Rachel Getting Married

For one reason and another, including car trouble, I haven't seen any movies on the big screen this year. Today I said, dammit, come hell or high water, I am going to the movies (also, there's a $2 special on Wednesdays). So I took a bus and a taxi across town to the V&A Waterfront.

I always read the reviews before seeing a movie. "Rachel Getting Married" had got very good reviews. This, plus Anne Hathaway, plus her Oscar nomination, plus a passing familiarity with recovery from addiction, plus a convenient show time, plus the fact this was its last week on circuit, meant "Rachel Getting Married" was the chosen one.

I hated every dreadful minute of it.
[nq:1]From before the beginning, when there's just a black screen and horriblescreechy music, to the I can't call it an "end" point where it sort of peters out, it was awful.[/nq]
For starters, most of the people were ugly. Even Anne Hathaway looked ordinary with little makeup and plain straight hair. She obviously needs crimson lipstick smeared on with a putty knife and masses of hair extensions to look her best. Her father had one of those Burt Reynolds-like facial jobs where you stare at him in horrified fascination at how someone can look so nearly normal, yet so clearly abnormal. Her mother was nice-looking, and had a mean right jab, bless her heart, but the rest were so-so to damned ugly (don't want to name names).
The cast was multi-cultural to the point of absurdity. About the only ethnic group not represented were the arabs (but the momentum from "Kingdom of Heaven" will keep them going for a while yet). To mix things up even more they had a black dude in uniform by the name of Gonzalez. Don't know what that was all about.
The music was multicultural too screechy mid-east violins, indifferent bouzoukis, some urban, some jazz, a Jimi Hendrix garage-band wannabe doing the wedding march (don't know if it was intentionally ghastly), even some folky stuff from from some old white guy sounding like a 12-yr-old had dubbed his voice. And all of it was horrible. If they ever issue the sound track, do a random act of kindness buy it and destroy it before anyone hears it.
Okay, the father was a Bachman, presumably Ashkenazi Jew hence the mid-east thing, and the bridegroom was a black musician, hence the various manifestations of schwartze music, but how the other ethnicities fitted in was never explained. Possibly they were Hawaiian friends of the groom, but I for one failed to see the need for such variety apart from some politically-correct statement, "Ooh, look how multi-cultural we are." I spit on their political correctness.
The sound was bad. It was hard to make out what was said. I don't know if it's because the theatre had turned the volume down, or because the soundtrack wasn't clear. Fortunately I had read about a third of the script in advance, so I could still follow it.
As for the story, well, Anne Hathaway comes out of rehab for her sister Rachel's wedding, some stuff happens, and she goes back. In other words, not much happens. In fact, for many minutes of screen time, nothing at all happens. People stand up and make speeches which reveal nothing about themselves or anyone else. People dance, but they are just going through the motions, not getting closer or drawing further apart. People bicker, but apart from one big revelation, it's nothing particulaly dramatic. One big drama was supposed to be where Anne Hathaway confronts her mother, but it was totally false. I just did not believe that real people would behave like that. And there is one big reveal in a scene with a hairdresser that was so blatantly expository it would have been laughed out of Screenwriting
101.

The only thing stopping me from walking out was I had to climb over other people to get to the aisle, something I hate doing.

As the final credits rolled, I wondered why on earth they had made the movie. Presumably, someone had been so excited by the central idea, she had laboured for many months and given birth to the screenplay, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what that exciting central idea must have been. It's just so, well, 'ordinary' is the word that comes to mind. A slice of someone else's not-very-exciting life. No questions asked or answered, no difficulties overcome, no obstructions raised and battered to the ground, no characters tested to the utmost, no faith, no forgiveness, no redemption; nothing that lifts it from the realm of common gossip to uncommon story-telling.
How Anne Hathaway got an Oscar nomination, I have no idea. Mostly she looked like she realised she was in a complete turkey and was hoping to escape. The rest of the time she was sticking a cigarette in her mouth. (And her cigarettes were always just-lit. Never half-burned. Continuity, tsk tsk.)
Seeing a bad movie literally makes me feel slightly ill. Luckily I was at the Waterfront (if you saw "Blood Diamond" you saw a bit of it near the end it's where Jennifer Connelly phoned Leonardo DiCaprio from, with Table Mountain in the background), so I was able to go and stand on the floating dock for a while and gently bob up and down until I felt calmer and the bile had settled. Then it was two taxis home again.

If you've never taken one of our minibus taxis, let me explain the procedure. The driver's assistant stands with the door open calling out the destination. He packs the passengers in according to their width and where they get off until they are jammed tighter than sardines. He then calls out, "All right, driver," and jumps in himself on top of the passengers, slides the door closed, and off we go. I was lucky today only one driver tried to outdo Ben Hur, and all the sound systems were set to less than ear-splitting.
When I finally squeezed my way out of the taxi like a cork being eased out of a bottle neck, I stood in the fresh air and freedom of the pavement, and thought, "Do I do the same for 'Vicky Christina Barcelona,' or do I hope the DVD turns up at my rental shop?"

Martin B