Kiss the Bride tells the story of a fairly large Italian family living in Rhode Island as Danni (Amanda Detmer, The Majestic) is preparing to marry Geoffrey (Jonothon Schaech, That Thing You Do!) and her sisters come home for the wedding. You have Nikki (Brooke Langton, Swingers), the oldest daughter with a degree but yet still shows up in a belly shirt on the beach each week on a popular TV show. Chris (Vanessa Parise) is a New York financial manager/workaholic, and Toni (Monet Mazur) as …he youngest who will do anything to get attention. The mother and father will look familiar to you, as they are played by Talia Shire and Burt Young, who played Adrian and Paulie in the Rocky films.
Produced, written and directed by Parise, the film has been slightly compared to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and may be, if that film had snorted a two foot line of cleanser, I could buy the comparison. This film is substantially darker and goes into each of the individual women’s conflicting emotions about the family and each other, but because the family’s so large, there’s nothing that carries out, or it’s left unresolved altogether. The scene that most typifies the movie is when Nikki and her boyfriend, whose relationship is deteriorating, are almost arguing (in between something between two other sisters), and the boyfriend asks if anyone wants to go out to play football, and everyone happily jumps at the chance. Just when you think the film may go somewhere, it goes into another direction.
When the one who sees the clearest about the family, Toni’s girlfriend Amy (Alyssa Milano, Charmed) leaves halfway through the movie, it seems like the film’s coherence left with her, because it gets more scatterbrained as you go. While the appearance of Charlie O’Connell (The Bachelor) was mildly entertaining, the fact that this was practically the only thing I remembered about the film probably says enough about the film itself.
Audio
Surprisingly, the dialogue-driven film has a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, which goes a little bit wasted in the film. Thankfully, if it wasn’t for the fact that the film is set in a town next to the ocean with some good effects reproduction, there’s nothing that you could find memorable from listening to this.
Video
Even with a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation, the video transfer in Kiss the Bride is simply all over the place. While the color was OK and a decent level of film grain was visible, the film looks very dark when viewing, and there was a lot of edge enhancement visible in more than a few scenes. Overall, it’s a very schizophrenic presentation.
Special Features
Not too much to be had here. Aside from the film’s trailer, along with trailers for other MGM pictures, there are a series of cast interviews that are about 20 minutes long where the cast discusses their thoughts of the characters, inspirations for playing them, et cetera.
Closing Thoughts
All in all, Kiss the Bride was a film that lacked focus, despite the efforts of Vanessa Parise. While there are plenty of respected names in the film, the fact that everyone had some dark story to tell got clichéd and tired really quickly, which exposed the lack of detail in the story. It’s not even a decent couples movie, so you may want to skip it.
Special Features List
- Trailers
- Interviews
