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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 11/07/2007 : 20:40:43
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Death at a Funeral
So Die Already!
Frank Oz - I love you, but, mate, honestly, zingy ideas for a broken comedy series, even with those terrif comedy actors - and let's hope this is the breakthrough film for Andy Nyman - this is total pants, dude.
Now the opening credits, I like -- little line-drawn coffin chuffing along the meandering line-drawn roads of line-drawn suburbia which somehow ooze more personality than the entire rest of the movie.
The film doesn't work because it's conceived and delivered in bits. Tiny bitty bits which never quite join up to form a cohesive shape. The setting is the home-based funeral service of a middle-class bloke who's left Jane Asher as the grieving widow, Matthew Macfadyen and Rupert Graves as his sons, and an assortment of stalwart British telly actors/comics as more friends and family.
With a series of problems including the fiance of the corpse's niece becoming increasingly affected by the hallucinogenic drug he's mistakenly taken thinking it was valium to calm him down; the rivalry between the sons; and a surprise guest who unleashes news of his years as the dead man's lover -- the film might have parlayed all this into a frantic comedy of bad-manners. Instead it plods through the material with the panache of a dissertation on the biochemical causality of fungoid growths of the pancreas - only not so amusing.
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Demisemicenturian 
"Four ever European"
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Posted - 11/08/2007 : 09:20:41
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| Some moments were very funny, but yes, it doesn't hang together well and the premise is rather flimsy. There were also rather too many outdated aspects (a dwarf? how funny! a dead body being knocked out of a coffin? how funny! a belligerent old relative? how funny!). I enjoyed it well enough, but was drunk, which presumably helped. |
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Death at a Funeral - some spoilers
