One weekend during the summer of 2008 when my wife and I were just getting to know each other, she was feeling a little down and she wanted me to bring over a movie to cheer her up.  Nothing too serious, but nothing too sweet and silly either was the order.  “Maybe something from the 80s?” she said.  I immediately thought of  the cheesy action movies that I grew up with and hit on Big Trouble in Little China as the perfect solution for a fun Sunday movie.

We watched it and she loved it (at least until Jack and company stormed the palace at the end, by which point she had fallen asleep with her feet in my lap.)  She missed two of my favorite moments--the one where Jack shoots the ceiling and knocks himself out, and the one where Wang engages in a gravity-defying sword fight.  I knew that we’d have to watch it again some day so that she could fully appreciate the brilliant ending, I just didn’t know that the next time we’d see it again would be at our wedding.

We had our wedding at the Plaza Theater and one of the bonuses to that venue was that we could screen a movie--anything we wanted that the theater could get a hold of.  I knew that there were prints of these kinds of movies floating around, but I didn’t realize it was quite that easy for theaters to book them.  When we decided on the plaza, we had to pick a film and the first thing that came to mind for me was Big Trouble.  It was silly, had some memorable lines, it was old enough that people would appreciate the kitsch, and at the center of the whole thing was a wedding!  OK, so it was an unholy marriage of Lo Pan and some kidnapped women to appease an ancient demon, but it still had a wedding theme so it seemed perfect.  I ran it by Leigh, she loved the idea so we were set.

Big Trouble in Little China remains one of my favorite movies.  It’s got such an odd blend of comedy and action and horror that it’s unique even amongst John Carpenter’s other films of the era.  The kung fu battles are actually fun.  The design of the storms is still cool to this day, and they factor into the story perfectly.  Kurt Russell as Jack Burton is perfect--he’s a near complete moron who manages to win despite himself.  He’s a laughable hero in the way that Inspector Gadget is--everyone knows that Penny and Brain do all the work but Gadget still gets credit for solving the crimes.  Russell is a lot of fun to watch and while he makes Burton into a cartoon, almost all of his comrades seem to be playing the movie straight.  Kim Cattral is so bad that she turns her scenes of expository dialogue into some of the funniest parts of the movie.  Out of nowhere, the movie throws things like the floating eyeball and the underground sasquatch at the audience and no one ever questions any of it.  It’s full of amazingly cheesy moments and goofy scenes, but somehow it all congeals.

I got to see They Live at the Plaza the same week as our wedding, and while I love the ideas in that film, I recognize that it’s a nightmare of pacing.  People like to talk about the eight minute alley brawl, but what about the twenty or thirty minutes that it takes Nada to even figure out what is going on?  I saw The Thing at the Plaza about a year ago, and while I loved it too, it’s a little more heavily reliant on the scares and the creature effects, so it’s not so appropriate for a wedding audience.  Big Trouble in Little China was the perfect film for us to show at our wedding.  I enjoyed it with our guests who stayed through the reception and Leigh got to see the whole thing through the end--no sleeping this time.  We had champagne and fabulous wedding cupcakes, truffle parmesean popcorn from our caterer Chef Courtney, and each other and that made the screening the best movie moment of my life.  It was a great way to kick off our life together, and a wedding/movie that I don’t think anyone will ever forget--indeed!