Rachel Getting Married

Director: Jonathan Demme
Year Released: 2008
Rating: 1.5

Who the hell are these people? An extravagant, pretentiously 'multi-cultural' wedding - which features, among other things, Fab Five Freddy, an elephant cake, difficult to pronounce dishes, gypsies who never get tired, sarongs, Robyn Hitchcock, a stand-up comedian, belly dancers, etc. - serves as a battleground for two sisters to battle: Anne Hathaway's improbable junky/attention whore and sis Rosemarie DeWitt's psychologist/diva. The film in essence is asking for pity for the Hathaway character - the major secret of the movie is that she accidentally killed her younger brother when she was younger - although she doesn't seem to deserve respect or consideration, and the film spends a lot of time on filler (singing, dancing) than on exploring relationships (I happen to think Debra Winger's mother isn't given enough screen time), and there is something fundamentally wrong with a movie where its most humorous scene involves loading a dishwasher (only to be ruined by the appearance of an object that most families would have buried in the attic, out of sight). The moral is basically the same as last year's Margot at the Wedding: rich, open-minded people (in this case from Connecticut) have problems, too.