I should hate this movie. A possessive father loses control when he realizes that his 22-year-old daughter – a demanding architecture student who has just returned from a semester in Rome – is engaged to a man he has yet to meet. After she tells him the news at dinner, we see her say it a second time from his perspective as a seven-year-old. When the groom arrives, Dad almost has an aneurysm when he dares to put his hand on her leg and starts watching “America’s Most Wanted” every night looking for his face. He is so excited about the prospect of their wedding that he loses his temper in the supermarket and briefly ends up in prison. “I was no longer the man in my little daughter’s life,” he regrets. It’s paternalistic nonsense, and it’s perfect.

As a child, I first saw the 1991 remake of Father of the Bride (FOTB) because it is my father’s favorite film. Since I’m his only daughter, I categorically refuse to engage in it, although I did have fun telling my boyfriend when I made him put up with my last replay. (Approximately my 975th view; his first and probably only.) It’s the film that made me fall in love with Steve Martin, our paranoid FOTB George Banks, and Diane Keaton, the optimistic MOTB Nina, who I considered mine to love cinematic parents, a comfort whenever I see them on screen.

It’s probably not one of their best works, as they come at the end of their respective Hollywood empires. (Anyone who argues that Keaton’s life was in the ’70s obviously hasn’t seen 1987’s “Baby Boom,” another of my favorite regressive capers.) Keaton is somewhat underused playing George’s sensible counterpart – although, as is her divine right, she still gets to preside over a “Great Kitchen,” since it is a film co-written by Nancy Meyers and her then-husband Charles Shyer Wasp-chewing and bulging eyes set the tone for an exemplary farce.

One of my absolute favorite on-screen motifs is a character saying, “It’s the ’90s – get used to it!” I would read an entire book about the history of the line: Who said it first? What do they mean?? At least here it means happiness in the face of rampant capitalism. Rococo wedding planner Franck Eggelhoffer, played by Martin Short with an accent of, shall we say, indefinite of Eastern European descent, stammers “Walkom to ze 90s, Moster Bonks!” as George winces at the price of “de kaak” (the cake).

Certainly George rocks some exemplary ’90s normcore looks in this film, including the sneakers made by his company, and their young eventual son Matty (an adorable Kieran Culkin) has a Simpsons drawing on his bedroom door. But when it comes to bridal fashion, FOTB is pure ’80s post-Diana flounce: meringue dresses, a jazzy wedding singer played by Eugene Levy, naturally pink swans to match the tulips. Set to take place in the Banks family’s sprawling home in a very Norman Rockwell neighborhood in California, it is, as Franck explains, Fabulous.

A sympathetic reading might see George’s panic over the wedding as a legitimate reaction to the absurdity of the wedding-industrial complex, but where would be the fun in that? And as George’s sanity collapses, the film makes it very clear that he’s the unreasonable one here because he doesn’t want to spend $250 a head on guests. He spies on the in-laws and falls into their pool. To save money, he buys a black “Armani” suit that may have fallen off the back of a truck. Franck tries to help him put a button back on on the morning of the wedding, but the thread is the wrong color and informs him that Armani doesn’t make a “navy tuxedo” or uses polyester.

And what about Brian, the groom? He is a new man well-versed in gender politics who supports his fiancée’s career and almost always cries. It’s not him, FOTB makes clear, the love story that’s important here.

Why do I keep coming back to this film? As a girl and younger woman, I was strongly against marriage (although I’ve softened a bit now) and saw it as more of a horror comedy than anything ambitious. The only aspect of the Banks’ life that I would like to see is the kitchen. And yet, when I see Franck and the family putting on their ridiculous show, I desperately want to be there. I love ritual and ceremony and Steve Martin, Martin Short and Diane Keaton.

I’m so excited about FOTB that when Vampire Weekend started teasing something called FOTB a few years ago, I tweeted a joke saying I hoped it was a concept album about the movie. The publicist emailed asking how I knew the album was actually called Father of the Bride and why I was leaking embargoed information. I didn’t have that; The acronym is just burned so deeply into my soul. I bet you will never guess what happens in FOTB2… 👶👶