# Wedding Singer, The (1998)

### reviewed by
Michael Redman

    Wedding Singer hits a sour note

    The Wedding Singer
    A Film Review By Michael Redman
    Copyright 1998 By Michael Redman

    *1/2 (out of ****)

What were they thinking? Nostalgia for the seventies is bad enough, but do we really need an eighties film?

Robbie Hart (Adam Sandler) used to want to be a rock and roll star, but in 1985 he's singing at weddings and having a good time. A romantic at heart, he loves weddings and is just about to get married to his high-school sweetie. When she leaves him waiting at the altar, his tune changes to "Love Stinks".

He meets waitress Julia (Drew Barrymore) who is engaged to a junk-bonds salesman and you know that they are going to get together. In fact you know everything that is going to happen during this movie.

Sandler is somewhat adequate in his leading man role, but there is no spark. Barrymore doesn't seem to be able to convey anything other than a pretty face with nothing behind it: beauty but no attitude. Both characters are just there. Bit parts by Steve Buscemi and Jon Lovitz steal the show.

The eighties are shoved in our face. References to DeLoreans, Madonna, "Dallas", Ivana and Donald, Burt and Loni and "Miami Vice" get old fast. The filmmakers must have realized that there wasn't much entertainment to the story and thought they could dazzle the audience with humorous period allusions. They're not funny and it doesn't work.

With change on all fronts accelerating more and more, nostalgia appears to have a great appeal, but don't you think we could have more than 14 years before we yearn for the past. Maybe we can look forward to a film next year waxing nostalgically about El Nino.

(Michael Redman has written this column for over 23 years and he knows that nostalgia is not what it used to be.)

[This appeared in the 3/5/98 "Bloomington Voice", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at redman@bvoice.com] -- mailto:redman@bvoice.com This week's film review at http://www.bvoice.com/ Film reviews archive at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews