Delayed Reaction: Love, Wedding, Repeat

Premise: Multiple scenarios of a wedding play out based on random seating at a table.

At some point I'll need to come up with a full list of movie weaknesses: narrative or stylistic tricks that immediately make me more favorable to a movie. Found-footage, especially in horror, is one that I'll always give a try. Coming-of-age stories, especially in high school, are something I have a soft spot for. Perhaps my biggest weakness though is when a movie plays with perspective or scenarios. Either multiple accounts of the same event (Rashomon, Vantage Point) or multiple ways for a story to turn out (When We First Met, Community's "Remedial Chaos Theory"). They are often cheap narrative tricks, but I've always been fascinated with the ways that things could be different with the slightest change.

So, Love, Wedding, Repeat was always going to be a movie I'd watch. The idea for this one is that the names at a wedding table get arbitrarily rearranged, and we see how the different arrangements change the results of the day. Simple, clear, fun.

Writer/director Dead Craig also wrote both the US and UK versions of Death at a Funeral as well as a 2011 comedy called Best Men. In other words, he's a fan of wacky movies in which family and friends come together for a formal event where everything goes wrong. He's good at making this kind of movie. Love, Wedding, Repeat has many characters. They are quickly established. Most of them get story arcs and a happy ending, if they deserve one. He has an interesting sense of humor. The jokes aren't particularly clever. They don't even have easy punchlines to hit, but he's very persistent with them. One character creates a competition then becomes obsessed with comparing penis sizes with his girlfriend's ex. Another character isn't just uncomfortable in a kilt. That becomes the crux of his story. Even the bad punchlines get hit so many times that I started to wonder if they were actually clever. It's not my preferred style, but I respect the effort put into it.

The multiple scenarios premise is a "have your cake and eat it too" structure. You can have the crazy story where everything goes irredeemably wrong AND have the happy ending. The big failure of Love, Wedding, Repeat is that it really only shows those two scenarios. In a 100-minute movie, the first 28 minutes are set up. The remaining 72 are split into two extended sitcom length versions of the rest of the day. There's a brief sequence which fast-forwards through the basics of a half-dozen other scenarios but that's it. That is a huge failure as far as I'm concerned. The fun of this narrative conceit is seeing multiple ways that things play out. Which things happen every time? Which things happen most times? Which things only happen once? Which things never happen? It's way more entertaining if every single time Allan Mustafa's Chaz ends up depantsing Sam Claflin's Jack. It's way sadder if Jack Farthing's Marc never convinces Eleanor Tomlinson's Hayley to leave her fiancé. If we only really see two versions of the events, there isn't nearly the impact. In other words, the time management of this movie is poor.

The cast didn't really do it for me either. Sam Claflin is way too sweaty in this. He's decent at playing charming (Love Rosie, Me Before You) but he's not great with physical comedy or landing a punchline. He has that Zac Efron thing where you can see him trying too hard to get it right. Eleanor Tomlinson and Freida Pinto aren't as comfortable in the comedy realm either. Olivia Munn is used to being funny, but she has more of a straight woman role in this. Besides, she's always been better as a personality than an actress. I'll admit, I'm not as familiar with the likes of Joel Fry, Tim Key, Aisling Bea, or Allan Mustaga, so maybe they were the UK comedy ringers brought in. None of them except maybe Joel Fry elevated their material though. I could see how this movie with the cast of Table 19 could've worked a lot better.

So, no. Love, Wedding, Repeat isn't elevating the form in any way. It owns its shortcomings though. It's an ideal empty calories movie that is exactly what it promises to be. It's pretty much the same quality as all the other Netflix RomComs out there (Always Be My Maybe, Set It Up, When We First Met).

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Social Network

Premise: A look about what in the founding of Facebook led to multiple lawsuits against Mark Zuckerberg.

I said it in 2010 and I'll say it again now. That was way too soon for a movie about the founding of Facebook. That site was barely 6-year-old at the time this movie was made. The lawsuits in the film hadn't even been fully settled yet*. The site has gone through countless facelifts since then and only grown as a societal force. 2010 was far too early to know the fallout of that story.

*I'm not fact checking that, but I remember that was true.

But, The Social Network was never really about the founding of Facebook, was it? I'll admit, when I first saw it in 2010 or 2011, I failed to appreciate that nuance. I was too fixated on the fact that the story was too recent to get a full perspective. This is a movie about ambition and loneliness. Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg is an invention. It doesn't really resemble the real Mark, whoever that is. And it's not meant to. I know this was based on a book, but it wouldn't surprise me if you told me that Aaron Sorkin or David Fincher already had the idea for this kind of story before someone made the Facebook connection.

