Father of the Bride (1991) | Steve Martin, Diane Keaton

Father of the Bride (1991) | Steve Martin, Diane Keaton | A classic comedy, maybe Steve Martin's best...

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Father of the Brid...

	Father of the Bride (1991) Steve Martin, Diane Keaton Walt Disney Video, 1995 average customer review:based on 84 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

father of the bride part 1

I, my wife and my fur oldest kids really like this movie. Just last night my son asked when can we watch part 2. Great show for most of the family.

A classic comedy, maybe Steve Martin's best...

A remake of a classic 1950 Spencer Tracy movie, Father Of The Bride is Steve Martin at his best. A fun comedy the entire family can enjoy, Father Of The Bride is great entertainment. When the daughter of George and Nina Banks announces her engagement, Nina is thrilled - but George has a difficult time handling the life changes that accompany his only daughter growing up for good. One of Steven Martin's funniest films, this is one movie you won't want to miss...

George Banks (Steve Martin) lives the perfect life. He has a great job, a nice house, a beautiful loving wife Nina (Diane Keaton), and two great kids. But George's world is shattered when his 21-year-old daughter Annie (Kimberly Williams) returns home from college to announce she's engaged. Her fiancée, Bryan MacKenzie (George Newbern), is a great guy, but when he puts his hand on Annie's leg, all sorts of feelings and emotions erupt inside George. It isn't her choice of a marriage partner, but rather her decision to get married at all that bothers George. He wants his little girl to remain a little girl forever, and he must now face the fact that he can't control the changes in his ideal world...

Father Of The Bride offers a number of hilarious scenes as plans for the wedding go forward. Annie and Nina hire an extremely feminine male wedding planner, Franck Eggelhoffer (Martin Short), whose annoying accent and take-charge attitude continuously rub George the wrong way. Deciding to have the wedding at the family home, the Banks's daily lives are turned upside down by all the last minute changes and typical pitfalls of an impending wedding. These comic sequences leading up to the big event are responsible for most of the humor and hilarity in the film (especially Martin Short's character). But will the wedding go off as planned? Will George come to accept his daughter's growing up? Or will she break off her engagement to Bryan? Father Of The Bride is a touching, romantic comedy you'll never forget.

Steve Martin stars as his usual likeable self, utilizing great body language and years of experience in the comic realm in order to provide the perfect likeness of a father in just such a situation. Not too over the top, and quite believable in every way, Father Of The Bride stands in stark contrast to the comedies of today which tend to go way overboard in their attempts to be funny. Outlandish comedies have their place, but sometimes its nice to able to laugh without having to suspend your sense of reality first. Father Of The Bride does well in this respect - similar to Christmas Vacation.

Overall, Father Of The Bride is a light-hearted family comedy with quite a bit of charm. Steve Martin and Diane Keaton form a likeable married couple, and the middle-class family life projected by the Banks family is something with which most viewers can identify. Because of its feel-good, light-hearted humor, Father Of The Bride is a definite must-see movie... Don't miss it!

The DVD Report

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All around good

The movie was in great condition. It shipped within a couple days. Everything went smoothly. Good job.

A very funny wedding featuring Steve Martin and Martin Short

I suppose I never saw Steve Martin replacing Spencer Tracey or Kimberly Williams replacing Elizabeth Taylor. The original film directed by Vincente Minnelli had charm and a number of fabulous sequences in it but Charles Shyer's film nicely updates the original film with some gut busting laughs for the ironic age. Shyer's films have a number of nice touches and references to other films including Martin commenting (as Banks) that he doesn't want to be bankrupt by the wedding and have to wander the streets in a bathrobe (a reference to Carl Reiner's film "The Jerk" starring Martin): Bank's character is named after George Banks (David Tomlinson) from the Disney classic "Mary Poppins"; the Bank's character's middle name of Stanley is borrowed from the father in the Spencer Tracey original and loads of other references to classic Hollywood films. This is the third turn for "Father of the Bride" (it was also a short lived TV series in 1960) and it's still delightful although this 15th Anniversary Edition is a year premature (the film came out in 1991).

George Banks' (Steve Martin) little girl Annie (Kimberly Williams) is getting married. All of the mayhem that you can imagine in a Steve Martin PG comedy ensues. Kimberly is marrying her college sweetheart Bryan (George Newbern). Banks doesn't have a problem with the concept of his daughter getting married but he does have an issue with his little growing up because, well, it means he's getting old, too. With delightful comic turns by Martin Short (as the wedding coordinator) and Diane Keaton, "Father of the Bride" unlike most remakes manages to update the material and make it work for a modern audience without betraying the emotional core that drove the comedy in the original film.

This version of "Bride" gets the deluxe treatment i the 15th Anniversary Edition. I don't know honestly if all of these featurettes and the commentary track were on the 2003 edition. I'd suspect they were and this is just a re-release in new packaging. The previous edition released two years ago was a nice anamorphic transfer. The sharp image quality and remarkable clarity evident here is a slight improvement over the original DVD release (although the previous version looked pretty darn good, too). It appears that the same transfer was used for this version and the film was tweaked a bit for the latest release. The 5.1 soundtrack

I seem to recall the extras here being the same as on the previous edition but that could just be faulty memory on my part. Either way, "Martin & Short Interview Each Other" is an amusing 5 minute, bizarre tongue-in-cheek featurette where they skewer each other, the roles they play and everything else in sight. At one point Short talks about how playing a woman liberated him in this film. He plays a man. We also get an 11 minute standard "Making of" featurette on the film with some amusing behind-the-scenes takes on the film.

Director Charles Shyer's commentary track is both informative and funny. Shyer discusses the challenges of directing a remake of a classic film. He notes that it's a fine line bringing a contemporary tone to the film but not playing with it or improving it into "a failure". It's particularly interesting to note that Shyer and Meyers both have a high regard for the original film. Hence, the things that worked well in the original (such as the opening monologue) are just updated (and, according to Shyer it took 35 takes to shoot the opening because of a number of technical issues that kept occurring). It's a pity we don't have Martin's comments or, for that matter, other cast members since Shyer recorded the commentary track 13 years after the film's original release (and he hadn't seen it since he finished working on it in 1991).

You're invited to a very funny wedding featuring funny men Steve Martin and Martin Short with able support from funny woman Diane Keaton. A delightful update of the 1950's classic, "Father of the Bride" has a number of moments that ring true for me from my experience with my sister. If you have the previous edition of the movie I don't know that I can recommend upgrading but if you haven't purchased until now, Buena Vista Home Video has priced this to move.

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Anniversary Edition a bit of a let down...

I really really like this movie. It's one of my top... 30 films of all time. I was about to purchase it on DVD this winter when I saw it for $9 but I noticed it was going to be re-released as a special edition with (gasp!) extra features!
I recently bought the new edition for 12 bucks from Best Buy- and it was a bit of a let down. It DID have more than just the theatrical trailer... but only 15 minutes more- a conversation between martin and short, as well as a 10 minute "behind the scenes" talk with the director, producer, and some of the actors. The picture quality also leaves much to be desired for an "anniversary edition." It tends to jitter a bit and there is a lot of 'old film noise.'

Never the less, it is STILL a terrific movie- so I guess this stuff is all just small details. It is certainly better than VHS!

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