La boda de mi mejor amigo

This is one of my favourite films of all time. There are so many occasions that you'll either adore or squirm at, which is why it is a love/hate film.

Diaz doing karaoke is hilarious, an entire restaurant singing Say A Little Prayer is entirely unbelievable, but still one of my favourite bits.

Rupert Everett steals the show for me. Right from when he meets Diaz for the first time in the church, the restaurant scene, & then the ending at the wedding reception, he just makes me smile.

I admit that there are a few moments to cringe at, like the Roberts e-mail incident, but the good bits certainly out-weigh the bad.

Take the movie at face value - it's just entertainment!

In a way this movie is quite recognizable to me. I also have made a deal to marry my best friend when we turn 30. She also has a boyfriend and I'm alone and yes, I do compare all girls to her. But that is as far as the similarities between the movie and my life go. No way that I would ever try to get between her and her boyfriend and certainly not when they decide to get married.

Still, I loved the story and the idea behind it, but I can't say the same about the whole movie. There were so many things that ruined it for me. For instance: what was all that singing about? Is it really necessary to hear Cameron Diaz singing out of tone for more than two minutes? Do I really want to see the whole family singing a song about love, in the middle of a restaurant? There is only one answer to these questions: the fast forward-button. The same for Cameron Diaz' character. Damn, I start running, kicking and screaming for help if I ever meet a girl like that. I really don't see what is so great about an overactive, lunatic 20-year old with too much money to spend.

Even though there were many things that I hated, I can't say the same about the plot. I admit that I didn't expect to see what I saw. Congratulations to the makers that they made the movie end in this way.

If all the scenes that annoyed me would have been cut out, I would have loved this movie, although I don't know if much would have been left of it. Now it crossed the line too many times, annoying me just a little too often. I give it a 6/10 because of the good idea and the unexpected ending of the story, but if it hadn't annoyed me that much it would have been at least an 8 or a 9. Too bad!

Good film. Some of the camerawork is also more interesting than one might expect, with particularly powerful close-ups where one or two faces fill the screen. Julia Roberts' beauty comes through in a long shot which starts to look like a shampoo commercial: long curly hair spills around her head as she lies in despair on the floor (the public safety message being, don't ever sit with your back against a door which an irate ex-lover might wrench open at any minute); nevertheless, the proximity gives us an intimacy with her character we might otherwise miss. Another effective shot of this kind (two heads on a pillow fill the screen) drives home the theme touched on here of the devastatingly attractive gay man who is made doubly so by his inaccessibility.

7/10.

I never realized how much of a villain Julianne Potter is until I watched this movie recently. However, Julia Roberts is so likeable that it's hard to hate her character. Rupert Everett steals every scene he's in, which was good because Dermot Mulroney dragged all of his scenes down. This isn't my favorite romantic comedy, but I don't mind watching it every now and then.

P. J. Hogan was educating people in the 90s about what a walking red flag looks like all while supporting the LGBT community. Making an unlikeable protagonist is risky, especially with the female one, because we know how society will always jump out on women at every opportunity. Yet casting the ever-lovely Julia Roberts is perfect because not only she embodied the hopeless manipulative Julianne Potter, but people find it hard to piss on the real Julia Roberts. The plot may be full of 90s cinema logic, but watching a big-haired food critic dance with her gay fiance is not bad. George Downes is such a spirit animal.