I don't like rom-coms very much. I think they paint a cartoonized version of something deep and beautiful. However, I do appreciate that some people like them, and that, I say, is fair enough.
Even those people though, must expect their rom coms to be at least romantic and/or funny. I mean, they're probably looking for a movie with genuine heart and relatable laughs by definition. Take out either of those things and what you're left with is either something vulgar (all com, no rom) or something so cheesy it may as well have fallen out of Mills' and Boon's reject bin (all rom, and yes, no com).
Take them both out, throw in an Adam Sandler type character vomitting up the 1980s, and you've got yourself The Wedding Singer.
Oh my gosh. It's so unfunny, I actually found myself looking for where I thought the jokes should have been. And even then I couldn't tell. Was I supposed to laugh at the horrific best man speech? What about the rapping old lady? I was baffled. And until the last ten minutes or so, this pot noodle of a movie just made me furious instead of romantic, exhausted instead of amused.
The film is set relentlessly in 1985. You can't forget. Every scene forces it on you - with its blasts of 80s music, awful awful clothes, and block-shaped cars. The colour-palette seems permanently set to bring out the pinks, yellows, and electric blues of a time fashion forgot. Sandler comes out crooning with a Kevin-Keegan perm (presumably the first scripted gag) and from that point onwards, the 80s references come thick and fast, as though someone's throwing cheese and pineapple sticks at you from a foil hedgehog.
Haha, says the movie, wanting us to laugh at the fashion-sense and culture. Weren't the Eighties the silliest? Yeah maybe, but not as silly as the 90 minutes of nauseous nostalgia you're inflicting on us by going on about them.
Anyway, don't let me bore you with the plot; it's very weary. Sandler, the eponymous wedding singer, falls in love with a waitress, who is getting married to a big city banker, who has the morals and form of a suitcase. Sandler himself has been jilted at the altar by another horrible person, and he reacts to this event a bit like Bruce Banner trying to hold down the Hulk using only his face.
The usual story arc unfolds: confusions, crossed-wires, quirky side-characters, last-minute dashes to the airport, and an insipid finale you could have predicted long before he took the mic. Yada yada yada.
Sandler is wearisome too. We're supposed to feel sorry for him, but he just whinges and screws up his face and makes noises as though someone has told him that's how to 'do acting'. During his 'Hulk' phase (post-jilting), he goes on the rampage, and destroys someone's wedding by shouting into a microphone about the futility of love. Then he punches the father of the bride in the face. That is monstrous, isn't it? Fast forward a couple of scenes and he's cheering on randy pensioners at a Bar Mitzvah. Our goofball hero, ladies and gents.
Not only does he paint himself like a child in an anxiety dream, but he paints the dream itself with bold, horrific brushstrokes too. There's an old woman who talks about sex and pays for her singing lessons with meatballs because, I don't know, age, kooky onset-dementia? There's the creepy friend who chats up women, not to mention the cadre of awful jocks who follow suitcase-man around, high-fiving him for his sleazeball ways. Then there's the slutty sister who's been with everyone, the random old guy who has one inappropriate outburst-line. Kids who are buttgrabbers, a Boy George impersonator who can only sing one song, a rival wedding singer who's basically a cheese-string in a plastic suit, and a whole host of forgettable pastiches from the 80s. At one point, a character pulls up in a DeLorien and its iconic wing-door swooshes open. If Doc Brown had beckoned me in for a trip to Biff's 'alternate' 1985, I'd have been punching the co-ordinates into the time-circuits before the wing door had clicked shut again.
I can only think that this cavalcade of cartoonish characters is there to let Drew Barrymore shine as Julia, the main love interest. She is the best thing about The Wedding Singer, and I think it's because she's the only one with a human haircut. Surrounded by these hallucinations of Adam Sandler's 1980s dreams, she sticks out a country mile as the only likeable, only normal person in this whole garish mess.
I think Sandler recreated a version of the 1980s he thinks he remembers as a kid. This is not the 80s of The Breakfast Club or Beverley Hills Cop. It's not even the 80s of a Duran Duran video. Sandler's spewed up his own memories here, assumed that everyone saw that decade the same way he thinks he did, and condensed the result down into an hour and a half of putrid nostalgia. His character is basically a petulant child, living in a sunlit version of 1985 he thought we'd all love and fondly remember.
Bring round the DeLorien, Doc. Sometimes we should just leave the past alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment