The Wedding Singer

A lightweight, by-the-numbers romantic comedy with Adam Sandler as Robbie Hart, a recently jilted wedding singer, and Drew Barrymore as Julia, the innocent waitress he falls for. Problem is, she’s engaged to a womanizing dick (Matthew Glave). What sets this apart are the charm of the kinder, gentler Sandler and the appealing Barrymore, and the hot late-’90s gimmick of setting the movie in 1985 — therefore allowing for wall-to-wall ’80s nostalgia. The movie, in fact, is like the entire decade of the ’80s thrown into a blender. It helps if you’re in the Gen-X demographic that remembers Miami Vice, Rubik’s Cube, and Culture Club, though the film did well enough to suggest that younger audiences simply laughed at the pastel-colored decade they were too young to live through. The jam-packed ’80s soundtrack includes just about everyone you can think of — Nena, Lionel Richie, the Smiths, Billy Idol, After the Fire, Hall and Oates — plus Sandler covering “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record),” “Love Stinks,” and “Holiday.” With Allen Covert, Christine Taylor, Angela Featherstone, Alexis Arquette as a Boy George clone, Christina Pickles, Steve Buscemi as a drunken best man, Jon Lovitz as a rival wedding singer, Ellen Dow as the hip-hop grandma doing “Rapper’s Delight,” and one of the above ’80s rock stars as himself.

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