PLOT: Three couples compete for a house and other prizes in a themed wedding day contest. One happy couple is having a Broadway musical ceremony, another holds a tennis-themed event and some nudists wish to marry in the buff. Silly fun.
Lightweight British comedy is available this week in Confetti, a sugary confection about three hapless couples competing in a wedding day contest. It's all rather sweet. This is, however, a film that makes full-frontal nudity fairly tedious, so that should tell you something.
The story goes like this: Confetti Magazine holds a contest to find the most original wedding idea of the year. After weeding out the Elvis weddings and the dinosaur nuptials and the under-water ceremonies and all that, the magazine chooses three couples.
Isabelle (Meredith MacNeill) and Josef (Stephen Mangan) plan a tennis-themed wedding, Matt (Martin Freeman) and Samantha (Jessica Stevenson) want a musical extravaganza and Michael (Robert Webb) and Joanna (Olivia Colman) are naturists who wish to marry in the nude.
Throw in a pair of earnest, gay wedding planners, a tennis coach named Jesus and a meddling mother (the inimitable Alison Steadman) and you've got lovely larks for 90 minutes.
Let the best couple win!
Weddings are fabulous material for comedy, given the opportunities available via bad fashion, heinous decor and dysfunctional families. Confetti has the additional advantage of involving naked people who really do not want to get dressed for the cover of any magazine. Imagine the possibilities.
The film has a couple of good laughs -- often via its use of music -- but it's overall a bit of a muddle. The characters are stereotypes and the action is mostly sitcom-ish, and the film seems to invite an audience to laugh at the characters rather than with them.
If, for example, you think a working-class accent is automatically hilarious, this could be the mockumentary for you.
BOTTOM LINE: Harmless laughs with a fine ensemble cast, but a bit thin overall. The film was shown here last week as part of the Toronto film festival.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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