Picture this potential movie scene – a white father takes his daughter’s fiance, who is black, to the police station for fingerprints and a criminal background check.
The Rev. Al Sharpton would be protesting the film before it could be shown in a single theater.
Yet a similar bit plays out in “Our Family Wedding,” the springtime comedy coming to DVD and Blu-ray July 13.
But in “Wedding” the father is Latino, not white.
The scene in question is part of the main story involving the marriage of a young black man (Lance Gross) to a Latino woman (America Ferrara of “Ugly Betty” fame).
The friction begins when the woman’s father (Carlos Mencia) and the man’s dad (Forest Whitaker) fight over a parking ticket. But their respective blood starts to boil when they first hear about the planned nuptials.
The film’s bawdy approach to culture clash comedy doesn’t work as intended, wasting an otherwise sharp performance by Mencia. The popular comic proves he can handle more than the stand-up stage.
But I couldn’t get that particular scene out of my head. Was I wrong to recoil at the turn of events? Or was the scene an ugly way to wring laughs from the audience?
(Photo: Forest Whitaker and Carlos Mencia play men whose cultural distrust of each other’s ethnicity complicates matters in “Our Family Wedding.”/Fox Home Entertainment)
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Nice to hear something positive about this movie; the trailers made it look like an insubstantial but pleasant comedy, but it’s currently rated at a 2.5 out of 10 on IMDB. Methinks the Mencia haters doth protest too much.
I’d have to see the scene in question before I could judge it, but it sounds to me like the filmmakers pushed things too far in order to get a laugh. Many modern screenwriters don’t have the ability to get laughs using wit, so they go for the “outrageous” joke instead, and usually end up shooting themselves in the foot (see every bad Judd Apatow joke in history).
I give the filmmakers credit for not following standard movie racial guidelines, though. I predict that within five years, Hollywood will remake this with the girl’s dad being played by a white guy with a Southern accent.