Happy Late Valentine's Day: Let's Shit on "The Wedding Planner"
Confessing my love for bad movies
On Valentine’s Day 2024, I wrote a fair and balanced review of Simply Irresistible, a late ‘90s rom com in which a magical crab (not a typo) helps a woman find love even though she killed and devoured the crab’s entire family. I enjoyed that so much that I thought I’d make it a tradition. And then I forgot about that tradition. And I ended up where I always do on Valentine’s Day: Thinking “oh shit” and scrambling to throw something together late.
So, look baby: Valentine’s slipped my mind again this year. There’s just so much stuff going on! But here’s your present: A couple-days-late review of the 2002 J-Lo vehicle The Wedding Planner. I love how cool you are about stuff like this — Garrison Keillor’s reader base would have been total bitches about receiving a Valentine’s column three days late.
The Wedding Planner asks the question: What if a gorgeous, balanced, successful woman struggled to find love? The real-life answer, of course is “Then we’re all astro-fucked, because if Literally The Perfect Woman can’t find love, then no-one can”. I don’t know why 2000s rom-coms didn’t feel that it was a major plot hole for potential suitors to treat incredible women like irradiated piles of dog shit. If I wrote this movie, I’d have J-Lo constantly saying “I just wish I could stop farting! This rare medical condition in which I blast weapons-grade, window-rattling farts every ten seconds is probably why I can’t find a man!” That and only that would make this movie make sense.
Despite having never been a bride herself, J-Lo is a gifted wedding planner. You might notice that that is not remotely enough of a hook for a movie, but 2002 was peak J-Lo — this was an era when someone pitched “J-Lo saves a mentally disabled boy from the mafia” and got that movie made. The action gets going when J-Lo demonstrates that she is the mentally-disabled person who needs saving this time by risking her life for a shoe.
I love how the writer tried to save this moronic sequence by having J-Lo exclaim “My good shoes!” and “My new Gucci shoes!” I guess we’re supposed to think: “Oh — they’re really good shoes. And that’s why she’s willing to die to save them. If it was a beat-up pair of Keds she’d get out of the way and hope that the dumpster would roll over them — which it surely would, right? — but these are Guccis, a.k.a. ‘the shoe worth being killed by trash for’.” Also: Remarkable choice to make the bad driver Asian. I write a lot about how Hollywood has jumped the shark in its obsession with race,1 but it is good that these days, if a script had a character called “BAD DRIVER”, the casting director wouldn’t think “Got it — I know just the old Asian guy for the role.”
To skip to the conceit so obvious that they gave it away in the trailer: J-Lo ends up planning Matthew McConaughey’s wedding. McConaughey is engaged to an uptight WASP in the mold of The Baroness in The Sound of Music or Billy Zane’s character in Titanic (business idea: a dating app where the cast-off fiancés in rom-coms can find each other). But even though McConaughey and Lopez appear to be something of a Boring Romeo and Bland Juliet, the universe keeps pushing them together. Consider this pulse-pounding action sequence, in which McConaughey and Lopez did all their own hiring of stunt people:
You might be wondering if McConaughey’s fiancée was miffed about her future husband dry-humping a pop star on a horse. The answer is: not really! McConaughey’s fiancée — though allegedly so uptight that she deserves to die alone — is incredibly chill about this gorgeous woman spending copious amounts of time alone with her husband-to-be. Of course, jealousy would have been completely warranted, because McConaughey and J-Lo end up together. Pity a rom-com fiancé: You exist to get dumped, and if you say a peep about your betrothed living out a storybook romance with someone else, that only confirms your status as The Frostiest Bitch Who Ever Lived.
There honestly aren’t many plot points to hit in this movie. McConaughey’s fiancé jets off quickly because “business work something something”, leaving McConaughey and Lopez alone to fall in love. And they do. And they get married, and J-Lo plans the wedding, because Wedding Planner (she is one). Really the only wrinkle in 100 formulaic minutes is that McConaughey keeps his shirt on the whole time — I kept expecting him to walk into an especially drafty room and have the AC blow his shirt clean off.
It’s strange to watch this movie at a moment when everyone is worried about AI. Will AI destroy Hollywood? Will it encroach on tasks that we consider quintessentially human? No one knows the answers to those questions. But a movie like The Wedding Planner makes me think that the robots might win by forfeit. I struggle to see a difference between screenwriters crapping out the umpteenth iteration of a shopworn formula and a robot doing the same thing. This isn’t art, this is commerce — which is fine, by the way. And The Wedding Planner grossed $95 million on a $35 million budget,2 so the joke is on us. But it does seem plausible that AI will write movies like this in the near future, and I doubt the robots will come up with anything worse than “two characters meet cute when one risks her life over a shoe”.
For people who went to see The Wedding Planner, the experience was probably like my experience when I go to McDonald’s. Was it what I thought it would be? Yes. Was it good? I dunno, it was what I expected — it was McDonald’s. I consumed one of that product; I didn’t ask myself “is this art?” The Wedding Planner is one rom-com widget and people who went to see it knowing that they like rom-coms probably liked it just fine. And I got a better-late-than-never Valentine’s Day column out of it, so I guess true love wins again.
A side note relevant to the discussion of which actors can play which roles on yesterday’s podcast: In this movie, J-Lo mentions completely out of nowhere that both of her parents are from Italy. I have no idea why they did that — the entire world knew that J-Lo was Puerto Rican on account of the five albums she made about being Puerto Rican. But I guess they were going after the “extremely racist J-Lo fans who don’t know who J-Lo is” demographic.
You still have to factor in marketing, DVD rentals, and the $3.99 I paid to stream this on Prime, but a reasonable guess would be that The Wedding Planner made around $50 million.
Oh shit. Valentine’s Day was last weekend?
I watched that clip with the horses. What’s up with McConaughey‘s hair? Does it look irradiated through the whole movie? Unwatchable.
And “meet cute when the female lead almost kills herself trying to rescue a shoe” feels very AI to me. It’s the kind of thing GPT would think was funny. Is this the first example of time-traveling script-writing AI?