With the possible exception of certain horror genres, “cringe” is not a word that most people hope to see in a recommendation. Common connotations, however, often don’t tell the whole story. Consider the case of Rachel Getting Married, a movie that made me cringe for all the right reasons. And with the right frequency – I didn’t cringe throughout, and the occasional cringes were hardly my only physical reaction to the film. They were good ones, though, and without them I wouldn’t have made it to the fond grins and I found later. I cringe because I care.
I’ve attended a lot of weddings over the last decade, and at nearly every one (my own certainly included) I’ve been struck by the high-stakes atmosphere of the event. Weddings have an uncanny knack for coaxing latent agendas and resentments out of hiding places in even the most apparently harmonious families; the most that be hoped for is that the appearance of unbroken harmony is maintained in the eyes of the guests. Since most of us don’t have dysfunction-free families, throwing a wedding is a calculated gamble from the outset.
I don’t know that I’ve seen a better dramatization of this phenomenon than Rachel Getting Married. Read the rest of this entry »
If this is your first visit to C&B you may be wondering, “Who the hell is this guy, and why does he have a blog?” It’s a reasonable question, so I’ve dedicated an entire page to answering it: check out 
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A Lethe
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Life 2.0
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Memoirs of a Barista
The Moving Target
