The Wedding Party

Writer-director Thane Economou pulls off an admirable technical feat here—making a two-hour single-shot feature film about a twentysomething wedding. But content-wise, The Wedding Party is hardly more sophisticated than, say, Wedding Crashers and it is not nearly as clever a wedding-themed comedy as Bridesmaids. Here, the hapless bride and groom, Margene (Meg Cionni) and Paul (Joel Johnstone), are typical middle-class lilywhite suburban types—as is the rest of the party—who wallow in nostalgia for their high school years and behave like frat/sorority kids who can't face adulthood. Intermittent bursts of mildly funny Kevin Smith-style slacker humor do occur, revolving around a Spanish immigrant caterer leading a workers' strike in the kitchen; the pretentious wedding cake baker who thinks he's an artist; a failed musician who tries to sit in with the cheesy wedding band; a masochistic couple whose lust is fueled by mutual verbal abuse; and a high-strung bridesmaid who ends up strung out on Xanax for the entire ceremony. But Economou often seems to settle for facile gags and thin characterization in the service of his one-shot technical derring-do. A strong optional purchase. (M. Sandlin)