I wanna grow old with you
The Wedding Singer and an exciting newsletter update!
Over winter break my son and I spent a couple of days at my parents’ house, which is one of my favorite things to do because I can fall asleep on the couch while my mom makes my kid mac and cheese. On this particular visit, my brother Alex was home from Brooklyn, which made my job even easier because my kid likes him way more than he likes me (probably because I rarely want to have a Nerf battle). After a long day of Nerf dart wounds, I put my son to bed and came downstairs to find my mom and Alex watching the last fifteen minutes of The Wedding Singer on a TV channel called Pop TV.
You might think that fifteen minutes before a film ends is a weird time to start watching it, but I’d disagree! Because we watched those fifteen minutes, and then Pop TV (a channel that apparently knows exactly what I want) did an encore presentation of The Wedding Singer so we started watching it from the beginning and quit when we got to the last fifteen minutes the second time.
I guess this edition of No One Asked is a recommendation for two things, one of which is watching a movie on cable television. If you’re like many people, you don’t even have cable television, but I bet your parents do (we have cable because I’m a maximalist when it comes to television…Hollis has been asking me to remind him to cancel it every month for, oh, three years now, but I never remind him because having any part in cancelling our cable is not my journey). The absolute frustrating thrill of watching a lightly edited movie with commercial breaks just cannot be matched. You’ll feel like you’re in the 90s. You’ll see commercials for things you’ve never heard of. You’ll start thinking, “wait, should I watch Pop TV more often?” You’ll wonder how much of the film they’ll change (in the case of The Wedding Singer, they only bleeped out the f-bomb when Adam Sandler is singing his song about Linda).
My second recommendation is, of course, for The Wedding Singer, my favorite non-Nora Ephron romantic comedy.
There isn’t a single second of The Wedding Singer that’s boring. The film is simply firing on all cylinders for its entire runtime, and not many movies can say that. Have a few parts of it not aged well? Yes. But for the most part, this movie stays fun, funny, and actually romantic the whole time and I don’t think it gets enough credit. Sure, people love it, but I don’t think they love it enough. We should be having yearly parades in honor of this film.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes it work so well, and here’s what I came up with:
The casting is perfect. Even the small roles are filled by people who are giving it their all (Steve Buscemi as the drunk best man, Allen Covert doing his Allen Covert thing as Adam Sandler’s best friend, Christine Taylor being a kinda skanky best friend, whoever plays Glenn as Drew Barrymore’s jerk of a fiancé). Alexis Arquette is so good as George that I laugh every time “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” starts for the second time, and I’ve seen this move a lot. Also, Jon Lovitz??
It looks great. I’m not saying this looks like, for example, a classic rom-com from the 1980s. We don’t have a beautifully lit Cher in Moonstruck. But it doesn’t have the cheap, model-home quality that many current rom-coms have. The houses look real and lived in. The clothes are interesting but realistic (Drew wears the same necklace for most of the movie!).
The writing is…actually funny! Which, believe it or not, does not always happen in a rom-com, despite the fact that “comedy” is literally half of the genre’s name. I’m biased because I have this entire film memorized, but it has so many iconic lines that work because they’re delivered in incredibly weird ways. Here are a few that play on repeat in my mind:
-“And Glenn will BE a really good looking older man.”
-Both of Robbie’s songs, the one he sings about Linda and then the one at the end about Drew Barrymore that makes me cry. Fun fact: in high school, a kid I knew used to play guitar at all parties/get togethers/parking lots/really anywhere you could carry a guitar and when he’d play “Somebody Kill Me Please,” he wouldn’t say any of the profanity. Just call him Pop TV! I guess the idea of hoping a woman chokes was okay, though.
-“And since we let our first class passengers do…pretty much whatever they want” in Billy Idol’s voice
-“Hey, my parents died when I was ten, would you like to talk about that?”
-The exact way that Adam Sandler sings Love Stinks when he’s heartbroken. “This thing called loooove is gonna make you cryyyyyI hate you” is ALWAYS in my head. Like, multiple times a day.
-“Sounds like a country song!” Lots of things sound like country songs. This comes up a lot.
-“Billy Idol gets it! I don’t know why she doesn’t get it.”
-“She said it wasn’t jacket weather anymore.”
-“We’re living in a material world and I am a material girl…or boy.”
-And OF COURSE…. “they were cones!” and you have to pronounce “cones” like there are a few extra vowels in there.
The music is amazing.
It’s like…the Forrest Gump soundtrack for the 1980s. I can’t be the only person who was absolutely obsessed with the Forrest Gump soundtrack in elementary school (despite possibly not having seen Forrest Gump at the time). To this day, when I hear many of these songs I think instantly of The Wedding Singer—and not just the “You Make My Dreams” montage, but all the small musical cues, too. “All Night Long” playing during the engagement party. “Every Day I Write the Book,” “How Soon Is Now,” “Love My Way”….all classics and all used perfectly!
