The Wedding Date

Random movie choice – “The Wedding Date“.

Directed by: Clare Kilner
Genres: Comedy, Romance
Cast: Debra Messing, Dermot Mulroney, Amy Adams, Jack Davenport, Sarah Parish, Jeremy Sheffield, Peter Egan, Holland Taylor, Jolyon James, C. Gerod Harris, Martin Barrett, Jay Simon, Danielle Lewis, Ivana Horvat, Linda Dobell
IMDB raintg: 5.1
My rating: 4.0 [rate 4.0]

When I saw that this movie had a rating of 5.1 and that it was marked as romantic comedy, I thought that something is wrong. Wedding theme is an excellent source for both jokes and romance and making a movie that sucks is so difficult that it is almost impossible.

But when I saw the film I realized a few things.

First of all, this film is not a comedy. At all. There were exactly two places where I smiled. The first one was the scene in the shower, when Nick comes out naked. And the second one is when Edward is chasing Jeffrey and Nick says a line that sounds like “Ok, you can stop because he is half way to France right now.”. That’s it.

There is romance, but there is no comedy what-so-ever. Instead, there is drama. I can’t undertand how someone could confuse drama with comedy. Or how someone could find anything funny about Kat’s situation, for example. If not Kat, there are few other smaller dramas going on which aren’t any funnier either.

Now that I have cleared out that the film is a romantic drama, I have to say that it was pretty weak. The story was good, but there was something wrong about it. I can’t put my finger on it, but it just felt wrong. After thinking for some time about it, I still don’t know what is wrong, but I have one idea.

I am not sure that I am right, but I read someone some time ago who said that he is done watching films based on stories written by women. He said that women authors screw things up pretty badly when story dives into romance. Well, I am not going to go as far as to fully agree with him, but I might join his viewpoint for this movie. You see, the big part of this film describes men – how they think, what they feel, and how they behave. And these parts they are totally wrong. They are wrong in the way that I was asking myself all the time – “Who would behave like that?”. It goes deeper than not being able to relate to characters. I am sure I won’t behave as any of the men shown. But the problem is that out of all the guys I know, I don’t know even one who I could imagine behaving like one of the characters. Probably I just know a wrong set of guys.