Our Family Wedding Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.0

Our Family Wedding Blu-ray Movie Review

More like Our Career Funeral, or My Big Fat Racially Charged Wedding

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater July 19, 2010

Yes, it’s time yet again for another round of Trash That Terrible Rom-Com, everyone’s favorite—or maybe least favorite—film review posing as a game show! I’m your host, Casey Broadwater, and I labor through nearly unwatchable, cliché-ridden, almost unbelievably formulaic rom-coms so you don’t have to! Or—who knows!—maybe you like terrible rom-coms. There is—and I can certainly attest—a perverse satisfaction in watching a movie that cost millions of dollars to make implode upon itself like a dying star, sucking more, and harder, than a black hole. Anywhoozle, our last loser was the dreadful When in Rome, a “film” that outright failed to be funny or romantic, and today’s contestant—Our Family Wedding—is up against even greater odds. Not only does Our Family Wedding have to make our home theater audience laugh, tear up, and sigh with achy, heartfelt longing, but it’s also tasked with wringing jokes out of stale racial stereotypes! Move over My Big Fat Greek Wedding! Now, you’re probably as anxious to get this over with as I am, so let’s spin the wheel, go to the videotape, and let the game begin!

For the sake of everyone’s sanity, I’ll drop the sarcastic game show routine and stick to what—even in something as subjective as a film review—is a cold, hard, objective, measurable, nearly scientific truth: Our Family Wedding is painfully, awkwardly unfunny. It’s like watching a drunk fall down a flight of stairs in slow motion, or standing behind someone who just audibly passed gas in a crowded elevator. It’s the proverbial train wreck from which, try though you might, you can’t possibly avert your eyes. It’s easily—hopelessly, flailingly—one of the worst films I’ve seen so far this year. Let’s step back for a minute, though, and examine the facts of the case. On the surface, Our Family Wedding is a film about an African-American man and a Mexican- American woman planning their nuptials, with the help—and hindrance—of their mutually racist families. The subtext though, if you parse director Rick Famuyiwa’s layers of symbolically loaded imagery and get at the core value system of his…psych! The film is as shallow and tepid as the water in a kiddie pool. Now, this is a charge commonly leveled at rom-coms, but Our Family Wedding is more vapid and watery than most.

The film features America Ferrera, of ABC’s Ugly Betty, and House of Payne’s Lance Gross as Lucia and Marcus, an interracial couple currently cohabitating and hiding their marriage plans from both of their families. They want to tie the knot before heading to Laos, where Marcus has accepted a volunteer position with Doctors Without Borders, but this means that Lucia has to drop out of law school at Columbia—the second fact she’s hiding from her overbearing mechanic of a pop, Miguel, played by stand-up comic Carlos Mencia. The couple travels to Los Angeles to break the news to their respective clans, but naturally, this doesn’t go quite as smoothly as planned. For one, Marcus’ dad, well-off late-night radio personality Brad Boyd (Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker, slumming) has just had his car towed by Miguel—what a coincidence!— and the two men, without knowing their offspring are in love, trade racial slurs and refer to one another’s respective races as “you people.” Imagine their surprise, then, when both men see each other later that night at the big cross-family, bean-spilling dinner that Lucia and Marcus have arranged. (The film pulls the old extremely loud argument in an exceptionally quiet, upscale restaurant routine, to no effect.) From here, the film traipses and trips through successive (and excessive) racial stereotype gags and rom-com clichés, as both families try to plan the wedding of their dreams while Marcus and Lucia suffer a breakdown in communication. No worries, though, it all ends in a wedding reception dance-off, with a mariachi band playing R ‘n’ B tunes. Don’t tell me you couldn’t see that one coming.

