Due to a snafu (my own fault), I did not have a seat at Tuesday night's Iron Man screening in Philadelphia. So while everybody who is anybody hereabouts was giddily watching Tony Stark transform from an arms dealer to an ass-kicking, metal-suited superhero, I was in a different theater one block away watching Patrick Dempsey be a bridesmaid in Made of Honor. There'll be a Cinematical review of the movie on Friday, but for now I'd like to ask a very specific question: what on earth could that title possibly mean?

Others who have seen the movie have referred to "Made of Honor" as "a pun," or even an "appalling pun." Okay, but a pun usually involves conflating two words or expressions that make sense in the same context and happen to sound alike. In this case, I only count one. Yes, I get it -- Dempsey plays the best friend of a woman who is getting married, and so she names him her maid of honor. It's funny because he's a guy, but he's the maid of honor. Hahaha! Fantastic. But made of honor? What, like built of honor? Who? Patrick Dempsey? I'm not connecting the dots.

I wondered about this back when I first heard about the movie and when I started seeing trailers, but I figured there must be some explanation, and that I would learn what it is when I saw the film. Surely, Columbia Pictures wouldn't actually release a movie with a completely nonsensical title. Well, now I've seen it, and I get the sense that no explanation is forthcoming. I don't think we ever learn the Dempsey character's full name, but I'm pretty sure it's not "Tom Made." (If it were, I might be even more irritated -- I mean, good God.) There's no mafia subplot. There's not a single mention of "honor" as a concept, or any reason why anyone or anything would be constructed from it. So -- what the hell?

I still insist that there has to be something behind that title that I'm just too dense to see. Maybe it's metaphorical -- in abandoning his womanizing ways, Dempsey finds out what he's "made of," and it happens to be honor? But while he's a lot of things at the end of the film (e.g., an idiot), "honorable" isn't really one of them. If the pun doesn't really work, why did they force it? "Maid of Honor" would have been just as catchy a name, and its meaning would have been far more obvious. No -- I am convinced that there's an explanation that makes the pun work perfectly, and that once I figure out what it is, I will at last appreciate Made of Honor's true genius. Any ideas?

Tags: made of honor, MadeOfHonor, patrick dempsey, PatrickDempsey, summer2008