Saturday, September 10, 2011

Four Weddings and a Funeral

During the course of the titular engagements, a bumbling yet charming young Brit who has always avoided commitments falls in love with an American and stumbles to declare his feelings as she becomes betrothed to another. "Four Weddings and a Funeral" was an unanticipated success in 1994 as well as the film that launched Hugh Grant to stardom, and watching it its not hard to believe as the film is thoroughly entertaining and Grant is entirely engaging and funny. After a raucous first half of the film, it does settle down though and become of more routine romantic comedy and doesn't really introduce its characters well so that when we do get to the dreaded burial, its hard to go along with the weepy eulogy because we only have a faint idea how these people know each other (I'm still not quite sure who the waif is living with Grant)! And still, "Four Weddings and a Funeral" is a highly enjoyable film and from it you can see a stew of mostly less worthy romcoms that were concocted from its ingredients.