At the movies (and on TV)...Sat, Feb 5, 2005

Grace MacLaine

05 Feb 2025 — 4 min read

20 years ago, Amy Adams won a special jury prize for acting at Sundance. Maybe the girl from Catch Me If You Can could finally become a movie star.

At the movies: the Wedding Date

After dominating the 1990s and early 2000s, the rom-com was worn out. Rom-coms of the early 2000s are too often lazy and rote, but 2005 is actually, a major year of innovation and experimentation for the genre (sometimes for better, sometimes not so much). This month, you could catch Hitch, a Will Smith star vehicle that dared to ask "what if rom-coms were...for boys?" (Later that year, The 40 Year Old Virgin would answer this question and become a smash hit). And you could catch Bride and Prejudice, which revived the "retell a classic story" trend from the '90s but with a major twist: this Jane Austen retelling was also a Bollywood-style musical.

Then there's The Wedding Date, which is the most traditional of the lot. For one, while Hitch and Bride and Prejudice brought some much needed diversity to the genre, The Wedding Date is lily-white. But that doesn't mean it isn't strange. The film continues the 2000s trend of very high concept rom-coms: Debra Messing hires a sex worker to be her date to her sister's wedding. Remember when all a studio needed to greenlight a rom-com was the guy from My Best Friend's Wedding, Grace from Will and Grace, and a premise?

I expected the treatment of sex work to be gross, but I was pleasantly surprised. Despite some ugly comments by Messing's character, the film clearly has a great deal of respect for the world's oldest profession. The script (by Dana Fox, a current Oscar nominee for Wicked) explores the immense emotional intelligence required in this job. I'm biased towards Mulroney and all cast members of HBO's Enlightened, but I think he's excellent here. You understand that this is a smart and kind man who is very good at his job, but the rigid boundaries of his work can also be isolating. The character as written is a too-perfect fantasy, but Mulroney finds new layers to him.

This rom-com is also surprisingly sexual, and foretells the genres impending turn towards raunch in the Apatow era. We see Dermot's butt, and we get veiled but nevertheless very frank discussion of specific sex acts.

This is also the first but not last time that a rom-com is destabilized by an unnecessarily excellent Amy Adams performance. Adams plays Messing's sister, and in another movie she'd be a total shrew. One of the things I like about The Wedding Date is that it allows its characters to be truly messy and even nasty. Messing tells her date "You know those families where everyone's out of their minds, but at the end of the day they're you family, so you love them? Mine's not like that." At times, The Wedding Date flirts with an emotional realism and darkness that reminds me of the indie rom-coms that came along once the studios stopped making rom-coms (eventually, this emotional realism bled into studio rom-coms, like the underrated satire Isn't it Romantic, also written by Dana Fox). And the performances back this up. This is most obvious with Adams (this was the middle stop on her whirlwind journey from Rob Lowe's love interest on a Friday CBS medical drama to Oscar nominee in about a year). She brings out real sadness and desperation in a character that's supposed to be a villain. But you see it with Messing, with Mulroney, with Holland Taylor as the mean mom, and even with Jack Davenport as Amy Adams' husband-to-be. I am inclined to give director Claire Kilner some credit for this, as she recently got superb work out of an enormous cast on season one of House of the Dragon.

Like many 2000s rom-coms, The Wedding Date has many ardent fans. And while I can't count myself among them, I can see what they see.

Also in theaters...

The Wedding Date was #2 this weekend with $13 million. It ultimately made $31 million dollars domestic.
#1 was the horror movie Boogeyman, written by Eric Kripke of Supernatural fame,
Million Dollar Baby was #4, it would ultimately cross the $100 million mark in the US, as would The Aviator and Sideways.
Alone in the Dark, the rare movie to receive an F cinemascore, dropped 67% in its second weekend.
Plus, James Cameron's ocean documentary Aliens of the Deep was in theaters.

11:30 Saturday Night Live! on NBC

with host Paris Hilton and musical guest Keane

I'm not a fan of SNL, and most episodes feel like they're straining to fill time. But then you watch an episode like this and you understand what it looks like when the show is stretched to the brink.

This episode shows you that the host does matter. Paris Hilton is a bad host. According to Tina Fey, she was lazy and disengaged the entire week. And you can feel it. Most of her sketches are designed to ask as little of her as possible. Her monologue is full of prerecorded voiceover for her dog. Most of the sketches require her to be pretty and stonefaced, and she is cut out of the frame whenever possible. And most of the sketches are...not funny.

You can feel what a struggle it was to work with her in the rest of the show. There are three separate ads for "CheapKids" when one would have done the job. They clearly lacked the bandwidth, time, and inspiration to make a fuller show. This hasn't been a great season of SNL. But this makes all those other episodes look better.

But at least I got to sing along with "Somewhere Only We Know!"