When American culture is reduced to ashes, cockroaches and DVDs, those left to make sense of it all will watch our films and ask themselves the following questions:
* How could we have so accurately predicted the end of the world as we know it, and then not force Bruce Willis to actually prevent it?
* Why were the female of the species so often expected to escape danger wearing only a negligee?
* And what was this strange and deeply flawed ritual, The Wedding?
Because in the nomenclature of Hollywood, a wedding is never just a wedding; it's always so much more. If Jane Austen were alive today she would have a nervous breakdown, and not just because she couldn't get Emma Thompson's and Colin Firth's publicists to return her calls. Far from being the ultimate, and predictable, happy ending, the wedding has evolved into the ultimate postmodern plot device, like the cranky in-law who is forced to move in with his distant family.
In "Wedding Crashers," we have the underlying theme of Wedding as Aphrodisiac, and a plot -- two guys crash weddings in the seemingly valid belief that single women at a wedding will sleep with anyone -- that allows director David Dobkin to create, in the first quarter of the movie, an overlong montage of cultural variations on the event, a sort of Ellis Island of weddings.
The joke is that all weddings are made up of the same predictable elements -- the adorable flower girls, the elderly aunts, the bad playlist, the drunken brothers-in-law and, of course, those desperate single women -- that two guys, played by Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, can manipulate to their advantage.
"Wedding Crashers" may or may not be the hot summer romantic comedy New Line wants it to be, but it is a fine contribution to a growing oeuvre of wedding splatter.
Blame it on "The Philadelphia Story," or "The Graduate," blame it on "Father of the Bride" or "Four Weddings and a Funeral," but weddings, particularly big weddings, do not fare well in modern movies. When Quentin Tarantino can commence a two-picture bloodbath with Uma Thurman being left, as in for dead, at the altar, then you know there has been a shift in society's view of conjugal tradition.
Wedding flicks come in many guises. Pick your own colors:
