Fridae

In the very misnamed The Wedding Diary, small-town boy Daniel (Aniu) marries way, way up to Tina (Elanne Kwong), a rich tycoon's daughter, and spends the film trying to come up with all sorts of schemes to pay for his wedding banquet bill.

At least this is how I'd describe The Wedding Diary. Sadly, its director and writer do not have a clearer vision of their own film. In an over-long opening act that adds nothing to the story in terms of plot or actual comedy, we get to know in excruciatingly irrelevant detail how the couple, who remain cardboard thin and flimsy despite the copious first act, came together and how the wedding preparations came about. And unfortunately because you've already watched the first act, you now have a healthy disbelief in the chemistry between the two leads. In addition, you will also be afflicted with a healthy distrust in this film's attempts at humour, which range from mistaking the verbatim observations of the tiny absurdities of everyday life for parody and satire to wholesale robbery of an entire anecdote from Chicken Soup for the Soul in the film's longest joke.

But what about the rest of the film? Say if you missed the extraneous first act, would the film be much improved once it gets to the business of telling the story it's supposed to tell? One can indeed make a fascinating caper revolving around one average Joe's attempts to raise money to pay for a wedding he couldn't afford. This film doesn't quite try at all. There is no caper, no outlandish madcap scheme, even no sustained attempt to bust a gut. It plods on through sheer force of its three-act structure, serving up as much blandness and predictability as an over-produced, over-budgeted Chinese banquet. And then it ends with a mawkishly sentimental over-long product placement segment, complete with sepia toned flashbacks, as its third act.

As nothing kills the thought of marriage and romance than a long-winded spiel about having to find the money to pay for the wedding, we cannot imagine even straight people taking their dates out to watch this as a Valentine's Day film. The Wedding Diary seems to be desperately seeking the very forgiving Lunar New Year family audiences who will watch anything in the cinema. Maybe you'd take grandma or auntie out to watch this. I'm sure they won't mind even though Lunar New Year is actually over.