The plot—if you can call it that—is padded more than the bra of an insecure freshman at her first homecoming dance. At times, the script seems to stop and ask, “Hey guys, what should we do next? I’m bored. You wanna play softball?” And so, yes, everyone plays softball, in a sequence that serves little purpose but to stretch the film closer to a respectable run time. “Oh, wait, I’ve got it! How about a food fight?” And so we have cake-based battle between Brad and his assistant-turned- lover Angela (Regina King), who burn through their own brief subplot. In the film’s most unnecessary scene, a goat—yes, a goat—forages on Brad’s stash of Viagra and starts wildly humping his leg. This, only minutes after we we’ve been dragged through a tender, reconciliatory father/daughter talk that’s meant to tug the old heartstrings. For every syrupy, life lesson-type sentiment, there’s a comic beat that’s dreadfully off-tempo, most involving race-based “humor.” And here’s the film’s biggest offence—it tries to make a point about the dangers and misunderstandings inherent in racial stereotyping, but most of its characters are, in fact, racial stereotypes. Yes, race relations can be, and should be, a good source of observational comedy— what better way than laughing to work through our differences—but Our Family Wedding just isn’t smart about it. Weddings are the usually subjects of months of planning, but this one feels like it was slapped together the night before.

Our Family Wedding Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Our Family Wedding may be a complete comedic disaster, but it at least looks great on Blu-ray, with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that's framed closely to the film's original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. 20th Century Fox and its Fox Searchlight arm have been doing fantastic work with the picture quality of their new releases, and Our Family Wedding is no exception. While not the sharpest film I've seen recently, overall clarity is strong, with discernable fine detail and plenty of texture, especially in close-ups of faces, clothing, and surfaces. The film's color scheme is warm and inviting as well. The look is slightly stylized, with colors that are a bit more vivid than they'd be in "real" life—see the red softball uniforms or the neon hues in the nightclub—but skin tones, of all shades, stay rich and natural. Adding to the effect are solid black levels that maintain shadow detail and contrast that's gently pushed to give a picture with dimensional presence. The structure of the film's grain is thin and untouched by DNR or edge enhancement, and there are no compression problems to report.

Our Family Wedding Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Like most comedies of this ilk, Our Family Wedding's soundtrack is fairly spartan compared to the more robust sound design of action films or intense dramas. This disc includes a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track, but the film could easily be in 2.0 stereo and you'd barely be able to tell the difference. The rear channels are dormant for much of the film, and even when they are active, they have little to do but quietly pump out music and very rarely—like in the scene at the Le Spot night club —broadcast room ambience, like background chatter. Likewise, the LFE channel's sole duty is to add some low-end oomph to the score by the Transcenders and the various incidental hip hop cues. The music sounds good when you crank it up—it's got presence and clarity—but there's really nothing else remarkable about this track. The focus is on the dialogue, which is presented cleanly and clearly from the center channel, with no hisses, muffled lines, drop-outs, or other audio hiccups. English SDH, English, Spanish, and French subtitles are available in easy-to-read white lettering.

Our Family Wedding Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Deleted Scenes (1080p, 16:57)
There are six scenes here, including a "director's cut" alternate ending.

Extended Scenes (1080p, 4:02)
Brief extensions of two scenes.

'Til Dads Do Us Part (1080i, 15:02)
If you watched this excellent behind-the-scenes featurette before seeing the film, you might actually get sold on Our Family Wedding. Don't be fooled!

Gag Reel (1080p, 2:40)
Your usual assemblage of crack-ups, botched lines, and missed cues.

Theatrical Trailer (1080p, 2:25)

Our Family Wedding Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There are have been some truly terrible films about weddings over the years, but Our Family Wedding takes the cake. And not only does it take the cake, but it gets a feisty Hispanic grandmother to karate chop said cake into oblivion. (Yes, this does happen in the film.) The worst part is that the movie tries to make a point about the dangers and misunderstandings inherent in racial stereotyping, but features characters that are, in fact, racial stereotypes. It's also painfully, cringingly unfunny. I like to laugh, and I don't think I ever even cracked a smile. I did a lot of wincing though. That, and resisting the urge to fast forward to the inevitable happy ending.