Hallmark For All Seasons

When “Wedding Every Weekend” aired this past weekend, it became the #1 Summer Nights movie for 2020.  I’m sure a lot of that was that non-Hallmark folks tuned in because of the one controversial couple that got married in the movie. But you know what?  Of all the Summer Nights movies we got in 2020, this was the best one, plain and simple.

Written by Julie Sherman Wolfe and directed by Kevin Fair, the movie was filmed only a few weeks ago in Vancouver, Canada.  Talk about a quick turnaround!

In a nutshell

I know a lot of people boycotted watching this movie because one of the four weddings featured a same-sex wedding. In doing so, those folks missed out on seeing a very sweet, occasionally funny, and simple love story between Paul Campbell and Kimberly Sustad, who previously starred together a couple years ago in the original “Godwink” movie.

Plot for “Wedding Every Weekend”

Nate and Brooke are going to the same four weddings, four weekends in a row. To avoid set-ups, they go together as “wedding buddies.” But what starts as a friendship soon becomes deeper.

Actors/Chemistry

These two are perfection together.  I love how Hallmark Channel is able to find and put together pairs that viewers would be happy to see together over and over again.  The good news is that Campbell has said that he and Sustad are currently attempting to put a couple things together in the future, including possibly a mystery series on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries!  Given their natural ease with each other on screen, and their innate comedic timing, I know that would be a fun series I could get behind.

In “Weekend” I loved how both actors played on the sheer awkwardness that popped up from time to time between Nate and Brooke.  I felt those long pauses of silence where neither knew how to fill the gap.

Six Degrees of Kris Polaha:  Kimberly Sustad is only one degree away from Polaha!  They worked together in Hallmark’s 2016 movie “Hearts of Christmas.”

Tropes in “Wedding Every Weekend”

Not many tropes in this one, sadly.  We did get the overview drone footage of Portland, Oregon (the city for which Vancouver played stand-in).  We also had an overheard conversation that was taken out of context and misunderstood.  That might have been it.

Did I Hear/See That Right?

Even Hallmark’s best movies still have issues, and “Weekend” is no different.

1. Only one wedding planner in Portland?  At all four weddings the same wedding planner kept popping up.  Portland is not a small town.  Why does everyone keep using the same wedding planner?

2. Clueless Bureaux employee. When Nate and Brooke agree to meet at the local gift shop to look for a gift for one of the weddings, Brooke arrives first and is shown getting a printed gift list from the woman at the register.  And yet a few moments later that same woman walks up to Brooke and Nate and asks when their wedding is taking place.  Has she suffered a traumatic brain injury?  No short term memory?  Because it’s a small store and she just printed out the gift list for Brooke and she SHOULD be able to remember that.

3. Buying cars – but ironically.  I don’t know about you, but when I buy a car, I buy it for reliability.  Apparently in Portland there are people buying ugly cars for irony’s sake.  Is this really a thing?  The guy who talked to Nate about Brooke’s vintage car was willing to spend $10K on a crappy old car and then spend ANOTHER $10K making the inside nice and modern.  So he wanted to spend $20K for a car that looked like garbage.  Is it to avoid being broken into?  Because that makes more sense than buying a car ironically.  I personally would like to think this is the screenwriter’s dig at hipster culture.

4. Ceiling repair for $10K.  Brooke can’t catch a break.  She decides she’s going to open her own PT studio, only to get a leak in her roof.  The repair guy says it’ll cost $10K.  Now, we had a leaky roof at some point in our house, and I can’t tell you that it did NOT cost $10K to repair.  Heck, in 2011 after a major hail storm in our area we replaced our entire roof for $8K.  And our roofline is a lot bigger than Brooke’s.  Also, that bucket to catch the drips should have been placed in the attic space to avoid having it continue to drip on the drywall.

5. Flag Football as a bachelor/ette party.  If I was in the wedding party and they told me that we’d be playing flag football, I would claim illness and inability to come.  And I won’t mention that in the scene prior Nate was at Brooke’s house for PT, after which she taped up his knee, only to have the tape be gone when they were playing football.

6. Nate driving his customer’s car for over a week.  Nate restores old cars.  But the problem is that once the cars are restored, he apparently drives them around for about a week before giving them back to the client.  He drove that silver Mercedes all over town for many, many days.

