Rachel Getting Married

Rachel Getting Married (2008)
Starring The Princess Who Wrote the Diaries, Don Draper's Super-duper-duper-duper Sexy Bohemian Girlfriend , Mr. Noodle (!), everybody else, everybody else's parents

Synopsis
This one woman who used to be famous (or something, which is not explained at all) got high and killed her brother when she was supposed to be babysitting him.  She comes out of rehab on some kind of temporary release to attend her sister's wedding and adds drama to the already-dramatic circumstances.

Woman
 i kind of dug this one. i'm writing this waaay after we actually watched it because i've been slacking, so i can't think of any specifics. very uncomfortable in parts......great acting...... the camera work was a little much at times. i kind of understand the point of it (the camera work) but it's not a documentary so i think it was a little too excessive with the zooms and stuff. i also understand why my friend found it too difficult to watch and turned it off... mothers of young boys, and all. but considering all of that i liked the way it was done over the couple of days up until the wedding and how it was over the morning after the wedding. um i think that's it...

...and i disagree with almost everything moster wrote.

MOster
Here's another "yeah, OK" movie.  Everybody has a pretty shitty deal, even though some of them are getting married and having lots of sex and things.  The status quo is slightly better in the end.

I had a hard time caring about these inexplicably wealthy characters and their crap.  It was a real tragedy that the kid died, but with the exception of one scene it's played for way too much sympathy.  The acting was generally good and it's nice to see Anne Hathaway growing into something less candy.  Midge plays most of the movie with that same self-satisfied smirk that was so sexy in Mad Men but doesn't quite fit in here.

The direction in this movie has to be broken into its two components.  The "telling the actors what to do" was more than adequate, but the "telling photographers what to do" more than made up for that.  We start with a fairly standard approach and then when we get to the rehearsal dinner shakicam is introduced in such a way as to feel like it's guests with their video cameras.  But there's no recovery (heh) from that crap and it continues through most (but not all) of the rest of the film.

There were some interesting elements of the production and most of them centered around the Indian aspect of the wedding between a white chick and a black dude (which is probably the most interesting--also unexplained--part of the whole story).  Other things were, again, overdone.  The drab nature of the backdrop with rain all the time and other such student tricks didn't do any favors for anybody.  I just don't feel the hype here.

Finally, the band was really annoying and I think it was supposed to seem really cool.  This another example of a movie which comes from undeserved pretension.