Because of the epidemic, the summer blockbuster season in 2020 has been postponed, but that doesn’t mean we can’t remember the action movies that drew us away from the sun and into the air conditioning. Welcome to The Ringer’s Return to Summer Blockbuster Season, where each week we’ll highlight a new summer classic.
This is largely due to the fact that weddings are one of society’s most action-packed events. Weddings are filled with narrative chances due to the collision of families, friends, love, floral displays, and open bars. Weddings are used as ethnographic excursions by Martin Scorsese, ground zero for narrative peaks by Nora Ephron, and venues for terrible violence by Quentin Tarantino.
The other reason for the high number of movie weddings is that after you reach a certain age, you have to attend so many goddamn weddings. It’s something that others warn you about it when you’re younger, however you, a rube, choose to ignore them. “How could wedding be a negative thing?” you wonder, as if you’re a moron.
Then, five-sixths of the way through wedding season, users find yourself in a backyard in Cleveland on a sweltering August day, drunk, wearing the same suit. You’ve seen every sort of wedding by both the time you’re into your early 30s—big, tiny, quaint, extravagant—and assessed each one with a venom you’d never admit publicly.
Weddings—both its joys as well as their sorrows—are universal, making it easy for a filmmaker to place an audience in a familiar situation while also correcting the mistakes of their very own wedding-going pasts (or, for the real masochists, to re-live them).
Now, as part of The Ringer’s Return to the Summer Blockbuster, we’re revisiting My Finest Friend’s Wedding, there’s no better time to reconsider whichever movie weddings are indeed the best. To accomplish so, I created a criteria that encapsulates the qualities that every great wedding—and every great movie wedding—must include.
Also Read: Are there any action movies with a female lead who is an amputee?
