Hollywood loves a good wedding, and always has done. Some of the most memorable movies in our culture center on the commitment ceremony of two main characters, some in slapstick ways (think Wedding Crashers or The Ghost of Girlfriends Past), and others in a more serious light (for example The Godfather). Weddings bring together the best and the worst of family, friendships, love and romance, often with dramatic or hilarious outcomes, and Hollywood has explored them all. Here is the first installment of our ten best wedding movie moments:
10. My Big Fat Greek Wedding. This movie boasts heartwarming moment after moment in Toula Portokalos’s journey to the aisle. An old maid, according to her traditionally minded Greek family, Toula (played by the movie's writer Nia Vardalos) surprises her family and herself by falling in love with the non-Greek Ian Miller (sexy hunk John Corbett from Sex and the City fame). The things he goes through to please her family and win their blessing would (speaking of Greek) impress many a freshman fraternity pledge. The best wedding moment of the movie comes, though, when Ian is being baptized and Toula watches from the sidelines with her brother, Nick. She comments, “Any second now he's gonna look at me and go, ‘Ha. Yeah, right, you're so not worth this.’” Nick, summing up the journey the Portokalos family has made parallel to Toula’s, simply says, “Yes, you are.”
9. My Best Friend’s Wedding. Julia Robert’s Julianne Porter is in love with Dermot Mulroney’s Michael O’Neal, her best friend of years. She realized this when he announced he was engaged to someone else, namely the quirky, lighthearted, perennially loveable Kimberly Wallace (played by Cameron Diaz). Julianne spends the bulk of the movie trying to diminish Kimberly’s charms and derail the love-locked couple in a variety of hilarious but heartless ways before they reach the aisle. In this cute movie, there are two great moments that contend for mention. The first is when Julianne convinces Kimberly to go ahead and marry the man that they both love, selflessly admitting to herself that this is the right thing to do. The second adorable moment occurs when Julianne’s stylish man-friend and pretend boyfriend, George Downes, consoles her at the end of the movie with the best of all redemptions: dancing.
8. It Happened One Night. Blame it on the romantic black-and-white film, blame it on the humor of two people forced to bunk side-by-side with the so-called Wall of Jericho (aka a sheet) strung between them to protect their modesty, honor and reputations, but this is undeniably a timelessly romantic movie. Claudette Colbert’s heiress character Ellie ends up marrying Clark Cable’s Peter Warne in means befitting royalty, and they spend their wedding night in yet another shelved-away hotel where, at last, the Wall of Jericho is dispensed with. The symbolism, although perhaps now outdated, is at once humorous and every bit as romantic as a wedding night should be.

