Hollywood Wedded to The Formula

Kate Hudson, left, and Anne Hathaway play best friends mutated into selfish harridans, each fighting to have her perfect wedding, in "Bride Wars." (By Claire Folger -- Twentieth Century Fox)

Those who will nod along with Candice Bergen, as wedding planner Marion St. Claire, when she tells the newly engaged Emma during their first planning session, "You have been dead until now."

Emma whispers in reply, "I understand."

So much freesia, so much Vera, and in between that, things happen that you would expect would happen. (In a movie, at least -- if they happened in real life, it would be either your wildest dream or worst nightmare.) Consider the following to be spoilers only if you have never seen a film in which two people say "I do":

It's sort of like "27 Dresses" (released last January), in which a meek woman has been planning her nuptials since embryo, or like "Made of Honor" (May) in which an engagement prompts old friends to reconsider their platonic relationship, or like "Sex and the City: The Movie" (also May) in which wedding planning causes psychosis.

Oh, but you know what else it's like? "The Philadelphia Story" (1940), in which a drunken escapade liberates an otherwise prim character shortly before the big day.

In fact, just about any movie with organza in the production budget ends up looking something like this:

Girl, having already met Boy, begins a zany trip down the aisle, and often ends up at the front of the church with a different groom than she started out with.

(This last bit makes wedding movies the ultimate romantic comedies: The audience gets to see both flirtation and gown montages. Because as anyone knows, most romcoms end with a first kiss, not a wedding, and two people planning a stressful wedding together rarely ever flirt.)

The stories are the same, and the weddings in them are all the same, too: White ball gowns, blue garters, drunken uncles, teary moms, a getaway Rolls trailed by shoes and tin cans.

Wedding-in-a-box.

A wedding is a good insta-device, says Murray Horwitz, director of the American Film Institute's Silver Theatre. "It's like in soap operas, when a scene isn't working right the director will say, 'Prop department, get me a gun!' The gun changes the whole scene because suddenly everyone knows what's at stake."

Prop department, get me a wedding!