{"id":5071,"date":"2010-04-16T16:58:35","date_gmt":"2010-04-16T20:58:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5071"},"modified":"2010-04-17T13:35:37","modified_gmt":"2010-04-17T17:35:37","slug":"death-at-a-funeral-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5071","title":{"rendered":"Death at a Funeral (2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"When I was in college, I had to write a paper trying to explain why certain films were box office successes. It was 1998, and I surmised that the top 50 films as of the year\u2019s end (in other words, final grosses were certainly not in by that point) were almost all formula; Buddy-cop, remake, sequel, disaster film, TV adaptation, etc. The only films that I deemed original were The Truman Show <\/em>and Pleasantville<\/em>, which turned out to be variations on the same concept, as the main characters are stuck inside a fanciful version of a TV show. I had not seen the highest grossing film of the year, which at that time was Armageddon<\/em>, only having seen the trailer and TV spot which made the film look it could not be more generic and predictable.<\/p>\n

I asked a friend who had<\/em> seen Armageddon<\/em> to either confirm or deny what I thought would occur, plot point by plot point, using only my limited knowledge of the film. It turned out that the trailer was absolutely truth in advertising, as I was able to figure out the entire film without seeing it. However, I didn\u2019t think it was ethical to write about a film without seeing it and so I rented the DVD. I ended up falling asleep halfway through, the downside of watching a film like Armageddon <\/em>at home is that you can always have the volume at a reasonable level. I also learned nothing<\/em> from watching the film, my original thesis, that Armageddon <\/em>was successful because it combined every possible formula that had worked in 1998 and shoved it into one 2 \u00bd hour package.<\/p>\n

\"\"Neil LaBute\u2019s Death at a Funeral<\/em>, his remake of Frank Oz\u2019s 2007 film (also in English, also featuring Peter Dinklage<\/span><\/a> as a blackmailing lover of the deceased), is blessed with an Armageddon<\/em>-worthy marketing campaign, there isn\u2019t a single surprise in the entire film. LaBute, who has written and directed many a scathing and nastily misanthropic play, as well as the equally caustic and hilarious films In the Company of Men<\/em> and Your Friends and Neighbors<\/em>, was clearly a gun-for-hire here, probably the first time he\u2019s been used in such a fashion (Nurse Betty<\/em>, which he didn\u2019t write, seemed to oddly fit his oeuvre). Whether he was doing penance for his histrionic remake of The Wicker Man<\/em> (which doesn\u2019t work as a movie, but is unmistakably a LaBute film through and through) or trying to get leeway to make more films that push the envelope, like his Lakeview Terrace <\/em>almost did, even if it was hampered by a PG-13 rating,<\/em> is unclear. From an outside perspective, if you wanted to remake Death at a Funeral<\/em>, hiring someone like LaBute to darken what was originally a slapstick farce makes sense. However, I don\u2019t think that hiring an almost all-black cast of mostly stand-up comics was what LaBute had in mind when he thought about darkening.<\/p>\n

The problem isn\u2019t just the obvious cynical one of selling the exact same movie except to a black audience, it\u2019s that, working from co-producer Dean Craig\u2019s script (who also wrote the original, and apparently hasn\u2019t changed very much), actor-comedians like Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan, and Martin Lawrence try to turn their lines into stand-up routines, and the material doesn\u2019t fit in the least. At certain points you can actually see Chris Rock the actor switch off and the comedian taking over. But Rock isn\u2019t doing the social satire he does in his act, he\u2019s talking about house payments, fraternal jealousy, and relatives at the titular family funeral that have sitcom level problems. Hiring talents like Morgan, Lawrence, and Rock to bring respectability to your cartoonish pratfall comedy is just a complete misconception.<\/p>\n

\"\"Even the slam dunks don\u2019t fall into place; Danny Glover\u2019s curmudgeon horndog uncle doesn\u2019t have anything funny to do, except to literally shit on Tracy Morgan\u2019s hand and occasionally nod off when it\u2019s narratively convenient [Oh, and he also provides a few Lethal Weapon<\/em> references]. That Morgan spends the entire second half of the film covered in feces, including an extended bit where his face is smeared with it, doesn\u2019t seem like a commentary on actors wearing blackface (or Brownface) while they shuck and jive and slam doors, but more like honesty about how he probably felt on the set*.<\/p>\n

Morgan does<\/em> get a line or two that work, he does a riff on how, because he\u2019s so sensitive, he\u2019d make a very bad Incredible Hulk<\/span><\/a>, and James Marsden, stuck in a tired old bit where he takes \u201cthe wrong drugs,\u201d has some inspired moments such as when he wraps his head in toilet paper until he looks like The Invisible Man. But the rest of Death at a Funeral<\/em> is so achingly predictable, the family is made up of as many caricatures as humanly possible, the letch, the cuckold, the cheapskate, the moneygrubber, the oblivious mother, that the endless gay panic<\/span><\/a> subplot seems oddly appropriate, since everything else is so by-the-numbers. Here\u2019s to hoping that LaBute doesn\u2019t get the impetus to remake Transformers 2<\/em> next.<\/p>\n

\"\"* I was once at a discussion where Jon Lovitz, speaking about the film the group had watched just days before, Trapped in Paradise<\/em>, said that he and the other actors on the set, such as co-leads Nicolas Cage and Dana Carvey, would refer to the movie as Trapped in Shit<\/em>. I\u2019m sure Lovitz, as a fellow Saturday Night Live<\/em> alum, knows exactly how Tracy Morgan feels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was in college, I had to write a paper trying to explain why certain films were box office successes. It was 1998, and I surmised that the top 50 films as of the year\u2019s end (in other words, final grosses were certainly not in by that point) were almost all formula; Buddy-cop, remake, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[5188,1045,756,2802,1845,5960,153,6304,2101,3152,6317,6200,786,1613,277,1528,6227,6310,6311,639,3046,6303,73,6316,6319,6309,680,4442,6320,360,910,6305,4600,6308,6302,620,2338,3181,310,6312,5189,246,5136,276,672,6318,441,6306,6073,6307,6220,6313,6315,1097,6314,6321],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5071"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5071\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}