Just dumped by the Best Man, Eloise decides to go to the wedding of her best friend anyway. Relegated to the far reaches of the reception, she and her table of misfits band together to have the time of their live. Can they find closure to the issues that brought them to this wedding in the first place before it’s too late? Find out in… Table 19.
How?! After a long debate with herself Eloise decides to attend the wedding of her best friend despite having just been dumped by the Best Man. Once the Maid of Honor, she has now been placed at Table 19, the table for those who should have known not to come. This table is full of people with secrets like the bride’s childhood nanny (who also is terminally ill), the bride’s cousin (who is also a white collar criminal), a couple who knows the groom’s father from work (who are also having marital issues), and the son of a family friend (who is skipping his prom to attend). It’s no different for Eloise who has a secret of her own: she’s pregnant. This revelation leads to a fight with her ex which culminates in the destruction of the wedding cake. Totally bummed (much like the audience watching the film) the group goes off to smoke some weed and crash the other wedding happening at the resort. This is a massive failure when Eloise realizes that a guy she was flirting with and kissed earlier in the film is actually the groom of the other wedding. Guys suck, emirite?! They decide to steal the wedding cake from that wedding, thus saving the day, and come to find that Eloise’s ex is actually a sweet guy and their relationship is worth saving. The table rouses Eloise from her melancholia and pushes her to make a grand gesture to her ex, which results in their happily ever after. THE END.
Why?! The motivations in this are all hazy. You get a sense that Eloise and her boyfriend broke up from the stress of the unexpected pregnancy but from there it’s a bit of an unreliable narrator. They both have different stories of what happened. Certainly her motivation for attending the wedding is to get him back… which she does. Everyone else is just kind of sad and finding friends in Table 19 bring them back hope in an otherwise hopeless world. Very much a Duplass film.
What?! Not much product placement in this guy. Maybe I’ll just point out the similarity this film has to The Breakfast Club. A group of misfits are thrust together. They have assumptions about each other but also secrets about themselves. They end up finding that these misfits are the first people that they can be honest with and everything turns out peachy. The Breakfast Club for the Millennial generation… so much worse and barely released.
Who?! A bunch of interesting “The producers wish to thank” credits. The obvious one is Helen Mirren who presumably gave the film permission to use her name and image as part of a joke. After that Anthony Jeselnik, Keegan-Michael Key, and Lennon Parham also get special thanks, but for what? It’s anyone’s guess. Maybe they were connected to the film before the Duplass brothers stepped back from directing? Impossible to tell.
Where?! Takes place on an imaginary island in “Lake Alma” in Michigan. You can tell from the address sent for the wedding invites that this is likely the case. They then seem to go to some trouble not to be very specific after that. Probably since it was actually filmed in Atlanta. B-
When?! The only hint we get of when the film takes place is that the high school student Rezno is skipping his spring prom to go to the wedding (because his mom thinks he has a better chance of meeting a girl there than at the dance). So this is probably set in May or something. Not super specific. D+
Overall this is a really tiny film. I thought it was crazy that it got such a big release and that seems even crazier after seeing the film. A bit paint-by-numbers, but not Waiting for Forever crazy weirdness, so overall just a film that exists in the BMTverse. Not much different than something like What Goes Up… you know, except actually released to theaters. Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! For those just following along at home you are probably stunned at our ability to pick bad movies. Like … we pick the worst of the worst quite well it would seem. Do we ever miss the mark?! You must be wondering that … well wonder no more! Let’s get into it!
The Good (Sklognalogy) – This film has genuine heart, it has an interesting structure (with the emotional climax occurring in the middle of the film blowing up the relatively uninteresting suitcase plot they were setting up), and has several quality actors involved (Lisa Kudrow, Stephen Merchant, and Craig Robinson are all quite good). I’m … actually not sure why people were so hard on the film. Seems like a fairly straightforward mumblecore awkward-fest. What Goes Up would be a perfect analogy maybe (although I didn’t like that as much as this one), but for the Sklognalogy I’m going to look back to our 1986 cycle from last year to the movie No Mercy starring Richard Gere. There are things wrong with it, it is a bit rote and dull at times, but ultimately it is just kind of crazy that people are so hard on the film. There are so many trite cop thrillers (and coming-of-age dramas in this case) it blows my mind when everyone decides to hate one of them for being “standard fare”.
The Bad (Crimes Against BMT-anity) – Mostly it is just dull. And the actor playing opposite of Anna Kendrick lacks context or fleshing out. This is likely intentional (to play up an unreliability to Kendrick’s narration), but it still comes across as kind of lazy. At least one character is totally unnecessary (the kid skipping his prom), and the film would have seems more sincere without him, although I wouldn’t say that is why the film got destroyed by critics. Probably the biggest Crime Against BMT-anity in the film though is the way they ultimately did exposition in the film. Craig Robinson at one point just says that he love detective novels and is very good at spotting things. This is somewhat amusingly contrasted with him not being able to spot that his wife intended on using the wedding to cheat on him with a business associate / old friend (who ultimately no-shows the wedding). But then, throughout the film, every character takes a movie cliche and uses it to deduce major plot points that move everything along briskly. Kendrick vomits at the table? She’s pregnant. The old lady has a bunch of weed? She has cancer. Etc. Lazy lampshading with a dumb detective novel device that is mainly unnecessary.
The BMT (Legacy / StreetCreditReport.com) – A rare dud in the BMT filmography I think. Like What Goes Up or like … Evening, the film just seems destined to be forgotten … well except for being the only film with the number 19 in the title. That is awesome. I’m going to declare no street cred here as well. I can see it on a few lists (like pop sugar), but I think that is because it had a relatively bad Rotten Tomatoes score and those are fake algorithmically derived articles. Given that places like the AV Club included The Space Between Us, somehow this movie managed to be so small that it will fly under the radar completely.
Congrats to us to filling in a new spot on the Periodic Table of Smellements for the first time in quite a while. The number 19 is sufficiently rare that I don’t think there will be another movie for it … ever? Bully for us.
Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 