Sweet Home Alabama (film)
Melanie, in her wedding gown in the rain, finds Jake planting lightning rods in the beach to create more sand sculptures. She tells him they are still married, and as they kiss, sheriff Wade "arrests" them and takes them to Jake's mother's bar where their friends and family are waiting. They finally get their first dance as husband and wife, to the tune of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama." A mid-credits sequence shows that they have a daughter, Melanie continues to thrive as a designer and Jake opens a "Deep South Glass" franchise in New York. Andrew is engaged to marry a girl named Erin Vanderbilt.Although centered in a fictional version of the town of Pigeon Creek, near a fictional version of Greenville, Alabama, the film was mostly shot in Georgia. The Carmichael Plantation, which Melanie tells the reporter is her childhood home, is the Oak Hill Berry Museum, a historic landmark in Georgia which is on the campus of Berry College in Rome, Georgia.
Reese Witherspoon
In 2002, after the success of "Legally Blonde", Witherspoon starred in several roles, such as Greta Wolfcastle in "The Simpsons" episode "The Bart Wants What It Wants", and as Cecily in the comedy "The Importance of Being Earnest", a film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play in which she received a Teen Choice Award nomination. Later that year, she starred with Josh Lucas and Patrick Dempsey in Andy Tennant's film "Sweet Home Alabama", where she played Melanie Carmichael, a young fashion designer who intends to marry a New York politician but must return to Alabama to divorce her childhood sweetheart, from whom she has been separated for seven years. Witherspoon regarded this as a "personal role" in that it reminded her of experiences she had when she moved from her hometown Nashville to Los Angeles. The movie became Witherspoon's biggest live-action box office hit, earning over $35 million in the opening weekend and grossing over $127 million in the U.S. Despite the commercial success, critics gave "Sweet Home Alabama" negative reviews. It was called "a romantic comedy so rote, dull and predictable" by "The Miami Herald", and the press widely agreed that Witherspoon was the only reason the movie attracted such a large audience. When describing Witherspoon's role in the movie, "The Christian Science Monitor" concluded, "She is not the movie's main attraction, she is its only attraction."