The Wedding Singer (1997, PG-13)

It's just your basic romantic comedy. It's also an eighties film (so if you hated the eighties …) On the overall the film is all right, not too good, not too bad. But, watching in dejected calm, staring as the screen threatens epilepsy at 24 frames per second, I realize that this is so much the same movie I had seen time and time again in my life. One out of a hundred within the past sixteen years. Yet somehow I keep going back. Mindlessly, numbly heading into the movie theater to see yet another movie, not entirely sure of the title yet certain as to an inevitable memory of the details.

Oh, well.

As far as this one goes, it tries to take off of the success of last years very offbeat dark romantic action comedy, Grosse Point Blank, another 80's movie about a hitman who has become dissatisfied with his professional life and returns to his high school reunion to try to rekindle an old flame (remember the tag line : Even a Hitman Deserves a Second Chance). Not that it [Wedding Singer] is in any way a sick comedy or nearly as good, but it still serves as a romantic comedy. You sympathize with the characters (like you sympathize with the people on "Friends"), you like the sweet romances, you know the ending as you go into the movie. Sure, it serves up well for jokes but, as was once the focus of a Seinfeld episode …

Yada, yada, yada…