Four Weddings and a Funeral

In the script, Duckface's brother is George, the red-faced bore who corners Carrie at the pub after the first wedding and keeps reminiscing about his schooldays (and is played by the actor who played Mr Hurst in the BBC Pride and Prejudice). But from what I can remember there's no indication of that in the film, so maybe posh twit has been rewritten as her brother?

Mind you, in the script Duckface isn't Duckface. She says 'Fiona calls me 'the attractive duck'', and Fiona once calls asks 'How's the Duck?' but generally she's referred to as Henrietta or Hen by everyone.

I think the posh twit is Duckface's brother, which is why he asks about the stag do, as you would expect to invite the bride's brother if he wasn't a knob.

tbf, Julia Roberts is a pretty boring British name if you forget about the famous actress...

(I was at primary school with a girl called Julia and another with the surname Roberts)

I would say a plot device. I got married in the late 90s and we had been together for 4.5 years by then and lived together for 2.5.

We went to so many weddings in that decade and I don't remember any whirlwind romance weddings. Everyone had been together at least a few years or more. It seemed to be the case that you booked your wedding about 2 years before and then spent that time saving up to pay for it.

There were people who lived together in the 90s but there were families who absolutely did not approve. I would have caused a family rift

I found Carrie rather brash and sarcastic. The rain comment was sarcasm, I’ve seen it as such as she looked like a drowned rat in that scene!
They wouldn’t have lasted the year and the baby at the end in the photo was probably one of their friend’s ones!
The bits below they cut out is interesting and far more cutting edge than the actual film.
I don’t mind it as something to watch and I like seeing how the roads are so empty everywhere. Not like it today is it.

It's a Richard Curtis script. They don't reflect real life.

Gah! Bloody face blindness. Poshoes all look the same... 😂

They could have given her a really starry name, a bit like Demi Moore's character in The Substance, Elizabeth Sparkle!

He always seems to do that. Carrie in FWAAF is called Judith Caroline Hartnell in the script. There's a joke in the script that when he opens the invitation he doesn't recognise the name until Scarlett realises who it is.

Yeah, Anna Scott. It does sound like a British name.
I do find it funny when he mentions horses in her new film and she whispers ‘ it’s set in space ‘.

That wasn't Angus who didn't get invited to Charles' stag! That was the twit Charles talks to at Angus and Laura's wedding in front of an amused Carrie. Charles says 'How's that lovely girlfriend of yours?' and the twit says she's no longer his girlfriend, and Charles says something like 'Oh well, cheer up -- rumour has it she never stopped shagging old Toby de Lisle in case you two didn't work out' and the twit says 'She is now my wife.'

Julia Roberts' character being called Anna Scott really irritates me. Why did they give her such a boring, British name?

Most RC films were made for the American audience. Get them on board with a few quirky Americans and sell it on to them. I didn’t mind Notting Hill, I often wondered how she found out his landline number , but guessed it was ‘her people’ who did the digging there with the phone book if he was in it. Ringing the actual book shop may have been a bit more believable!
I liked his friends who seemed a lot more well rounded than the four weddings ones were especially the one who didn’t recognize Anna Scott at first.

I was disappointed by Notting Hill too. Plot holes aside (poor Angus not even invited to the stag do, when Charles was his best man), I think FWAAF really holds up. I think the humour is on point, and it's so evocative of those summers in your late 20s when it feels like you have a wedding every weekend.

I had hoped Notting Hill was a literally sequel to Four Weddings, so was disappointed straight off the bat (no Google ahead of time in those days).

I have a soft spot for Love Actually though. Yes, I've read and agree with the Jezabel article, and yes, it's emotionally manipulative - but it really does have its funny moments too. More character-driven than one liners. Yes, when I watched it with DD I did have to keep pausing it to reiterate that Natalie Is Not Fat. But I will never not chortle at "Where the fuck is my fucking coat". Plus Emma Thompson is sublime.

I agree. I was completely underwhelmed by Notting Hill. I'd had enough of "let's stick a beautiful famous American actress in it for Hugh Grant to swoon over, we don't need to worry about the rest". Four Weddings i thought was ok

i read the great WH Auden poem which appeared in 4WAAF at my dear darling late husband’s funeral. I was pretty much in a haze of shock throughout the whole service but there were so many loud outpourings of grief, it was quite surreal. He was young and it was very very unexpected. And 4WAAF was not only one of his favourite films, but one of our favourite regulars when we were having a snuggly night in. It felt very fitting.

