's NOT just based on vision.  Sorry, try again.  OK, maybe a point for originality here, because I've never seen a blind person on a blind date in any other movie.  But the blind woman is somehow a photographer, which makes zero sense, and then the movie has to bend over backwards to make up some BS about art installations to explain this point, when, honestly, it would have been much easier to just assign her a different profession.  Right?  

Ugh, this was so painful.  If you stick with this ONE particular story, there's a bit of redemption because the uptight caterer learns (eventually...) to see things from her point of view, like he puts on a blindfold to experience the world as she experiences it, and everything from eating sushi to riding an escalator takes on new meaning for him.  That's kind of adorable but it's LONG slog through crap to get there - and he learns not to leave her written notes, or rearrange her furniture without telling her, which you might think would be patently obvious, only not to him.  WTF?

The other sort-of but-not-really connected story involves the tour guide on a Duck Boat, which is a Boston institution, it's a vehicle that can go on land and also on water, I think after a driving tour through the city it goes out into Boston Harbor for a while, if memory serves.  But he falls in love with a woman on one of her tours, she's got a glass slipper tattoo, but the movie never really says WHY he falls in love with her, he sees dozens of attractive women each day, what EXACTLY about her caught his eye?  And then why can't he move forward in his life until he finds her again?  And then, once he realizes that, why is he not willing to do ANYTHING to find her, except mention her in a local news story? It feels like a lot of story points got skipped here - so once he meets the love of your life, and he'll do anything to find her again, except he won't go on Facebook or social media to track her down, nor will he look for her, he'll just sort of give up?  That doesn't logically follow, not at all. 

These really feel like the rejected ideas from the movie "Boston, I Love You", which was at one time a planned part of the franchise that included "New York, I Love You", "Rio, I Love You" and "Paris, Je t'Aime".  JK.  Screenwriters, I implore you, get out in the real world once in a while, figure out how people talk to each other, learn how things work before you try to stick a bunch of things into a screenplay that just don't work together. 

Also starring Maggie Grace (last seen in "Aftermath"), Diane Keaton (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Todd Stashwick (last seen in "The Way Back" (2020)), Diego Boneta (last seen in "Terminator: Dark Fate"), Jesse McCartney (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip"), Dennis Dugan (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), Richard Kline (ditto), Chandra West (last seen in "White Noise"), Andrew Bachelor (last seen in "When We First Met"), Veronica Ferres (last seen in "The Comedian"), Elle King, Melinda Hill, William Xifaras, Caroline Portu, Ava Gaudet (last seen in "I Care a Lot"), Abbey Dubin, Rob Norton, Libby Collins, Mark Lainer, Levon Panek, Keaton Simons, Jonathan De Azevedo, Dennis Staroselsky (last seen in "We Don't Belong Here"), Andy Goldenberg, Tarek Moussa, Billy Concha (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Natalia K. Grace, Becky Bass, JinJoo Lee, Gail Bennington, Rachel Wirtz, Paul Melendy, Pesach. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 street musicians who immediately all know how to play together, in the same key, without having one rehearsal together.