Romancefest 2016: My Best Friend's Wedding

Okay, back to the 90s for that decade's reigning queen of rom-coms, Julia Roberts in MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING. I guess you could say Meg Ryan is the actual queen of 90s rom-coms but Julia Roberts is up there. Look, they're both queens, all right? Don't make me decide!

Anyway, Roberts stars as a restaurant critic in her late 20s who realizes she's been in love with her best friend (Dermot Mulroney) when he announces he's about to be married to a woman he's just met (Cameron Diaz). This isn't cool because Roberts and Mulroney vowed to marry each other if they weren't married by the time they were 28 and now Mulroney's ditching Roberts at the last moment.

So, it's off to the wedding to bust shit up! No sooner does Roberts arrive than Diaz asks her to fill in as maid of honor. Diaz also turns out to be a pretty sweet and sincere young woman, so now Roberts has a couple obstacles standing in the way of the whole wedding break-up thing.

She enlists her gay other best friend, Rupert Everett, to help out and it isn't long before he's pretending to be Roberts' fiancee. Will Roberts bust up the wedding and hook up with Mulroney? Wacky hijinks!

This movie works for a few reasons, but the main thing is that Roberts has such a natural and likable star presence that you could put her in pretty much anything and it'd be all right. Everett's the other stand out in this flick with Mulroney being kind of a boring love interest. Diaz is good but isn't on screen as much as she probably deserves.

What's really cool, though, is despite all the scheming and sitcom shenanigans, for the most part the characters, situations and motivations remain human and not just plot contrivances. This is most obvious in the way the story eventually plays out in a bittersweet ending. Even though this is packaged as a super mainstream Hollywood romantic comedy, it does not have a typical Hollywood ending forced upon it.

I should also mention the movie's particularly good use of the word "fuck" in one scene in which Julia Roberts is attempting to justify why her fake fiancee has suddenly flown into town and just as suddenly has to fly out.

"He, uh, just need to, uh," she stammers, "... fuck me."

That's good shit.