And the final, most important reason this movie is one of my absolute favorites is…Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore.
I don’t really find Adam Sandler attractive in most of his movies (except for Punch Drunk Love, but that’s a personal problem I need to work through in therapy), but he is so cute here. He’s goofy and kind, and even when he does the Adam-Sandler-yelling-thing he’s known for (“Things that could’ve been BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION YESTERDAY!”) it feels a little more toned down and less juvenile than his other movies. And his character makes sense. He loves performing, he loves his family, he wants to live in the town he grew up in, and he’s also interested in songwriting but not really motivated enough to pursue it/not getting any support from his terrible fiancée.
But the real star is our girl Drew. I love her, you know she’s my favorite.
My favorite part of this clip is, “the gauze in your mouth adds authenticity” because IT DOES. I love the way Drew talks like she has gauze in her mouth. No other actor delivers a line like her.
Even though I like the writing in this movie (IMDB says Carrie Fisher worked on the script!), the fact remains that her character is wildly underwritten. Robbie has career ambitions, a past, etc. Julia has…well, she just kind of showed up in town to be close to Glenn. She has no goals other than Glenn. But it doesn’t even matter! Drew makes her feel like a real person and gives her a personality that doesn’t exist in the script.
But even more than Drew, it’s Drew and Adam together that work. They have real chemistry, as in they seem like people who like each other. My biggest problem with modern rom-coms is that the leads very often don’t have any discernible chemistry. They’re like those red carpet photos of Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher: in the same frame, but not really looking at each other and keeping their arms crossed (I haven’t seen the film Reese and Ashton were promoting here, so for all I know they have great chemistry on screen. I love Reese!). In The Wedding Singer, and to a lesser degree in 50 First Dates, Drew and Adam seem like people who love each other. I’m struggling to think of a currently working duo who have their chemistry. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are clearly not going to do another movie, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are dead…Drew and Adam are our only hope! Someone get them a script!
Just writing this post filled me with an inescapable urge to watch The Wedding Singer again. I won’t, if only because tonight I’m finally going to finish Elvis (you might note that I talked over a month ago about watching Elvis…and yet I’m still not finished with it. Listen, it’s a long movie!). But if it comes on Pop TV, well, no promises.
And now for the newsletter update: I’m introducing a paid subscription! This is something I’ve been thinking about for awhile, but I was always hesitant to do it because it’s important to me that most of my non-book writing is available for free. My career has benefited enormously from all of my free (blog) writing projects, and I see this as a blog that shows up in your inbox.
All that being said, keeping the majority of the newsletter posts free is important to me, so being a free subscriber will get you at least three free posts a month, as long as my kid doesn’t get sick and miss an entire week of school (which happened this week). But once a month, paid subscribers will get a monthly round up post where I talk about what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, etc. I’ve heard from several of you that you enjoy these posts, so I hope it’s something that you’ll consider paying for. But that’s not all. There are occasionally things I want to talk about that feel too controversial or scandalous to write about publicly. Yes, you know where this is going…I’d like to share my official ranking of Gilmore Girls boyfriends as a paid post (I will include Rune, and I bet he’s gonna rank higher than you suspected). I may even share the occasional negative opinion for paid subscribers (I don’t like to be negative on main). Also, someone suggested subscriber threads for book and movie recommendations. You know I love to give recommendations.
If you’re interested in supporting me, buying my books is always great but a paid subscription is another way to do so! You’ll get some extra posts and be secure in the knowledge that I think of you fondly. It’s $5 a month or $50 a year, and you can upgrade your subscription here. If you enjoy this newsletter, read it every week, and want some extra content, I hope you’ll consider getting a paid subscription. But if you don’t, you’ll still be getting the same weird newsletter/Dakota Johnson updates/constant mentions of Children of a Lesser God you’ve become accustomed to.
See you next week, when I’ll be talking about…well, who knows, but it MIGHT be nuns (I have a lot to say). The Gilmore Girls post will be coming up soon for subscribers, and the first monthly round up will be at the end of March. :) Oh, and very soon I’ll be sharing the beautiful cover of my next book, FAKING CHRISTMAS. I can’t wait!
I think we have DM'd about this movie before but definitely THEY WERE CONES stays in my head forever!! I love it SO MUCH.
50 First Dates is my preferred Adam Sandler / Drew Barrymore romcom for very subjective personal reasons, but this comes a very close second, and I agree with pretty much everything you've said. It's probably the better movie of the two, if I'm being honest.
Also, delighted to learn that my favorite dysfunctional space mom had a hand in the script.