Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather cannot believe what is going on in their Facebook feeds. Why are people saying such awful things about Guardians of the Glaaxy, Vol. 2?! They ask whether sentimentality is a sufficient condition for a movie, and they wonder what makes a great wedding reception playlist, with detours into literary criticism, acting technique, and music theory.
(This episode was pre-taped.)
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Further Reading
- Does the Dog Die dot com
- Movies Where You Will Cry Your Eyes Out
- Jodie Foster on Inside the Actor’s Studio
- “Get in the emotional transportation business!” by Peter Guber
- “bathos” defined on Dictionary.com
One song that would count as providing musical closure is The Beatles’ ” “A Day in the Life” — the final definitive piano chord is certainly a consummation (although it is a terrible wedding song).
American Pie ends with a slower down beat version of the chorus. The last line is “this will be the day that I die.” That’s seems pretty final and after 8 minutes anything less would be unacceptable.
I have a theory about why the wedding band played “Don’t Stop Believing” as the last song: to try and bilk whoever is paying for the wedding for extra cash.
If you end your set on a song that doesn’t resolve, particularly one as crowd-pleasing and high-energy as “Don’t Stop,” you leave the crowd wanting more. If you’re a band playing at a concert, this means the crowd shouts for an encore and you come out and play one more song.
But if you’re a wedding band, you presumably have a fixed contract: play X songs in Y amount of time in exchange for $Z. There’s probably no encore.
The crowd at the wedding doesn’t know or care about that. If the band does it’s job right, the guests are all psyched up at the end of the night because of the rockin’ tunes you’ve been playing, and they want to keep going. They cheer “one more song, one more song!”
And then whoever is paying for the wedding (presumably the bride/groom/their families), who are already 3-10 drinks into the night, and hopefully having a blast as well, come up to the band leader and say: How much for 30 more minutes?
Man, is there anything in the Wedding Industrial Complex that’s not a racket?
I would tend to agree, except for the fact that a lot of venues have a hard stop time which prevents you from tacking on an additional 30 minutes of dance tunes.
Unless the venue is in on the racket and can be paid to extend the evening…