Reviews

Table 19 is a dreadful movie.

The script is surely the worst thing about it. Some people are stuck at Table 19 (the loser table) at a wedding. We get each of their stories, if you can call an incoherent jumble of clichés a story. One boy of about 13 is trying to laid, with his mother calling him every 10 minutes to give him advice. One couple may or may not be in love, depending on when you went out for popcorn. One woman plays the ridiculous old person, a staple in every bad Hollywood movie. One man is even more ridiculous.

Joining the table is Anna Kendrick, who seems to have two love interests, one of whom just vanishes when his presence becomes inconvenient for the plot. She has recently broken up with the best man, though the explanation for how this happened makes little sense.

Everyone at the table has problems. They all go off and smoke dope, and then suddenly the problems are magically solved. This is basically the plot, minus a bunch of slapstick scenes with the wedding cake.

Aside from Anna Kendrick, none of the characters are the slightest bit interesting, and none of them, including Anna Kendrick, undergoes any sort of personal transformation that leads to the resolution of their problems. The movie is just one sorry gimmick after another.

The movie has a good heart, but it basically makes no sense.

Jenny is marrying Kitty, and they have been living together for five years. When they are together, do they touch each other, or call each other pet names, or look into each other's eyes, or kiss, or stand close together? Nope. This is a movie about lesbians from which lesbianism has apparently been banned.

Poor Kitty barely has a part at all. Could she have spoken ten lines throughout the whole film?

Never mind the question of why Kitty would stay with Jenny for five years while Jenny gets around to telling her family she is gay. And Jenny and Kitty live in town, so why does Jenny's family seem to barely know who Kitty is?

When Jenny finally tells her parents, they react as though they had never heard of gay people. The movie is made and presumably set in 2015, in some reasonably large city, and the parents have 3 kids and lots of family friends, but they don't know ANY gay people, or ANYONE with a gay child. Come on.

The biggest lie in this movie is the excision of religion from the motives of the parents. They react badly to her announcement, they won't come to her wedding, they don't know who she is any more. But do they ever mention God or the Bible or their church? Nope. But other people do, right? Nope.

When the parents finally change their minds, there is not any particular reason for it, except that it is getting close to the end of the movie, so I guess this is where they should say they're sorry and live happily ever after.

What in the world happened here??? We can only guess. But it's hard to see how something this bad could have gotten that way without some sort of fear being involved.

This is a stylish thriller with good acting and nice settings.

Unfortunately it is full of outlandish things that in real life would never happen:

1) The wife suspects her husband is cheating, so she hires a prostitute to tempt him. Huh? What about talking to him? Or having him followed? Or checking his phone?

2) The prostitute accepts the job. Huh? If word got out, this would ruin her business. Surely she would say no.

3) The prostitute reports all sort of shenanigans with the husband, but the wife never asks for any proof that she was with him. Come on.

4) The wife and husband have an ugly fight about their affairs, but the wife doesn't get around to mentioning the prostitute. Really?

5) The prostitute makes up stories about her encounters with the husband, but she has no way of knowing that the husband isn't home at the time of the alleged encounters, or didn't call his wife to ask if he could stop at the grocery store. I guess she just got lucky.

6) The prostitute fakes love affairs with multiple guys a night. This is her job. But somehow when she has sex with the wife, she becomes obsessed with her.

7) The prostitute ends up in the couple's house, on the second floor, and lightly bumps the plate glass window, causing it to shatter. Huh? Was the house not built to code?

I still enjoyed the movie, though some of my enjoyment was amusement at the utterly ridiculous plot.

I loved this movie, in spite of its flaws. The biggest flaw was a script that seemed like a soap opera, with tricks and scenes that made me squirm in disbelief. Another was the sappy music, lifted from the slow movement of Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto, but altered to make it a lot less interesting.

So why was the movie good? Acting! There were lots of meaty parts, and every actor was a joy to watch. The movie was also quite interesting visually. It had a very comfortable pace to it, leisurely, but not too slow. And it had a great moral: your time on earth is short, and you only get one chance. Most of the main characters live a troubled life in some way. Some of them manage to nudge themselves towards happiness, and others do not. The movie manages to be both sad and hopeful. When it was over, I wanted to watch it again.