Death at a Funeral (2007)

Directed by Frank Oz
Written by Dean Craig

Rated R for language and drug content

"Death at a Funeral" is a British comedy from Frank Oz, the man best known for his voice-acting work as Star Wars' Yoda or several Sesame Street characters. His comedy directing is not so famous. As the movie poster says, he also directed "In & Out" and "Bowfinger", two star-driven, big budget flops of the 90's. I would have to say that "Death at a Funeral" is Oz's finest comedic directorial effort since "What About Bob?" (1991).

"Death at a Funeral" revolves around the funeral of protagonist Daniel's father. The film opens with the hearse delivering the wrong body to the Daniel's home, where the funeral is to take place. This elicited a few giggles. Daniel (Matthew Macfadyen) is an aspiring writer, but has always lived in the shadow of his brother, who is a famous writer. Daniel has chosen to give his father's eulogy, but everyone who arrives at the funeral asks if his brother Robert (Rupert Graves) will be giving the eulogy, and if not, why? After all, he is the writer in the family! All this does nothing for Daniel's self-esteem.

Daniel and Robert's cousin Martha brings her fiance Simon (Alan Tudyk) to the funeral, but Simon's terrified of Martha's father, who will also be there. Martha gives Simon what she thinks to be a Valium, but is actually a hallucinogenic compound that her brother Troy had put in a Valium bottle to transport to a buyer. One of the film's biggest flaws was predictability. As soon as Troy put the pills into the Valium bottle, I already knew that someone would get accidentally drugged.

Simon begins freaking out on the way to the funeral, and is in a very strange state by the time they arrive. Alan Tudyk is a great actor, and I love his performances of drug trips (for more, see him as a stoner in the "Dollhouse" episode "Briar Rose") so it was genuinely rib-tickling to see him go crazy with this performance. However when the "accidental drugging" gag was used not once, but twice more throughout the course of the film, I began to feel that this was just lazy storytelling.

The second major plot thread is the arrival of an American outsider to the funeral. Daniel assumes it's one of his dad's friends, and repeatedly brushes him off when the small stranger Peter (Peter Dinklage) tries to corner Daniel for a private chat. I was immediately suspicious that the stranger was in fact the dead man's gay lover. No one seemed to know him, yet he looked like he took the death harder than the dead man's family. When he finally does get Daniel alone, Peter not only tells him about their relationship, he shows him pictures! As the dead man's gay lover, Peter argues that he's entitled to some kind of inheritance. He's willing to blackmail Daniel and his brother Robert with the gay photos if the brothers can't pay him.

Robert tackles Peter and makes Daniel help tie him up. The brothers try to keep their father's secret in the closet, but someone gives Peter a handful of Troy's psychedelic pills (thinking they're Valium) to shut him up. Peter begins to bounce of the walls (somewhat literally) and ends up falling and hitting his head on the edge of a coffee table. The brothers now have their dead father's midget lover's body to dispose of, and decide the most fitting way is to put him in the coffin with their old man.

The family's crotchety, wheelchair-bound Uncle Alfie (Peter Vaughan) provides the film with it's funniest gross-out moment when one of the other guests must help him use the toilet and gets shit on his hand (pardon my French, but "poop" just isn't a strong enough word). In a panicked attempt to wash it off, he ends up splattering it on his face. This scene could have been from an "American Pie" style college comedy, and seemed a little out-of-place in this otherwise relatively tame black comedy.

I give "Death at a Funeral" a 7/10. It was a bit on the dramatic side for a comedy, and many of the jokes could be seen coming a mile away. The acting wasn't terrible, but there were just too many characters to give any of them the screen-time they deserved. Overall, I feel Frank Oz's movies have gone downhill since his earlier films "Dark Crystal" and "What About Bob?". I laughed quite a bit watching "Death at a Funeral", but doubt I'd ever watch it again. Definitely rent it before you buy it.

If you thought this black comedy couldn't get any blacker, check out Hollywood's insta-remake "Death at a Funeral" (2010), which stars Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan, Martin Lawrence and Danny Glover. This too-soon rehash will be out in theaters next month.














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U-Turn (1997)

Directed by Oliver Stone
Written by John Ridley

Rated R for strong violence, sexuality and language.

Oliver Stone apparently got into some drugs in the mid-90's. Some of his movies get so fragmented and psychedelic that it's hard to believe they come from the same filmmaker who made "Wall Street" and "JFK". Luckily for his fans, Stone's "stoned" period resulted in some of his most interesting films, including "Natural Born Killers" (1994, one of my favorites) and "Nixon" (1995), which both feature highly-stylized editing and hallucinatory, dream-like sequences. "U-Turn" takes the same drugged-out aesthetic to new heights in a dark comedy that is so over-the-top it'll put you six feet under.

