Bride Wars (Theatre) - Jennie

Weddings are amazing. I mean that. Mine was the second happiest day of my life. Only to be surpassed the very next day as my new bride and I drove to our hotel in Maui. So how does Hollywood take the romance, joy, and love out of weddings?! How do Cinema weddings turn into what was displayed by this film?

This film was horrible. It highlighted a rare strain of female that wants so badly to have the perfect wedding that nothing, not even a cardboard cutout of a fiancé will stand in her way. Now, technically I don’t know any woman who has acted like that on their wedding day. So I feel that Hollywood is doing the fairer gender a disservice by producing this schlock. But it was obviously made for females. Not one male of note even graced the cast.

I’m not sure what anyone can get from this movie either. It depicts two wedding hungry girls who happen to be best friends. They both get engaged around the same time as well, one by forcing her boyfriend to ask her and the other by a nonchalant sigh of resignation. After finding that the wedding planner of their dreams booked them on the same day they fight to see who gets to keep the wedding date. No one wins and they both put on their weddings but not before attempting to sabotage the others. Along the way the husbands to be are pushed aside and barely even noticeable except for the occasional quip about how “crazy” girls are about weddings.

Eventually, one’s wedding falls apart on the day of the dual weddings and they make up. They both attend the wedding that is still on– while both of them are in wedding dresses – um, yeah. There is a little wrapper that shows that the two have been playing wedding together since they were children and the final voiceover reads something like this "Sometimes in life there really are bonds formed that can never be broken. Sometimes you really can find that one person who will stand by you no matter what; maybe you'll find it in a spouse and celebrate it with your dream wedding, but there is also the chance that the one person you can count on for a lifetime, the one person who knows you, sometimes better than you know yourself, is the same person who's been standing beside you all along."

Now I don’t know about you. I don’t know about your partner. I don’t know about anything other than my own marriage, and if that last sentence isn’t talking about your partner then you probably shouldn’t be getting married in my opinion. I wanted to start this review of with a remark about how Sex and the City has given woman the courage to say that a good group of friends is really all they need, if a life partner comes along so be it. And I think that is great, but that also means you shouldn’t then get married because it is some rite of passage. I guess what I’m trying to say is you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you can’t give everything to your partner, then why get married, what is the point? Stay dating forever and leave it at that. If you really do want to be there for that person in good or bad times, sickness and health, zit or no zit (thank you Mrs. New!) – do it. But don’t marry someone for the ceremony. It is just rude.

I know I got off on a tangent, but this movie simply pissed me off. Marriages, between men, women, both – who cares – should be held in high regard. If you don’t – don’t get married. This movie simply mocks what it supposedly obsesses over.

1 out of 10 – simply a waste of time. And even somewhat offensive to weddings in general.

13 going on 30 (TBS) - Jennie

This should be a quick one. This is Jennie’s favorite movie. I’m not entirely sure why, but I have a feeling that it something to do with Jennifer Garner being Jennie’s favorite actor. She loves her. And this film is pure Jennifer Garner gold.

I actually don’t mind this movie. It has a nice little plot device, and gull darnit if I don’t love me a time travel tale! A quick summary is that a young girl gets made fun of at her thirteenth birthday party. She wishes she was thirty. It happens! Hilarity ensues. It’s Big (1988) but with a girl.

The film has some pretty good elements in it including one of my man crushes Mark Ruffalo. Don’t ask me why – he falls in with Ron Livingston (Berger from Sex and the City) as a mundane nice guy that I would most likely be friends with. Who knows – but, for some odd reason I always find myself wanting these guys to succeed. The film is pretty well written for a Romcom. This includes scenes where Jennifer Garner has to see a man naked (Gross!) and when she interacts with a girl who is thirteen:
Becky: I like your dress.
Jenna: That's because I have these incredible boobs to fill it out!
Garner is fantastic in this role. She plays the character with wide-eyed innocence that few could pull off. I dare say she even got the best of Tom Hanks with his role in Big, as I believe it would be harder to pull off a thirteen year old girl than a thirteen year old boy.

There are only one or two complaints I had. The first one is the fact that “young” Matt (Ruffalo’s character) is played by a somewhat chubby brown haired kid who looks nothing like Ruffalo, while the “young” Jenna Rink (Garner’s character) looks to be every bit the part. Maybe they didn’t know who the leading man was going to be at the time, but couldn’t they have reshot? I also find it frustrating that they gave Ruffalo’s character a fiancé. He basically cheats on his fiancé and then ends up marrying her because – well, I guess, that is what you do when you get older. You marry a person who you don’t really love. Wait. What? Really? I guess, Romcoms gotta have some sort of spur to action. Don’t worry she goes back to when she was thirteen and gets him back from that hussy fiancé of his.

4 out of 10: probably the best score a Romcom can get. Light and fluffy – empty calories.