My Brother's Wedding
Director: Charles Burnett
Year Released: 1983
Rating: 1.5
A young man without a whole lot of career prospects resents his older brother's upward mobility and marrying into a bourgeois family - he also, on the other hand, has a friend fresh out of jail who meddles in his life. I've never seen Burnett's original version (and have no intention to do so for a while) - which runs about twenty minutes longer than this - so I can't say whether this 2007 edition's cuts are as jarring or if the flow is better, but I know Burnett couldn't have spliced out or fixed the terrible line readings and wooden performances - the idea for a good movie is there, but the execution is weak (using amateurs doesn't always work out in the long run). The 'great crisis' the lead experiences at the end is really no great crisis at all: you brother takes precedence over your idiot friend's funeral. Or, to put it another way, it could have been resolved by making good old Dad the Best Man. There, I fixed the problem.
