Our Family Wedding
PG-13 (sexual content, brief strong language); 101 minutes
One enters a movie like Our Family Wedding bracing for cheesiness.
As a genre, wedding films are typically about as cloying as two hours' worth of kitten videos on YouTube. Add in the equally checkered history of stridently ethnic movies, and you might want to start asking moviegoers to remove their belts before entering the theater.
But as Rick Famuyiwa's Our Family Wedding, which combines both elements, moves along, the fingers in front of one's eyes slowly part, and the realization dawns that Famuyiwa has made a mostly charming movie despite its cliché milieu.
At the center are America Ferrera (as Lucia) and Lance Gross (as Marcus), a young couple in college in New York who return home to their families in Los Angeles to break the news that they're engaged. Neither family much likes the decision. Lucia's father (Forest Whitaker) and Marcus' dad (Carlos Mencia) quickly become rivals.
To be sure, there are plenty of predictable jokes reliant on stereotypes. But Our Family Wedding often smacks of real people. As the families feud, they use racial stereotypes less as a crutch for identity than as a means for sarcasm, self-deprecation and, if possible, ammo against their potential new in-laws.
Unfortunately, Our Family Wedding loses its balance around the time the goat gets loose and eats a bunch of Viagra. Still, though cheesiness is all around, it never quite penetrates Our Family Wedding.
