![]() But there’s nothing mean-spirited or overly judgmental happening. ![]() It’s an inexpensive gag about a secretly lonely guy who has yet to meet a trend he won’t immediately hop on to meet women. When Robbie’s friend Sammy isn’t sporting acid-washed parachute jeans, he’s out on the town as Michael Jackson, complete with a “Thriller” red vinyl jacket and single silver glove. Much of the audience plopping down cash to see The Wedding Singer in 1998 had to expect a film that largely uses the ‘80s as cheap fodder for laughs. But, in fairness, the movie’s intended to be a nostalgic smorgasbord, not an accurate account, and much of the film’s appeal comes from picking out a favorite reference: an old man doing the Moonwalk in a bar or maybe the orchestra at Robbie’s doomed wedding to Linda plucking and sawing away on Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”. Yes, Sandler’s hairdo could not exist in any other era in human history yes, his annoying nephew wears a Freddy Krueger mask and, yes, the film’s Grade-A asshole, Glenn Guglia, aspires to be Don Johnson in Miami Vice and drives a Back to the Future DeLorean because, didn’t we all back then? It’s also a film that treats the entire first half of the ‘80s as a single moment, making for anachronistic gags about Rubik’s Cubes, Flock of Seagulls, and “Who shot J.R.?”, all of which would’ve long since faded from the pulse of pop culture by 1985. The three playfully cram in as many ‘80s pop-culture signposts as possible, as if afraid their period piece won’t be convincing enough. The ‘80s had become little more than a punchline: “That’s so ‘80s.”īesides the opening caption that sets the film in 1985, director Frank Coraci, writer Tim Herlihy, and Sandler leave little doubt of when wedding singer Robbie Hart’s story takes place. Look no further than the bands topping the charts to see the shift in mindset: leather and spandex had been banished in favor of flannel and ragged tees hair hung down grimy and unkempt rather than peroxided and coiffed to the hair metal heavens and a distortion pedal spooked away all the synths and keyboards lurking behind every hard riff that actually had a pair. I’m not sure about all that, but we were a skeptical and sarcastic bunch – the Beavis and Butt-Head generation who could sit on a couch and call things stupid even if we didn’t quite know why we thought that. Pseudo-sociologists painted us in magazines as disaffected slackers rebelling against the empty Reaganism of the ‘80s. ![]() That was our generation’s outlook by the mid-‘90s, a decade whose pop-culture attitudes, in hindsight, seem disproportionately formed as a reaction to the obviously lame decade that preceded it. ![]() Part of the humor in her hopefulness stems from the fact that Cynthia’s explaining her theory in ’76 as an audience watching Richard Linklater’s out-all-night teen period piece in theaters back in 1993 or a couple years later on VHS, we already knew that anyone relying on the ‘80s to bail them out was utterly doomed and shit out of luck. So, maybe the ‘80s will be like, radical.” The line always gets a chuckle. “I call it the ‘Every Other Decade Theory,’” Marissa Ribisi’s Dazed and Confused character, Cynthia, tells Pink, Jodi, and Kaye at the film’s beer bust.
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