Evening movie review

There are two words that make most men cringe:Wedding Season. Why is that? Is it a fear of commitment? Is it a desire to avoid the battle between Bridezilla and Momthra? We’re not entirely sure, so we put together a list of movies that you and your guy can watch together. They prove that weddings aren’t necessarily the beginning of the end, and they can even be fun.

In order to make the list, the movie had to be mostly about a wedding (or series of weddings), it can’t just have a tacked on wedding at the end (like the latest installment of certain adventure-archeology series). Also, the movie has to be something that a guy would watch with one of his buddies (buffer seat optional).

5) Honeymoon In Vegas

Before there was Indecent Proposal, Nicolas Cage and Sarah Jessica Parker were approached with an offer they couldn’t refuse. Cage stars as a commitment-phobe who gets browbeaten by SJP into a Vegas wedding (hmmm, sounds familiar . . . ). From there things go sideways, James Caan winds up winning SJP for 2 days, and Mr. Miyagi runs interference while Cage tries to get her back. Nic ultimately triumphs with the help of the Flying Elvises, Utah Chapter and a lil’ Nevada wedding chapel. Weird that a Nicolas Cage movie ends up with hundreds of Elvis impersonators. Or in Las Vegas, he just can’t escape that place.

4) Father Of The Bride

Sure, it’s hard to call any movie featuring Diane Keaton dude-friendly (except The Godfather) but Steve Martin gives a fantastic performance as a man (George Banks) dealing with his mortality vis-à-vis his kids growing up. George eventually comes around, but not after fleeing from attack dogs, wearing a blue Armani tux, and letting his preteen son (Kieran Culkin) drive a car. On his path to breakdown, he lets the audience in on the collusion between the hot dog companies and the bun companies. Diane Keaton even manages to give some reasonable advice, plus Martin Short turns in one of his best performances as a wedding planner named Franck.

3) The Wedding Singer

It was the late 90’s and everything Adam Sandler touched was gold. Instead of playing a rage-filled simpleton, Sandler stretched it to play an affectionate wedding singer that just wanted a wedding of his own. After getting left at the altar, Sandler decides that “love stinks, yeah, yeah” and doesn’t get out of his funk until he falls in love with Drew Barrymore (does she ever age?) before she becomes Julia Guglia (pronounced goo-lea). Good showings from Christine Taylor and Billy Idol in this one. The movie was set in 1985, so there are a lot of those ‘if we knew then what we know now moments’ involving Van Halen and CD players. Evidently, someone liked this movie enough to put it on Broadway. Totally awesome edition.

2) So I Married An Axe Murderer

OK. This one is really more about the relationship between Mike Myers and Nancy Travis but the wedding is fairly important. Myers started his penchant for playing multiple characters in this movie. His beat poet character, Charlie, was always coming up with reasons to break up with the women he dated. And then he met Nancy Travis, whom he later suspected of being a black widow, “Jane, get me off this crazy thing called love.” The wedding’s reception feature’s Myers as Charlie’s Scottish dad belting out Rod Stewart hits until his bagpiper passes out. We also learn that the world is run by a group called the Pentavirate and that Colonel Sanders puts an addictive ingredient in his chicken that makes you crave it fortnightly.

1) Wedding Crashers

How can you have a wedding movie list for dudes without Wedding Crashers? This flick hit the theaters and launched the so-called Frat Pack into superstardom. And made guys realize, ‘hey, I can totally get laid at that wedding, sweet.’ Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn were perfectly cast as 2 charming lotharios out to crash 1,000,000 wedding and rock them all. This one has too many quotes to even mention and Will Ferrell’s appearance may be one of the greatest film cameos of all time. The deleted scenes feature an incredible karaoke version of Nena’s ‘99 Red Balloons.’ And, yep, a little poetry courtesy of Sarah McLachlan. This movie went on to make 285 million bucks in the theater which places it just behind My Big Fat Greek Wedding as the best selling wedding movie of all time. Enjoy, you motor boatin’ son-of-a-gun.

It took years for me to do this.

I was afraid to disconnect from cable TV.

What would I do without it? My favorite programs were on it: Law and Order, Boston Legal, and Turner Classic movies.

And my youngest daughter loved the Disney station. But I couldn’t stand the advertising, the endless commercials (not on Turner) and I wasn’t so sure that some of those children’s programs were all that wholesome either.

And the price of the service kept going up and up and up.

But still I hung in there.

There is something social about having cable. It’s like you’re not connected to the world unless you have it.

But when the prices hit $65 a month I baulked.

That’s how much I paid for rent in my first cabin when I moved away from home in 1968, and that included utilities.

But still the fear of disconnecting persisted.

My daughter out grew the Disney station and so my last moral fiber to cable was snipped. I reduced to basic television with a package that included Turner Classic Movies.

Total cost: $22.

Not bad at all. I received some fifty or sixty stations, which I never watched, Turner Classic Movies, and about five other movie stations; some with commercials others without.

Now, I love the old black and white classics, but after you’ve seen them half a dozen times each, you start to flip around to the other stations, but the movies they were showing on the other stations were not riveting.

Yet, there was the news.

I love the news.

But, I discovered I was getting more and more of my news on NPR and online.

But I do enjoy the News Hour on PBS.

The case for television kept weakening, yet I still couldn’t cut that cable.

Then one day it happened.

I couldn’t stand it any longer.

I unscrewed the cable.

I was finally free from cable TV.

I took the black box back to the cable company.

I was all alone.

Just me and NPR.

But then I thought, what if there were an emergency?

How would I know what was going on in my neighborhood, in the state, in the country in the world.

I panicked.

And though I love NPR, I wanted to actually see things that were going on locally, to be in touch.

I bought a set of rabbit ears for $10, connected them to the antenna on my television and flipped on the set and scrolled down to the easy set-up.

Within moments I was watching five stations with varying degrees of clarity.

Not only did I get our local PBS with the News Hour, but Channel Four, an excellent news station from San Francisco, some sixty miles away, Channel 50, from Santa Rosa, about eight miles away, a Hispanic station which has an excellent news show in Spanish which I understand very little of, but is fascinating to watch, and another channel that shows the same five or so black and white classics over and over and over commercial free.

I don’t understand that last station at all.

So, I have television again, for free.

And I hardly watch it at all.

There’s something comforting about watching television every once in a while.

And when season four of Boston Legal comes out on DVD I’ll rent it from Netflix and watch it commercial free.