Yesterday I ended my longest yet drought between weddings, since I attended my first wedding in September of 1994. Yes, I have a list so I know these sorts of things.
Don't pity me, dear reader. As a 51-year-old, I don't expect to get invited to many weddings. Most of my contemporaries married around the time I did or are never going to.
Fortunately, in Australia I have become friends with a decent number of people who are not my contemporaries, and are at least ten years younger than I am. The one who was getting married on Sunday is 15 years my junior, and that helped me not build any further on the seven years and eight months it had been since my last wedding in March of 2017, involving a guy who is 13 years younger than I am.
The thing is, this wedding was unlike any I have ever been to in that there was a large time window in between the ceremony at the church and the reception. Usually these things more or less run into each other, with no more than an hour gap in between. The gap on Sunday was 3.5 hours between the end of the church service and the start of alcohol-related celebrations. I don't really get the logic behind that, but I was just happy to be there.
If the wedding had been closer to my house, I could conceivably have gone home in between and then gone back. But it was more than 30 minutes away by car, and because I intended to drink at the reception, I got there by a bus and a train, with plans to get home the same way.
Then there was the fact that another friend of mine was coming for both the service and the reception. We were effectively each other's dates, and he was coming from a lot farther away than I was.
So what was my call?
To see a movie in the middle of the wedding, of course.
The wedding and reception were both just a short walk from a nearby shopping center -- a short yet painful walk as I was breaking in new shoes that were killing my heels -- and this shopping center came equipped with a Hoyts cinema. As luck would have it, the 3:30 showing of Robert Zemeckis' Here would perfectly kill the remaining time before the reception began at 5:30, with the 2 p.m. end of the service having given us just enough time to walk over and get a beer and a small bite to eat before the movie.
When I first thought of this gambit, I thought it was unlikely to succeed -- or not without some guilt on my side, anyway. My friend and I bond on the basis of baseball and our former shared workplace, not on movies. He tells me he only sees four or five movies a year, both in and out of the cinema.
But facts are facts. Due to the, in my view, slightly awkward way the various wedding activities were timed, it required a plan for the portion in between. I'm sure some people who lived closer did go home, but the rest of us had to figure out what we were going to do. And according to another former coworker who was at the wedding, who worked with the groom at their next job and was there with a contingent from that workplace, we made the right call. He said they passed the time initially at the same place we had our beer, which we knew because we ran into them, but then engaged in sort of aimless and fruitless shopping that was a less than ideal way to pass the time. Two hours can be quite a long time to walk around in a shopping center if you have no specific goal in mind and don't want to be encumbered by any potential purchases for the remainder of the evening.
I was also initially worried that the start time for the movie was just a tad too late to get us back for the start of the reception, which indeed it was. Although the movie is less than two hours long, Hoyts plays a ton of ads, and it had already turned 5:30 by the time the credits started. We still had to get out of the theater proper and walk back, though given the worsening blisters on my heels and our impending potential lateness, we opted for an Uber instead.
When we arrived at around 5:45, the dining hall was not yet ready to seat us, so we essentially missed just a few minutes of people milling around in the lobby with a drink.
As for the experience of going to the movie itself, it was a bit surreal to be sitting there in our suits and ties at the movies. It prompted me to recount the only other such experience I think I've had, which was in 1999 when I was in journalism school. My classmates and I attended a funeral for a classmate's father, and then attained a necessary release by going straight to a showing of Office Space.
Given the way my shoes were murder on my feet, I was also glad to have the chance to kick them off for two hours as we reclined and watched the movie. My friend said he didn't mind, so I availed myself of that option right quick.
Perhaps making a small 11th hour attempt to redirect the plans, my friend said he also wouldn't mind sitting in the Sporting Globe -- the sports bar where we got our beer -- for the remaining time before the reception. Although I am usually susceptible to such subtle attempts to steer things in another direction, I held firm in this case, making the sound argument that there was no point in drinking another two to three beers at this establishment when all the free alcohol we wanted was surely waiting for us at the reception.
And then I also just went for honesty: I need something to review this week, and the newest film by Robert Zemeckis would make a golden opportunity for me to do that without otherwise inconveniencing my family with a trip to the theater.
I didn't know a lot about the movie beforehand, only that Tom Hanks and Robin Wright appear de-aged in it. (It strikes me as a little ironic, considering that Wright made an entire film about signing over the digital rights to her likeness so it could be repurposed for any use, which is Ari Folman's The Congress.) Once the movie started, I realized this was not even its most prominent "gimmick," as the entire film is shot from the perspective of a single spot of land that comes to be the living room of a house somewhere on the east cost of the U.S. (Reading up on it a bit, I am convinced that the exact location is intended to be vague.) The camera never moves from its perspective, but the action jumps between eras to show what was happening on that exact spot of land -- which I naturally like, given its similarity to the narrative choice made in David Lowery's A Ghost Story.
Given that it involves key moments in the lives of a couple different families, Hanks and Wright among them, I also found it a profound thematic companion to attending a wedding, which is one of those key moments. At the reception we later found out that the bride is due to give birth to a baby girl in a couple of months, which made it all the more poignant in retrospect.
Here had the potential to be one of my favorites of the year, though I think it will fall a bit short of that mark. It's still quite good though. I was hoping my friend would feel a bit more strongly toward it than he did, because of course that would be a validation of my decision to take us there. He described it as "pretty good," which either could have been his honest assessment or a slight politeness. I think we were both glad we saw it, though, especially if the alternative were aimless shopping as I continued to complain more and more about my feet, or dropping a small fortune on alcohol that we would get for free if we waited two hours.
I'll have a review up in a couple days if you want my further thoughts on Here.
