Sorry, did I miss a meeting? Someone in the Office of Comedy seems to have decided that if you insert a few indie rock songs into your film and make sure to set it in New Jersey then any amount of narrative chaos and forced wackiness is acceptable.
It's a disgrace. Zach Braff's Garden State, the film most to blame for this change in policy, was no real masterpiece, but, despite its loose form, it did have a degree of order and a consistency of tone to it. Wedding Daze, which, in the time it takes to play a Belle and Sebastian tune, veers from light whimsy to deranged surrealism, is a witless mess of the dreariest stripe.
If this were, Lord forbid, a Rob Schneider film, the producers would at least have made sure it remained the same type of bad film throughout. Michael Ian Black, the supposed director, confident of his credentials as a master of quirk, clearly imagines himself above such conventional attitudes. He wants to get over himself.
The premise of the film is, to be fair, simple enough to state. It does not, you understand, make any sense, but it can be easily written down. Jason Biggs, playing a very slightly altered version of his American Pie character, becomes hugely depressed when his girlfriend - after enduring a hopelessly humourless and elaborate marriage proposal - drops down dead of a heart attack.
Some months later, half-heartedly trying to shake himself out of misery, he proposes marriage to a waitress (Isla Fisher) in his local diner.
She, for reasons only obscurely explained, agrees, and the two begin making plans to move in together. Further madness follows. Why does neither come to his or her senses and call the whole thing off? Are you from a Rob Schneider film or what? This is an indie comedy. It's set in New Jersey. It's got Belle and Sebastian on the soundtrack. We can do whatever the hell we like.
