Sarah wanted to write this post. I decided to write it though because I’m travelling today and have had to pre-write most of my articles to account for being in transit and she’s on standby for breaking news if I can’t get to it. So she’s pissed. Which, fair enough, because who wouldn’t want this assignment but also? I wrote about it first back in August when the project was announced. I believe what I said at the time was, GIVE US THIS MOVIE NOW.
The movie is Destination Wedding, starring Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves. It comes out in August. It’s a rom-com. The first trailer was released yesterday and…it’s perfect. PERFECT. If you don’t think it’s perfect, you must be a Yanny. Actually that’s not true. Duana is a Yanny and Sarah is Yanny and both of them agree this is perfect. So what that means is that Winona and Keanu can bring all of the Yannys and the Laurels back together and restore peace to the realm.
Destination Wedding is about two miserable assholes who end up at a destination wedding. This plays to both of their strengths. Winona is not the plucky writer who’s beautiful but doesn’t know it and charms all the mannered people in Martha’s Vineyard with her easy laugh and irresistible charm. Charming is not a word anyone would use to describe Winona. She is, rather, beautifully awkward. Which is what she’s been trying to tell us for 25 years and it took this long for everyone else to catch up. So no one’s pretending here that the room spins on her axis. What we’re seeing is that she prefers the corners. As for Keanu, well, this is John Wick, without the assassin skills and the love of dogs. One of the reasons why Keanu works as John Wick is because ….Keanu isn’t that great at dialogue. He is, however, great at being brief, in monotone. Other Keanu strengths on display here include being bewildered and saturnine. That’s how the sad Keanu meme came to be. His is a confused melancholy. He looks glum but he also looks like he doesn’t know why, exactly, he’s so glum. I have no idea whether or not this script was written with specifically these two in mind but it totally feels like it.
So are we all going to see this? Can we make it a hit? Like if for some reason this is a flop, we really don’t deserve good things.