The film opens with a psychedelic credit sequence featuring the protagonist, Bobby Cooper (played by Sean Penn) driving through the Arizona desert in his Mustang with one bandaged hand and a suitcase. Cooper is foul-mouthed and mysterious, apparently on the lam from something or someone. I have to wonder if Terry Gilliam was influenced by this stunning opening sequence when he shot the opening desert scenes for "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (1998), because they are remarkably similar. As we watch, Cooper's Mustang blows a radiator hose, forcing him to pull off the highway to a town called Superior.

Bobby's first contact in superior is a beer-bellied mechanic named Darrell (played expertly by Billy-Bob Thorton). Darrell is a stupid hick, and Bobby wastes no time telling him as much. Underestimating the locals is a mistake Bobby will make more than once, but his feud with Darrell becomes comically epic as the film progresses. As he waits for Darrell to fix the Mustang, Bobby wanders into Superior on foot.

The next of Superior's crazy residents to meet Bobby is a blind Native American who begs on the street corner with his lazy dog, spouting wise to anyone who will listen. The Blind Man is played by a barely-recognizable Jon Voight ("Deliverance", "Mission: Impossible") who gives perhaps the most impressive performance of the film. The Blind Man gets Cooper to buy him a Dr. Pepper from the corner machine for him, because "cola's nothing but flavored water." The Blind Man is also a compulsive liar. Though it didn't strike me until I thought back on it, he contradicts himself at least twice. When he first meets Cooper, he tells him that he lost his eyes in Vietnam, but later he says that he was blinded with acid for "getting smart with the wrong man's daughter". He also says early on that his dog is dead, but we see him walking with it later, alive. Nothing in Superior is as it seems.

As Cooper continues through town, he meets Grace, a half-Native American femme fatale who is carrying large, unwieldy packages down the street. Bobby offers to help her carry them to her car, and she ends up inviting him home. The two flirt for a while, but just when things are about to heat up, Grace pulls away and plays coy. Cooper gets fed up with Grace's games and starts to leave, but she calls him back and they finally kiss. Their kiss ends abruptly with the arrival of Grace's husband, Jake McKenna, who terrorizes Grace, clocks Bobby and throws him out of the house.

Jennifer Lopez is a better singer than an actress (and that's not saying much), but she does okay as Grace. Her attempt at a Native American accent is put to shame by Jon Voight's, but perhaps it's unfair to compare Ms. Lopez to a veteran acting god like Voight. The only part of Grace's character that Lopez really nails is her crazy bitchiness, a character trait that seems to find it's way into every J-Lo role.

Jake McKenna is a brutish, uncouth hick extraordinaire, and is played to perfection by Nick Nolte, in perhaps his most unusual role yet. After kicking Bobby out of his house, Jake catches up to him on the road and offers him a ride back into town. Bobby is distrustful of Jake's motives, considering their recent drama, but cannot refuse a ride in Arizona's deadly desert heat. In the car, Jake makes overtures to the effect that he would pay a lot of money to the man who would kill his cheating, whoring wife. When Bobby doesn't seem interested, Jake shakes the conversation off as a joke, dropping Bobby off back in town.

Bobby continues bouncing around Superior, having repeated run-ins with Darrell, Grace, Jake, a nosy Sheriff (Powers Boothe), and many other strange characters. Two of my favorite recurring characters are Jenny (Claire Danes), a doe-eyed trailer-trash girl who flirts shamelessly with any man that wanders into her line of sight and her boyfriend Toby N. Tucker, or "T.N.T." (Joaquin Pheonix), who feels the need to beat up anyone his girl talks to. The pair haunt Cooper throughout his stay in Superior, Jenny trying to seduce him and T.N.T. trying to start a fight with him.

So here you have the basic premise and cast of "U-Turn". The ensuing adventure is one I won't ruin for you. Suffice to say the plot contains many twists and u-turns, and features elements of suspense, horror, crime drama and dark comedy.

I gave "U-Turn" a 10/10. It is a star-studded masterpiece of cinematic storytelling, transporting the viewer to the middle of nowhere and stranding us there with a cast of unstable and potentially dangerous hillbillies. Like "The Wicker Man" (the original, not the crappy Nic Cage remake) "U-Turn" takes a man from one walk of life and puts him completely out of his element. Though he feels his lifestyle to be infinitely "Superior" to that of the locals, Cooper's sense of superiority is worth less than nothing in the sun-bleached community of Superior, AZ. A haunting score by legendary composer Ennio Morricone (who has composed scores for nearly 500 films, including the Fistful of Dollars trilogy, John Carpenter's "The Thing", "White Dog" and "Kill Bill") rounds out another fantastic film by Oliver Stone.













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