frankandwong

No shit, the Steve Martin/Diane Keaton Father of the Bride movies were some of my favorites as a kid. I re-watched the first a year ago on the occasion of my friend’s wedding and while I was mostly drunk and yammering throughout, it appeared to have held up. So news of a third film has my interest piqued, especially because it’s reportedly about a gay marriage.

The twist in this threequel is that Little Matty is now 29 and gay and getting married to a Navy SEAL’s son. Father of the bride George is “thunderstruck and speechless” and has problems with the whole gay thing. So wife Nina kicks him out of the house, according to the pitch which Disney loved.

The only problem?

That’s fine! Do a remake! A second remake, even! Father of the Bride Part II will be 20 next year and Disney should know better by now than to force another entry in a decades-old franchise down our throats…again. The only people who are going to care about seeing Steve Martin and Diane Keaton reprise those characters are their agents (and my fiancé). The rest of the world will be fine with a movie called Father of the Bride that has an uncomfortable-looking dad standing in the middle of a gay-guy-kiss-sandwich on the poster. It actually makes the original title funnier (if not a little cheap).

And therein lies the real question: how offensive is this shit going to be? If this is a gay panic story where the homophobe learns to love his son (AS HE FUCKING SHOULD!) in the end, then that sucks. It allows the close minded side of the argument the opportunity to make a bunch of lame, gay jokes for the majority of the running time before reversing their opinion and endearing themselves to the audience before the credits roll. In other words, they get to have it both ways. That sucks and benefits no one. Not the right people anyway.

Who knows? The first Martin/Keaton movie was more dramatic than I remembered, so maybe this isn’t a factor. Regardless of how this shakes out, Franck is clearly going to have his best role to date.