Our Family Wedding (2010)

The weeks leading up to a young couple's wedding are comic and stressful, especially as their respective fathers try to lay their long standing feud to rest.

Director:

Rick Famuyiwa

Writers:

Wayne Conley (story), Wayne Conley (screenplay)

Stars:

America Ferrera, Forest Whitaker, Carlos Mencia

3 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Forest Whitaker	...	Brad Boyd
America Ferrera	...	Lucia Ramirez
Carlos Mencia	...	Miguel Ramirez
Regina King	...	Angela
Lance Gross	...	Marcus Boyd
Diana Maria Riva	...	Sonia Ramirez
Lupe Ontiveros	...	Momma Cecilia
Anjelah Johnson-Reyes	...	Isabella Ramirez (as Anjelah Johnson)
Charlie Murphy	...	T.J.
Shannyn Sossamon	...	Ashley McPhee
Tonita Castro	...	Aunt Rosita
Anna Maria Horsford	...	Diane Boyd
Warren Sapp	...	Wendell Boyd
Shondrella Avery	...	Keisha Boyd
Sterling Ardrey	...	Ardom Boyd (as Sterling D. Ardrey)

Storyline

"Our marriage, their wedding." It's lesson number one for any newly engaged couple, and Lucia and Marcus are no exception. In Our Family Wedding, they learn the hard way that the path to saying "I do" can be rife with familial strife. When they return from college and too suddenly announce their marriage plans, they soon discover that their fathers - two highly competitive over-the-top egos - can wreak a major amount of havoc on their special day. With insults flying and tempers running high, it's anyone's guess if the alpha dads will survive to make it down the aisle in one piece. Lucia's mother is busy planning the wedding of "her" dreams and the only levelheaded one in the bunch is Angela, the groom's father's best friend and lawyer, who manages to keep her cool when the madness reaches a crescendo. With only weeks to plan their wedding, Lucia and Marcus soon discover the true meaning of love and find there is truth to the saying - that when you marry someone, you marry their ...

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Plot Keywords:

wedding | marriage | love | wedding dress | california | 

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Taglines:

To have and to hold... 'Til dads do us part.

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Genres:

Comedy | Romance

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated PG-13 for some sexual content and brief strong language

Details

Official Sites:

Fox Searchlight [United States]

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

12 March 2010 (USA)

Also Known As:

The Wedding Pact

Filming Locations:

California, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$14,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend:

$7,629,862 (USA) (5 March 2010)

Gross:

$20,246,959 (USA) (11 June 2010)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Fox Searchlight Pictures, Sneak Preview Entertainment, Dune Entertainment

Technical Specs

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital SDDS DTS

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Lupe Ontiveros played America Ferrera's mother in the film "Real Women Have Curves" (2002). In this film, she plays her grandmother.

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Goofs

During the wedding ceremony, the priest is explaining the symbolism of the "lasso" but as it is being placed on the bride and groom's shoulders, his mouth is not moving.

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Connections

Featured in The Rotten Tomatoes Show: Alice in Wonderland/Stolen/Brooklyn's Finest (2010)

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Soundtracks

Save Your Love for Me
Written by Buddy Johnson
Performed by Jose James
Courtesy of Brownswood Recordings

User Reviews

How is Carlos Mencia successful. Explain this to me someone

Our Family Wedding is a grim prospect on its face: a frantic wedding movie meets an uproarious culture clash movie, where two patriarchs - the smooth African-American and the fiery Latino - do hilarious battle and then there's some romance somewhere. It fails to deliver even on that meagre promise. Forest Whittaker and Carlos Mencia play the fathers of young lovers Marcus and Lucia (Lance Gross and America Ferrera) who return home to L.A. to announce their surprise engagement and plans to be married immediately. Things get complicated, when we learn that Lucia's family don't really like black people, and Marcus' father, a neat-freak radio DJ-cum-ladies'-man, doesn't like Mexican people. Predicaments predictably follow, in the proper order and to factory specifications.

Despite a legitimately (for the most part) talented cast and a set-up almost guaranteed to be worth at least a few forced laughs, the film manages to be almost completely devoid of humour. It's a punishing, depressing display. The film knows what beats to hit, and tries with heroic, military determination to hit them only to fail, every single time. We're presented with the really uncomfortable knowledge that the film knows it should be funny, here, here and here, and is really trying, honest - see how the goat tries to have sex with the fancy man!? - but just can't quite haul it's hackneyed self anywhere close to an actual laugh. It's ugly and it tries to make you complicit in its ugliness, like when you walk in on your roommate three quarters of the way through an extra large pizza and they try and make you eat the last slice.

To do the obvious thing and fail at it is the worst thing an artist can do. To offer a thin-gruel compromise to your audience, to say "here's a trite, rote ethnicity-clash wedding comedy that you know will be derivative but what else are you going to watch come on it can't be terrible" and then to hand them something terrible is just... rude. To ask us to watch Carlos Mencia flail his way through a grim, graceless Mr. Hulot-inspired bit of non-comedy is mean, and makes us feel badly about ourselves and the choices that brought us here.

One bright spot: Anjelah Johnson as the tomboy sister of the bride is the only actor in the film that's able to wring a couple of laughs out of it, and the sisters' relationship is one of the only interesting things in a film that's otherwise not much more than a grim procession of joyless clichés. 2/10