Shotgun Wedding (2023) + You People (2023)

SHOTGUN WEDDING
½*/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Coolidge, Lenny Kravitz
written by Mark Hammer
directed by Jason Moore

YOU PEOPLE
***/****
starring Jonah Hill, Lauren London, David Duchovny, Eddie Murphy
written by Jonah Hill & Kenya Barris
directed by Kenya Barris

by Walter Chaw Jennifer Coolidge, 61, plays the mother of 50-year-old Josh Duhamel in Jason “Pitch Perfect” Moore’s abominable-in-pretty-much-every-conceivable-way Shotgun Wedding, and her being 11 when she had him isn’t even the worst of it. Honestly, this is the kind of movie where it would’ve been funny if they’d made a joke out of that somehow (like maybe how Steve Coulter, who plays his dad, would’ve been 12), and Coolidge has exactly the befuddled, oversexed MILF persona to pull it off. I don’t know, I didn’t write this shit. Coolidge is Carol and Coulter is Larry. Their son Tom is a total loser recently released from a minor-league baseball team, which only makes sense because he’s on the AARP mailing list. Has he been trying to make it to “the show” for 30 years? One of these Crash Davis things, I guess. Just kidding: Crash was 33; can Tom even tie his own shoes anymore without getting winded? Because I’m turning 50 this year, and let me tell you, I cannot. Tom is marrying Darcy (Jennifer Lopez), who spends every other sentence mobbing Tom for each of his groomzilla decisions–decisions he has to make, because Darcy is disengaged from the entire process and resents having to have a wedding at all, since one of the first things she said to him when they started dating was that she didn’t want a fancy wedding. Tom will eventually apologize for not listening to her, but if the intent is to make this about Tom learning to be a better partner, I must confess I would stop listening to someone as passive-aggressive and monstrously belittling as Darcy. Maybe Tom has a humiliation kink. That would explain why he played minor-league baseball for 30 years and probably votes Republican. It’s not my place to judge that, I’m just observing it.

Tom wants to get married in the Philippines for some reason, but for other reasons he moves the location to an unspecified private island, where Filipino pirates instantly hijack the wacky shenanigans. Whoops, not Filipino–Balinese, which is part of a plot point involving Darcy’s ex-boyfriend Sean (Lenny Kravitz), a guest of Darcy’s millionaire dad, Robert (Cheech Marin), who, we learn, is worth six million dollars, which is sort of that Austin Powers joke where the guy emerging from 30 years of suspended animation thinks a million dollars is a ridiculous amount of money. If you’ve skipped forward to the end, the pirates are not pirates but mercenaries hired by… Look, as offended as I am by the idea that the gallon of milk you’ve had at the back of your fridge since the beginning of the pandemic could be further spoiled by anything I do to it, the plot isn’t important. Real talk, this garbage was packaged spoiled. I like the part where Tom and Darcy are zip-tied together and decide the best way to cut themselves free is with an industrial meat slicer that’s sitting on a counter without the faceplate that prevents assholes from doing stuff like this. And then Darcy, who is extraordinarily foul, bullies Tom for being a pussy and shoves both of their hands into the machine, causing a pretty severe injury to her fiance that, for me, is a strong predictor of their future marriage as a terrible, painful trap for Tom destined to end in his emotional if not physical devastation. Oh, and Shotgun Wedding, in addition to being the type of racist and sexist that old people are, is also extraordinarily boring, curiously sadistic in a nihilistic way, and shares a gag with The Lost City where the middle-aged heroine finds the dress she’s wearing bad for human functionality. Is this an elder meme or something I’m not yet aware of? Comedy is so healing, isn’t it? It’s just good to laugh sometimes.

62-year-old Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays 39-year-old Jonah Hill’s mother in Kenya Barris’s sharp feature debut. You People finds Hill, Dreyfus, and Eddie Murphy (who, at 61, plays 38-year-old Lauren London’s dad–it’s all working out) riffing on racial tensions in ways that are unsubtle, perhaps, but expert enough. Frankly, You People is a lot like the movies Woody Allen used to make: verbal, awkward, ethnic, uneven but smart, and finally entertaining, with a large cast of people who are very good at doing what they’ve always done. In a series of largely contained vignettes, it follows the love affair between Ezra (Hill) and Amira (London) as they meet-cute over a case of mistaking Amira for an old picture of Jada Pinkett-Smith, all the way through to meeting the parents (Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny on the one side, Murphy and Nia Long on the other), getting engaged with a tiny ring (the only one Ezra can afford on a podcaster’s salary), and the ceremony itself, where people get to do bits as speeches. This is when Mike Epps shows up. Rhea Perlman’s in this, too, in a terrifying approximation of my mother somehow–but that’s my demon to wrestle, look away. Ezra tells a story about the ring to explain its size, relating it to his grandmother and the Holocaust, leading to a joke about how she was engaged when she was “three or four years old… It was a different time.” See? That kind of joke. Shotgun Wedding should’ve gotten You People co-writers Hill and Barris to punch up their script–that’s what I’m talking about right there, you guys. See how it could’ve been funny with a bit of wit and agility?

You People has some mawkishness as it tries to force moments of emotional truth-telling and righteous confrontations. At least in my experience, conversations like this in interracial marriages are exceedingly rare. My divorce from my culture when I got married was nearly complete enough that I made it very clear my choice was my wife and everyone else could get behind it or go, unmourned by me, to Hell. It wasn’t a conversation I had–it was all the conversations I would not, under any circumstances, have. On the other side of it, this marriage mattered enough to me not to initiate the educational diatribes that would have devastated the relationships we had left. I can preach with the best of them, but I don’t leave much to build on when I’m done. That’s my cross and I’ve borne it, for better or worse. So when You People reaches the point in its arc where the rom-com template requires these speeches–the breakup, the reconciliation, the parts I call “horse in traffic” because it’s when the jilted groom rides a horse through a traffic jam to get his runaway bride back–it loses a lot of its authenticity in favour of racial wish-fulfillment. But–as my dear friend, the late Reggie McDaniel, used to say, “In life, there’s always a but”–I liked Ezra and Amira enough to roll with the picture as a romantic skylark that suggests the only way to heal the divisions in our culture along racial lines is to recognize they are essentially insurmountable but to accept humans for their humanity–and our children as adults capable of making their own mistakes without our help. You People doesn’t treat race as a puzzle to solve. I’m glad these kids are gonna take their shot. Not Shotgun Wedding; those “kids” have 103 years between them. If they take anything, it should be warm Ovaltine and a nap.