In hindsight, this movie was almost prophetic in the way that it tears down the troubled genius myth. Shows like House and The Mentalist were still on the air glorifying brilliant assholes. Breaking Bad was still revealing the end lesson about the folly of Walter White. The 2010s are when media really started to turn on these characters. The Social Network jumpstarted this trend by never attempting to redeem the character Mark. The movie literally opens with Rooney Mara delivery the movie's mission statement when she lays into Mark.

It's remarkable how much the performance has come to define Jesse Eisenberg's career in the years that followed. He's pretty much always playing into that persona (see: Lex Luthor) or consciously against it (remember 30 Minutes or Less and American Ultra?). I forgot just how stacked this cast is. It was most people's introduction to Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, and Rooney Mara. It gave us a glimmer of hope that Justin Timberlake could be a serious leading man. It turned out to be Brenda Song's only role in a major movie to date. Dakota Johnson even sneaks in there. Rashida Jones. Max Minghella too. It seems like every producer came away from this movie with a starring project for a different cast member.

Also, the Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross score is tremendous. I don't have the musical vocabulary to say how it works exactly. I just know that it set the perfect tone throughout. It is the secret star of most scenes.

I'm glad that I finally have enough distance to appreciate this movie. The only problem is that I my first instinct is to check how much of the story is accurate, and that's not the point of it.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: The Bronze

Premise: A washed-up surly former Bronze medal-winning gymnast begrudgingly agrees to coach a new Olympic hopeful from her home town.

It's really hard to make a lovable asshole. Way harder than it sounds. It requires a performance of near perfect calibration, because this is a character who is supposed to be genuinely awful while never losing the audience. Morris Buttermaker is the gold standard of this. Both actors who have played the role (Walter Matthau, Billy Bob Thornton) are veterans of this kind of character. For every Bad Santa or Bad Teacher who I mostly come away liking, there's a sociopathic Melissa McCarthy character who I can't stand (Identity Thief, Tammy, The Boss).

The Bronze tries to follow in the tradition of lovable assholes by using the site gag of tiny sweet-looking Melissa Rauch as a foul-mouthed curmudgeon. This is a movie I'd been looking forward to for a while. I always liked Rauch on The Big Bang Theory and was curious to see what she was like in center stage. This is also an early Haley Lu Richardson role. It's a very Sundance-y movie, with Gary Cole, Thomas Middleditch, Sebastian Stan, and Cecily Strong all in supporting roles. I also appreciated the 1996 Gymnastics love with Dominique Dawes and Dominique Moceanu showing up. This felt especially appropriate since Rauch's character's Olympic story was inspired by Keri Strugg in '96.

There are some aspects of the movie I really liked. Rauch is 100% committed to the role and isn't afraid at all of how bad she looks. The sex scene involving gymnastics moves was quite funny, even if it was a level of physical comedy that wasn't anywhere else in the movie. Rauch's character's emotional growth is believable. I really liked her speech at the end that nailed home that she was the hometown hero who stayed.

The movie didn't really work though. The secret sauce to Bad News Bears, Bad Santa, Bad Teacher, etc. is how the "Bad" person relates to the young characters. The Bronze is a weird situation because Haley Lu Richardson never really gets to develop any personality and she turns heel at the last second. Richardson tries to make it work, but her character just giggles 90% of the time. There's not much to work with. Richardson's heel-turn is especially damaging for Rauch's redemption. In this kind of movie, the audience uses the approval of the person being mentored to absolve the mentor. In The Bronze, that gets undone because we can't use Richardson as the moral center, which throws the balance off completely.

Probably more importantly though is that not enough in the movie actually made me laugh. Melissa Rauch's lines failed to cross the line from lewd to poetically foul. Thomas Middleditch gave a performance conspicuously free of jokes. I spent most of the movie confused why anyone would put up with Rauch rather than finding her roughish and charming. I'm trying to take a step back and see if this is a gendered thing: Would I be just as turned off if this was a male role? I think so. I'm drawing a blank on movie characters, but Sheldon Cooper (The Big Bang Theory) and Barney Stinson (How I Met Your Mother) both turned me off at different points in those runs when their awfulness went too unchecked. This is certainly one of those movies I'd really love to track down a female take on, to see if it exposes any hypocrisy in myself.

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend