Last Wedding

Last Wedding is a slow moving heart warmer. Three men in a tub: rub-a-dub-dub. The movie is about how they messed up with the loves of their lives, but it isn't painful in the least. You'll laugh all the way through. The acting is draws you in, so you are fascinated by these real life characters. Your heart goes out to them, despite their glaring faults. The directing is expert. The editing and camera angles play up the slow building drama to the max. If there is a fault, it is the lack of a powerful dramatic arc. However, some would call that refreshing. The lack of "special effects" was fine, too. There was no shortage of lasting lovable memories.

Bruce Sweeney's Last Wedding is a hilarious but flawed look at three couples whose marriages all fall apart. This is the reverse of a romantic comedy. The comedy is there all right, but there are only fleeting glances at any thing that could be called romance. The film starts just before the wedding of Noah and Zipporah, the last of the three couples to tie the noose - I mean knot. From that point on, it's all downhill, as we watch how these three relationships crumple in a pile of miscommunication, and infidelity. Some of the moments in this movie are uproariously funny, but there is too much sadness in between. That is really the only flaw - the slow pace. But the acting is sensational, and there are many memorable moments - both of which definitely overshadow the pacing problems.

Within the genre of romantic comedies, Last Wedding stands out from the rest of the pack. It is a slightly absurd (yet very honest) portrayal of how relationships are, and how they can fail. Whether it's with hasty commitment, selfishness, or a flagrant lack of healthy communication, Last Wedding proves that our own, below-Hollywood-standard relationships cannot be ignored and that they deserve some sort of cinematic representation. Thank you Bruce Sweeney for bringing a dose of romantic realism back to the film industry. I don't know how you do it, but you turn the silver screen into a gigantic mirror for a captivating 101 minutes. You allow us the opportunity to relive our personal dating history with your own colourful brand of constructive criticism. We laugh as much as we cringe because you manage to entertain your audience without truly shaming us.

Despite the fact I volunteered for 2 weeks on this shoot in some rather sweltering Vancouver weather and that none of the volunteers was invited to the Vancouver premiere and that I actually paid money to rent this title and that not one of the volunteers was ever mentioned in the credits...the movie was yet another awful example of why Canadian cinema continues to fail.

I had no sympathy or connection with any of the characters in this film. The dialogue was trite and vacuous. The acting did nothing to correct this. And Molly Parker's performances continue to be flatter than a pre-Columbus Earth.

A complete waste of film stock.

This is an amusing and believable story about three young couples who are not particularly well suited to each other. They all discover this, but one couple has to get married to find this out. The film is set in Vancouver, which, for once, is not dressed up to be some American city. It was nice to see Canadian references, such as Canada Council grants and the Cambie Street Bridge. The film is very funny in a low keyed, unhysterical, thoroughly Canadian way.