But my biggest issue is with the conflict due to the misunderstood conversation.  They are fine at the BBQ and then suddenly Brooke is acting weird and all Nate had to do was ask, “Did I do something?  Did I say something? Why are you mad at me?”  But he didn’t do that.  And then at the fourth wedding when Nate talks about putting on a happy face to fool everyone, that was another opportunity for him to ask, “WHAT HAPPENED?”  But he didn’t do that.  And Brooke, who was free with sharing her opinion about things during the whole movie, suddenly doesn’t tell him what she’s truly thinking.

Feelgoods

I loved that Brooke was a physical therapist. I worked for many years in a PT department at a hospital and so I have an affinity for PT/OTs. They are wonderful people.

When Brooke sold the car to Kingston, Nate quietly responded, “Cool cool cool.”  I love the TV show “Community” and while I don’t know that Julie Sherman Wolfe deliberately threw a “Community” reference in there, that’s where my brain when went Nate said it.

The phrase ‘Summer of __________’ will forever be associated with the ‘Summer of George’ from “Seinfeld,” and that’s a good thing.

I was nice seeing both Peter Benson as Brooke’s boss and boring boyfriend, as well as Geoff Gustafson from the “Signed Sealed Delivered” Hallmark series playing Nate’s co-worker, Dan.

Re-watchability

I’d totally watch “Wedding Every Weekend” again.  In fact, I already have!  Two wonderful actors, a well-written story, and a pretty great vintage red car makes for a movie I thoroughly enjoyed.

The Ranking

This movie is right near the top for me.  I think it might have taken the top spot if it didn’t have so many headscratchers.

1. Matching Hearts (air date: Feb 8) – 640 pts – weighted score: 109.0 (76.5%)
2. Winter in Vail (air date: Jan 4) – 623 pts – weighted score: 108.8 (76.4%)
3. Wedding Every Weekend (air date: Aug 15) – 639 pts – weighted score: 108.3 (76.0%)
4. Love in Store (air date: Feb 22) – 637 pts – weighted score: 108.2 (75.9%)
5. Love on Harbor Island (air date: Aug 8) – 634 pts – weighted score: 106.9 (75.0%)
6. The Secret Ingredient (air date: Feb 15) – 617 pts – weighted score: 105.2 (73.8%)
7. You’re Bacon Me Crazy (air date: Apr 4) – 591 pts – weighted score: 104.0 (72.9%)
8. Fashionably Yours (air date: Apr 11) – 594 pts – weighted score: 102.6 (72.0%)
9. A Valentine’s Match (air date: Feb 1) – 562 pts – weighted score: 99.8 (70.0%)
10. Love On Iceland (air date: Jan 18) – 563 pts – weighted score: 99.4 (69.7%)
11. Hearts of Winter (air date: Jan 25) – 561 pts – weighted score: 98.2 (68.9%)
12. Just My Type (air date: Mar 28) – 565 pts – weighted score: 95.4% (66.9%)
13. Bad Date Chronicles (air date: Feb 28) – 520 pts – weighted score: 91.0 (63.9%)
14. Love in Winterland (air date: Jan 11) – 508 pts – weighted score: 90.7 (63.6%)
15. Nature of Love (air date: Apr 18) – 520 pts – weighted score: 90.3 (63.3%)
16. Amazing Winter Romance (air date: Jan 20) – 487 pts – weighted score: 85.6 (60.1%)
17. Love Under the Olive Tree (air date: June 20) – 473 pts – weighted score: 85.0 (59.6%)
18. In the Key of Love (air date: Mar 14) – 470 pts – weighted score: 82.5 (57.9%)
19. Love in the Forecast (air date: Jun 13) – 440 pts – weighted score: 72.5 (50.8%)
20. Midway to Love (air date: June 26) – 410 pts – weighted score: 69.0 (48.4%)
21. Romance in the Air (air date: Aug 1) – 367 pts – weighted score: 63.2 (44.3%)
22. How to Train Your Husband (air date: May 16) – 350 pts – weighted score: 62.5 (43.9%)

To see where this movie lands in my overall rankings of Hallmark movies, visit my Hallmark Movie Rankings page!

What did you think of Hallmark’s “Wedding Every Weekend”?  Comment below and let me know!

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