Ten minutes into watching this movie I was thinking: how much longer will this last? This film sort of reminded me of the time my neighbor brought their daughter's wedding video over and, to my wife's embarrassment, I fast forwarded thru the ceremony, in front of them. By that ten minute timeframe I was already thinking how this is like the worst possible wedding video experience you could have ever lived thru - combining the bad wedding video with the pre dinner and all the other new age wedding experiences that have developed in the years since I attended my first wedding, at the age of 6 when I was the ring bearer at my cousin's wedding. During the pre dinner scene I just wanted to hit the fast forward button and get to the drug addict sister's speech -a bit of crappy standup that quickly turned into the very flat climax of the scene - which I already figured was going to be her chance to embarrass herself and her family while ostracizing everyone else.
The hand held camera work, changing film quality and grain, and the MTV hectic editing style totally removed any possibility that I might have been immersed in the "film experience", that thing that films are designed to do. Plus the story line was way too flawed, like how is it only the ex-addict daughter realizes the mother shouldn't have left a known drug addict to babysit a child (BIG), or, how come the daughter ends up with a split lip from a smack down with her mother but the mom doesn't get even a bruise from the daughter's Mike Tyson punch to her kisser (MINOR) during a scene where the mother erupts into complete anger while telling her daughter she killed her brother. Here's my take: cold and indifferent mom who had long lost any maternal feelings to her children was already having an affair with her soon to be new husband and left drug addict daughter with son while she snuck off for a quickie, tellingly shown in her priority to leave the wedding to take care of her husband's travel arrangements in the face of her daughter's clearly expressed need for some motherly interaction.
The PC attendance to the Diversity detail was too obvious and annoyingly in your face, leaving me to contemplate what Diverse element may have been excluded, and leaving me with the impression that I had just seen a bad film about a wedding that should have made number 1 on one of those TV reality shows about the world's most horribly designed theme weddings.
As to the acting, Rachel, the soon to be husband, real dad and mom, step mom and dad, and all of the other supporting actors and actresses were all played quite well, to the point where one would expect that all of those people were probably just like that in real life. Anne Hathaway's performance was just as good though it didn't leave me believing anything other than that she was an actress playing a role, which was probably more because of the writing than anything else. I sort of had the feeling that Lumet idea for character development for this role didn't go beyond what would happen at a wedding where one of the daughters was a drug addict who had previously killed her brother.
What would have made this film good would have been if it were a documentary, a real documentary, not a film, falling incredibly short of attempting to be . . .
The hand held camera work, changing film quality and grain, and the MTV hectic editing style totally removed any possibility that I might have been immersed in the "film experience", that thing that films are designed to do. Plus the story line was way too flawed, like how is it only the ex-addict daughter realizes the mother shouldn't have left a known drug addict to babysit a child (BIG), or, how come the daughter ends up with a split lip from a smack down with her mother but the mom doesn't get even a bruise from the daughter's Mike Tyson punch to her kisser (MINOR) during a scene where the mother erupts into complete anger while telling her daughter she killed her brother. Here's my take: cold and indifferent mom who had long lost any maternal feelings to her children was already having an affair with her soon to be new husband and left drug addict daughter with son while she snuck off for a quickie, tellingly shown in her priority to leave the wedding to take care of her husband's travel arrangements in the face of her daughter's clearly expressed need for some motherly interaction.
The PC attendance to the Diversity detail was too obvious and annoyingly in your face, leaving me to contemplate what Diverse element may have been excluded, and leaving me with the impression that I had just seen a bad film about a wedding that should have made number 1 on one of those TV reality shows about the world's most horribly designed theme weddings.
As to the acting, Rachel, the soon to be husband, real dad and mom, step mom and dad, and all of the other supporting actors and actresses were all played quite well, to the point where one would expect that all of those people were probably just like that in real life. Anne Hathaway's performance was just as good though it didn't leave me believing anything other than that she was an actress playing a role, which was probably more because of the writing than anything else. I sort of had the feeling that Lumet idea for character development for this role didn't go beyond what would happen at a wedding where one of the daughters was a drug addict who had previously killed her brother.
What would have made this film good would have been if it were a documentary, a real documentary, not a film, falling incredibly short of attempting to be . . .