Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding

Watching Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding was like watching a newsreel on the lives of some very ordinary people whose children are getting married. In class these families, the Nunzios and Vitales aren't exactly the Montagues and Capulets. One hopes things go better for Tony Nunzio and Tina Vitale than for those other kids.

The film starts from just before the wedding and ends with the end of the wedding reception from hell. Joey McIntyre and Mila Kunis are our protagonists and both are from some very dysfunctional families. McIntyre's father John Fiore runs a strip club and its where he can exercise some serial infidelity with his employees. Kunis's mother Priscilla Lopez just wants to live her life again with her daughter vicariously. There's also some bad history with Lopez and Fiore from way back in the day.

If Joe Columbo's Italian American Civil Rights League was still around I doubt Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding would ever have been made. Every nasty Italo-American stereotype out there is in this film. The action takes place in 1988 but I think it could be made dated in the present without any plot problems.

The reception in a catering hall that's seen better days is a hoot. Topping it all off is the demolition of the wedding cake. Has to be seen to be believed.

Other performances to take note of are Lenny Venito as the videographer of the proceedings which will I'm sure be edited into a comedy by him, Guillermo Diaz as the gay wedding planner who has some amusing observations on the whole scene and Matthew Saldivar as this stoner who is a friend of the bride who disrupts on all occasions.

If you're Italian you might get offended though.

And I am speaking now. Actually, others might enjoy this movie. These are just my thoughts.

Raphael interviews many of the guests. This is more fun than anything else at the reception.

Vinnie, whose place hosts the reception, is a standup comic and quite likable.

The reception has the usual comic moments and some very unusual misadventures. I don't see how anyone can drink as much as some of these people did and not pass out, but the results are predictable.

There is music for nearly every taste. I liked the tarantella and an Italian version of Elvis' "Love Me Tender". Or perhaps he sang the English version of an Italian song. The band insists on power ballads. In some scenes I hear hard rock but don't know where that is coming from. Earlier in the movie we heard rap, but I think that was just those of us watching the movie.

I did not enjoy this movie. Maybe there were a few good moments but I never quite reached the point where i really liked it.

In addition to Vinnie, Uncle Lui (or Louis, depending on which version of the credits you go by) and Grandma were standout characters.

Was this family friendly? I mentioned the statues. The sound went out A LOT. And when it did, a character's mouth was often blurred. Sometimes this was so bad I couldn't follow what was going on. These people are just plain crude. And there was a lot of blurring of hands.

But some people might enjoy this type of humor. It just wasn't for me.

1988 on Long Island. Tony (who's family runs a strip club in Queens) and Tina (who lives with her mom in Massapequa) get married and then go to a run down catering hall for a reception. Its every wedding and Italian American joke you can think of brought to life as two families that never should meet, do so at the wedding of their children. Its nostalgia for those who lived through (and were scarred by) the 1980's, particularly those who did so on Long Island and Queens.

Long running Off Broadway participatory theater hit has been turned into a movie. What you experience in the theater (actually a church and in a restaurant) has been shifted around so that we are experiencing first from the point of Tony and Tina and then from the point of view of the video camera recording the event. What worked live becomes a bit shrill on screen as all of the big over the top characters seem even more cartoonish. These people are everyone of your most stereotypical Italian American stereotypes brought to life. Don't get me wrong, its a funny movie but its really more an R-rated low brow sitcom than a big screen movie. I know much of my enjoyment comes from the nostalgia factor, I was just a bit older than Tony and Tina at the time this movie is set and I knew people who were just like this (and there is a reason that I don't talk to them any more). I like the music,and I'm amused by the hairstyles. I enjoyed the pre-movie advertising cards that set the mood and fill in details of some of our characters (I used to see these sort of things projected on the screen all through the 80's and 90's in theaters and more times than not when I mentioned seeing the ads it shocked the owners of the stores)

Amusing to a point, the jokes play too much into stereotypes and set patterns (clearly the result of the movies participatory origins where you need that sort of thing as a short hand), this is not something I would have been happy paying 10 or 11 bucks to see in a theater (I saw this on IFC in Theaters on cable). I think most people are going to find something to laugh at, but I think mostly this is going to appeal to those who are from Long Island or Queens, especially those who are children of 1980's Long Island or Queens.

Wait for cable 6.5 out of 10