@trockodile I'm sure I read somewhere that when Queen Camilla and Andrew Parker-Bowles were dating, her father was so livid that APB hadn't yet proposed, despite them practically living together, that he put an engagement announcement in the Times and they basically had to go through with it to save face....

Citizen Kane is a work of real brilliance, and does have its own brand of humour albeit dark. William Randolph Hearst was a true horror whose actions have quite literally destroyed people. He thoroughly deserved to be sent up in the most visceral way possible! You can't in all seriousness put Mankiewicz/Welles and Richard Curtis in the same sentence.

Four Weddings was pretty much rescued by Kristin Scott Thomas and the late and sadly underrated Charlotte Coleman. Rowan Atkinson was too hammed up and overplayed to the point of cringeiness. Thomas afforded a much-needed note of pathos amongst all the saccharine, and Coleman was just about the only remotely likeable character. Agree with the PPs above that Carrie was awful.

Notting Hill was more than enough to convince me that I never wanted to watch another Richard Curtis film in my life.

The original script, which is quite different in lots of ways from the finished film (including some really weird bits, like Tom paying for Charles to fly to his own wedding to Henrietta in a helicopter so as not to be late!), is available online.

Carrie is much brasher and sexier in it -- when the vicar at the first wedding asks if anyone has any objections to the marriage, she says to her neighbour 'I suppose him [Angus] being a terrible lay doesn't count?' and after the service, she takes off her hat and tights and dumps them in a nearby bin before going to the reception, and spends the entire first wedding being chatted up by other men.

When she sleeps with Charles the second time, after she's engaged, she says upfront 'The second I said yes to Hamish I knew there'd be one final fling', and she throws him out at 5 am because Hamish's sister is coming over to talk about bridesmaids. When she takes Charles wedding dress shopping with her, one outfit she tries on is hotpants, and at one point she runs out of the fitting room in her bra and pants and says 'What about the beach look?' AND she says Hamish (who is much nicer in the script, and whose wedding speech is quite funny and likeable) says he's slept with 84 women.

Carrie also begins her own wedding speech by saying the last time she gave an important speech she was explaining her her parents why she had condoms in her bedside table.

And in the script she doesn't say 'Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed'!

Don’t know about it being “normal”, but it did depend on your social circle. I met ex husband in Feb ‘96 and married in July ‘96 (very small wedding! we split up after 20 years 😝). The reasoning behind that is he was in the army and we could only get housing after marriage! It was considered quite unusual
I was a nanny in ‘94 when the film came out. My boss was very upper class, loved the film because it was exactly like the weddings they went to! Among her circle -who all knew each other/knew them from boarding school etc, living together was still slightly “off’, and certainly not mentioned in front of Grandma!. (remember it was only 14 years earlier that Prince Charles HAD to marry a virgin, and it was noted and frowned upon that Fergie had lived with a previous boyfriend prior to marrying Andy!) Most engagements and weddings were fairly formulaic and iirc were mostly in the summer, and timed to avoid Royal Ascot, Wimbledon, and Henley Royal Regatta!
I loved the soundtrack and cried at the funeral 😢

I totally agree. I think a lot of people are remembering it with rose tinted glasses and the fact that it's usually shown around Christmas when you can get away with all sorts of shite

I thought Love Actually was total crap when it came out. It feels like a film made up of rejected jokes from other RC films, and hasn't aged especially well. It has become a bit of a nostalgia watch though.

While it is weird and inexplicable in 4 weddings that everyone is at Carrie and angus’ wedding, on the other hand I do remember that as a time when friendship groups were very fluid and fast moving. You could suddenly be deeply involved with people a friend had introduced you to in the pub the week before

My friends and I were in our 20s in the 90s and some got married fairly quickly. They tended to be ambitious well organized people with big plans and felt that they were “starting life” together and that it was both romantic and efficient to just be properly married and get on with it. They had well off parents who paid; they probably had lives together but would secretly have been uncomfortable doing so without being engaged, their parents definitely. The engagement or proposal wasn’t a thing. Someone would suggest getting married, possibly drunkenly, the other would agree, and that would be that. The weddings were comfortable, well catered and didn’t have stupid touches like animals doing things or weird photography of inanimate objects. The bride got dressed at home and maybe got a hairdresser round for her and her mum and the bridesmaids, but no photographers or special accessories.

at the same time, other couples were living together and one half assumed / hoped that meant theyd get married, the other had no intention of marrying that person. About 10 years later a huge number of those “starter relationships” all fell apart at around the same time, creating a new musical chairs scramble