Bride Wars

Filed under: Film — purplehsiaoling at 11:34 am on Saturday, January 24, 2009

     Hi, people!  I’m back.  Or at least, I hope I’m back.  Gosh, my last post was in May 2008 and that probably explains why one of my 2009’s resolutions is to continue writing!  And on the 25th day of the year, I hope that I’m still on track to achieving that resolution!  Anyway, it’s always something that inspire or compel me to write (it’s been mainly movies, books and songs) and isn’t it such a coincidence that my first post is due to a movie and it is a movie now that is making me write again.

     Bride Wars.  I saw the trailer and thought it might be cool: it has Kate Hudson (loved her in How To Lose A Guy in 10 Days) and Anne Hathaway (loved her in Becoming Jane), it’s about brides and weddings and it’s a modern romcom (read ’romantic comedy’ - the words just kind of jumped at me, haha).  But what I thought might not be so cool is the way the two girls were going to act mean toward each other because they fell out from being best friends.

     Nonetheless, I’m so glad that I caught the movie.  Despite my reservations that I wouldn’t be able to stomach the mean stuff and girl fight,  I knew I should still give it a chance because it might be something like Monster-in-Law.  And it certainly didn’t help that online ratings and reviews on it weren’t that favourable.  Plus I caught it at almost midnight after shopping and was getting a headache (okay, okay, another resolution to work on - to get more sleep!).

     I really enjoyed Bride Wars.  And I guess I have a lot to thank it for since it has made me write again here.  A quick look at why I like the movie.  It has a happy ending!  *Spoilers ahead*  A happy ending despite one wedding that didn’t happen but fate works in a mysterious way.  You can’t help but like all the characters in the movie (even the ghastly Deb) because no one is a villain here  (right, I confess, I cannot stand villains).  And most importantly, this lightweight romantic comedy is very thought-provoking.  For me, that is.

     Marion St. Claire, the wedding planner, narrates the story and offers a lot of interesting lines along the way.  The first that I want to highlight is this:  You are dead until your wedding day.  Forgive me if I didn’t quite get the exact lines but what I want to point out is the idea of it.  She says that you aren’t really living if you don’t have a wedding and get married.  And if you really don’t, then you’ll probably die being dead.  Call it harsh (after all, not everyone wants or likes to be married) or even old-fashioned (where’s your independence?) but oh, oh!

     Which girl hasn’t dreamed of her wedding since she was a little girl?  Hmm, I wonder if I have but all my ideas on weddings come from the story books I read as I was growing up.  A wedding in a garden with just your family and friends and people whom you really want to see you get married like Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables.  A wedding in three weeks after running away with your lover because your father and his father are engaged in a bitter feud with no hopes of reconciliation like Florentyna Rosnovski in The Prodigal Daughter.  And bits and pieces from other stories..

     So, it simply makes you smile when you see the two little girls dreaming of their weddings and playing bride and groom at the beginning of the movie.  It also makes you think how wonderful it is to be kids when your imagination is endless and only limited by yourself, when anything is possible in your eyes and when nothing is too silly or laughable.  Why do we lose all this and become disillusioned as we grow up?  Wouldn’t it be nice if we always continue or remember to lose ourselves in our own imagination, never to stop dreaming and not be afraid to be silly or to laugh at ourselves?

     Back to the movie..  The girls created their idea of a perfect wedding because of one that they witnessed and twenty years later, they were on their way to having their own.  I had to smile again when there was a scene in which a bride was throwing her bouquet of flowers and the two girls were aiming to catch it badly.  Well, call me a hopeless romantic but I caught two bouquets of flowers at the end of last year and I’m glad that I did!

     Well, if you must know, I caught the first one at my best friend’s wedding despite not paying much attention to it.  Somehow, the flowers just flew straight into my left hand and it’s mine!  And no, I didn’t plan it with my best friend even though she told me to try and catch it.  I was flabbergasted when I realized that the flowers were in my hand and when I told my sister who’s the first to hear about it, she went, wedding bells are ringing, ting-a-ling..

     As for the second bouquet, my sister said she wouldn’t count that I caught it because it fell nearest to me after the bride threw it the second time and I was picking it up to hand it back to her to throw again when everyone else said that it was mine and that I could keep it already.  Another friend (bless him!) said well, if it makes me happy, I could still count it as one that I caught, haha..

     Well, my hopeless romanticism suffered a bit when I read a few weeks later in a local newspaper about how a single girl lamented on the fact that she remains unmarried despite catching bouquets after bouquets of flowers at weddings.  Aww, shucks!  There goes my ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling..  Haha!

     Next, the movie implicitly shows how two couples deal with crisis.  One stayed together, the other didn’t.  *No more spoilers on who did, who didn’t, haha*  It was so touching to see one of the girls lying in bed with tears rolling down her cheeks and telling her partner that she felt so alone (when everything seemed to be going wrong for her) and then, he embraced her and said that he was there for her.  Aww..  And both of them told each other how if the other didn’t behave like that (in a less pleasing way), they wouldn’t have liked the other because that was what made them love the other in the first place.

     Compare this with the other couple.  When the girl was talking, the guy didn’t want to listen because he thought that she was changing into someone he didn’t recognized even though she was only doing something she wanted to do.  And worse, when she wanted to talk some more, he left to go to the gym after saying that this is a quarrel and they will work something out later because he didn’t think that they could deal with it now.

     At the end of the movie when the bride who did get married was telling the one who didn’t how sorry she was about her wedding, she said that she was fine.  She said that if she and the groom had been right for each other, they would have gone on with the wedding but now, they didn’t.  In fact, when she told him goodbye, he didn’t do anything to protest or to make her change her mind.  And she even told him that he knew all along that they weren’t made for each other despite being so close to getting married.

     Moral of the story?  Always be yourself and don’t be someone else just because you want to please other people.  And most importantly, you really, really should marry someone who can accept you for who or what you are because marriage is for life and you’ll be with that person for a lifetime.  When you marry someone, it is because you love that person and when you love that person, it is because you love everything about that person- the good and the bad.  And oh, get someone you can talk to as well and someone whom you know will stand by you no matter what.

     Marion said this:  Sometimes in life there really are bonds formed that can never be broken. Sometimes you really can find that one person who will stand by you no matter what. Maybe you’ll find it in a spouse and celebrate it with your dream wedding, but there’s also the chance that the one person you can count on for a lifetime, the one person who knows you sometimes better than you know yourself is the same person who’s been standing beside you all along.

     And I think you are incredibly lucky if you have that person in your spouse, family or friends..

     Before I end this, I would like to say thank you to those who wanted me to write.  You know who you are.  This is dedicated to you.