I've come across some absurd premises for movies in my day, but Wedding Daze (now bearing its third title) has to be one of the strangest.

Here's the setup: Hopeless romantic/loser Anderson (Jason Biggs, playing his usual persona yet again) proposes to his girlfriend so elaborately that she has a heart attack and dies on the spot. He mopes endlessly until his best friend (Michael Weston) goads him into getting back in the game. Anderson misunderstands... and proposes to the next girl he sees, Katie (Isla Fisher), the waitress at the diner where they're eating. It just so happens that Katie was proposed to the very day before all this happens; she doesn't want to marry that guy, so she agrees to marry Anderson on the spot. Who'd a thunk?

What follows is a rather typical Meet the Parents kind of story as the pair try to decide whether or not they should really get married, but filtered through the kind of generally bizarre craziness that's designed to give the movie street cred. You know what I mean. One of Katie's co-workers wears a Darth Vader mask in his daily routine. Anderson's post-menopausal mom threatens Katie "I'll cut ya!" if she mentions the dead girlfriend's name. That kind of stuff. It's strange that such a conventional story -- it's a Jason Biggs comedy for God's sake -- would come from writer and first-time director Michael Ian Black of the subversive, cult comedy troupe "The State."

Wedding Daze never earned a domestic release (it made about $5 million in the UK), but it's not as bad as its box office might indicate. Fisher is charming, and though Biggs is as sleepy as ever, the nutty goings-on are enough of a diversion to keep us at least amused enough that we're largely willing to overlook the absurd plot of the film. I mean: Should we care about the happiness of characters that are this outright stupid? Hoping for these characters to get married is kind of like rooting for Britney Spears to get hitched again.

The DVD includes three deleted scenes.

Aka The Pleasure of Your Company, The Next Girl I See.



The pleasure is all mine.