The Rom Com Catalog

Tag: The Wedding Date

  • ‘The Wedding Date’ (2005) Review

    ‘The Wedding Date’ (2005) Review

    With her ex-fiance standing as the best man at her sister’s wedding, Kat hires Nick, a male escort, to accompany her to the wedding in London to make him jealous. Of course, things take a turn when Kat finds herself falling for Nick while still sorting through her issues with her ex.

    The Wedding Date has a great cast. While I’ve never been a massive fan of Debra Messing, I thought she was pretty charming and funny in this film as Kat, a woman with massive insecurities and awkwardness. Dermot Mulroney has grown on me quite a bit over the years, and I enjoy him in most things, though I really wish he could be given a rom-com role with more depth. We get to know Kat enough, given that this is her sister’s wedding and her family surrounds her.

    Nick is never really fleshed out, though Mulroney does well enough despite how little he’s given to do. He’s an escort hired by Kat to accompany her to this wedding… that’s about all we know about him. Sure, we hear him answer some of Kat’s questions about his profession, but his job has no bearing on the plot whatsoever.

    He could have just been a friend or some random guy she met and offered to pay money to play her boyfriend for the weekend. Maybe the film and the role itself would have been more interesting if his profession had come into play at some point. To me, that’s a much bigger, more interesting romantic conflict than what you ultimately get.

    We also get the excellent Jack Davenport and a young, blondeAmy Adams as the soon-to-be newlyweds. Jeremy Sheffield and Sarah Bishop round out the cast as the bland Jeffrey, Kat’s ex-fiancé and Ed’s best man, and TJ, one of Kat and Amy’s closest friends, who was delightfully funny but was sadly underutilized.

    I think the issue with a 90-minute movie (less if you factor in the opening and closing credits) is that there’s not much time for character development. Some of the supporting cast could have been removed from the film without affecting the plot. While The Wedding Date was briskly paced, I think that was a detriment. Messing and Mulroney had decent chemistry, but I’m not sure they were together on screen long enough to make their whirlwind romance believable.

    The family drama and the revealed betrayal are quickly swept under the rug, with no real consequences for the parties involved. I think it would have been more beneficial to the story to reveal the “secret” earlier, so Nick and Kat could have dealt with the heightened emotional stakes together. As is, the conflict driving Kat and Nick apart felt slightly contrived.

    I found The Wedding Date to be enjoyable enough. I didn’t outwardly cringe or roll my eyes. It has a fantastic cast, but the script is lacking and full of rom-com tropes that aren’t executed well enough to get a pass. There was potential, but the movie didn’t rise to the occasion. I also know The Wedding Date was based on a book, so maybe I’ll read it and see if it’s any better.

    Watched: 06/18/2021
    Notable Song: All Out of Love by Air Supply

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  • ‘The Wedding Date’ (2018) Book Review

    ‘The Wedding Date’ (2018) Book Review

    The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory

    Synopsis from the Publisher:

    Agreeing to go to a wedding with a guy she gets stuck with in an elevator is something Alexa Monroe wouldn’t normally do. But there’s something about Drew Nichols that’s too hard to resist.

    On the eve of his ex’s wedding festivities, Drew is minus a plus one. Until a power outage strands him with the perfect candidate for a fake girlfriend….

    After Alexa and Drew have more fun than they ever thought possible, Drew has to fly back to Los Angeles and his job as a pediatric surgeon, and Alexa heads home to Berkeley, where she’s the mayor’s chief of staff. Too bad they can’t stop thinking about the other….

    They’re just two high-powered professionals on a collision course toward the long distance dating disaster of the century–or closing the gap between what they think they need and what they truly want…

    Review:

    Full disclosure, it took me a while to finish The Wedding Date. I’ve been so excited to read it, as I’ve heard good things, but once I started I got about 4 chapters in and then set it aside and dove into other books, mostly from the true crime/horror genres, so clearly my heart wasn’t in people looking for love. I finally picked up The Wedding Date again and finished with some major disappointment. Jasmine Gulliory is a talented writer. I enjoyed her writing style enough that I fully plan on checking out some of her other novels, however… .The Wedding Date was not for me.

    I really loved the premise. The fake-dating-to-true-love trope is one of my favorites, and I loved the diversity represented. Drew is a pediatric surgeon, and Alexa is the Mayor’s Chief of Staff. Both characters are clearly successful, with some well-meaning, loyal friends. After their chance meeting in an elevator, Drew invites Alexa to be his date at his ex-girlfriend’s wedding – I still find it so odd when exes invite one another to their weddings – and from there, they hit it off. However, Drew is in L.A. and Alexa is in San Francisco, so they try to do the long-distance thing, flying to see each other on the weekends.

    My disappointment stems from the plot’s redundancy. Essentially, Drew and Alexa fly to see one another, have a lot of sex, and decide what to eat. They’re both a little confused about what they are to one another, but neither of them feels comfortable bringing it up.

    Instead, Alexa assumes the relationship will run its course because it’s casual and fun, and Drew, while he feels possessive and jealous of other men who talk to Alexa, continually tells himself and his best friend that she’s not his girl, and he keeps thinking he ought to end things before Alexa ends up hating him. So we have two successful, intelligent main characters who instead feel buckets of insecurity and have no clue how to communicate with one another.

    Instead, they avoid having meaningful conversations and focus on the physicality of their relationship. After Alexa talks to a few of Drew’s ex-girlfriends at a party, all of whom are kind women who are still friends with him, she ignores Drew and then fights with him at the party about how he can’t seem to have a relationship last more than a couple of months. It was a pretty cringeworthy scene. Honestly, reading these interactions was like reading a relationship between two insecure high schoolers. It was hard for me to imagine how they fell in love when it really felt like they didn’t know each other very well at all beyond their sexual chemistry.

    I suppose I would have liked more plot, conflict, and character interaction that wasn’t just about what to eat. But again, I enjoyed Guillory’s writing style, so I’m going to check out The Proposal and hope I enjoy it more than The Wedding Date.

    You can read more of my book reviews here!

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