It’s the August bank holiday weekend here in the UK, which is one of the most popular times to have your wedding – in fact one of my co-workers got married yesterday. So today’s not a book is one of my favourite films set around weddings – the late 90s Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore classic: The Wedding Singer.
It’s 1985 and Robbie Hart (Sandler) is the singer with a covers band in Ridgefield, New Jersey. Their main gig is weddings, and as the film opens he’s performing at one the week before his own wedding. Newly employed at the venue is waitress Julia Sullivan (Barrymore), who Robbie meets during his break and promises to sing at her wedding which she is just beginning to organise. But it seems that they may both have chosen the wrong people to get engaged to…
I have watched this film more times than I care to mention – and it’s one of those films where if I come across it on the TV I can’t help but stop to watch it. It was in Amazon Prime a month or so back and I watched it again then. In fact, while I was writing this paragraph I went back to see if it was still on Prime so I could watch it again (it’s not, it’s back to being a rental, gnash). I can recite along with large parts of it because it was one of about half a dozen films that my sister and I had on heavy rotation on Saturday nights when we were teenagers – it’s in a group of films* where even now if I send a line from them to her and she’ll message be back the next. It’s one of a couple of Drew Barrymore movies that I love but it’s also maybe the only Adam Sandler film I’ve watched more than once.
There was a musical of the film made in 2006, which falls into the category of shows I’ve never seen but still know all the lyrics to – because it hit Broadway during the period where I was deeply into the BroadwayWorld message board and when YouTube was starting to get videos of clips from TV shows – which happened to include their Tony Award performance. Although the soundtrack to the musical is iconic, the musical has an original score – except for Grow Old With You which is from the movie – which I think does a great job of capturing the energy of the 80s songs of the movie. So enjoy their opening number – It’s Your Wedding Day – from the Tony’s and see what I mean.
Anyway, I love it to the point where I find it hard to believe that there can be any one out there who hasn’t watched it, but if you haven’t and you like the sort of romances that I write about on this blog and you like romantic comedy movies, then you should definitely seek it out at your earliest convenience.
Have a great Sunday and enjoy the rest of your long weekend if you have one.
*The other films in this basket include Bridget Jones’s Diary, Drive Me Crazy, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill and on the TV front large swaths of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 