Death at a Funeral

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Grade: B –

Director: Neil LaBute

Starring: Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan, Regina Hall, Zoe Saldana, James Marsden, Luke Wilson, Danny Glover, and Peter Dinklage

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

For those wondering why there’s a remake of Death at a Funeral a scant three years after the original’s lackluster release, look no further than Neil LaBute. While the first film bore the novelty of a British comedy directed by an American – Frank Oz – and starring several American actors, the follow-up distinguishes itself in two principal ways. First is the African-American bent of a splintered, somewhat dysfunctional family brought together on the occasion of the passing of one of its patriarchs.

The other is LaBute, hardly a household name whose legacy as a director was cemented in the minds of movie critics and indie film fans by his audacious debuts, In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors. His two-headed monument to modern-day misanthropy both conceded and laid bare a world of masculine survival of the fittest, where sadism and masochism thrive and the meek inherit nothing but personal and professional sorrow. They were depressing to watch only because they carried an uncomfortable, cynical truth. In the minds of many, they were brilliant.

Of course, even brilliant cynicism wears thin over time, for moviegoers, producers, and even the filmmaker himself. So, as LaBute has flailed about the last decade looking for different directions to point his talents, the quality of that work has precipitously dropped – Possession and The Wicker Man remake, for goodness sake?! Beginning in 2000 with Nurse Betty and resurfacing with Lakeview Terrace, LaBute has shown a recurring curiosity for the contemporary African-American experience, an interest he revives in Death at a Funeral.

On the day of his father’s funeral, Aaron (Chris Rock) finds himself at a personal crossroads. He is the older son who remained at home while his younger, more popular brother, Ryan (Martin Lawrence), made his way in the world as a somewhat successful author. Aaron and his wife, Michelle (Regina Hall), live in Aaron’s parents’ house under the mindful eye of his mother (Loretta Devine) and her blunt demand for a grandchild. The funeral also brings together an assortment of family and friends. There’s old Uncle Russell (Danny Glover), who basically eats, sleeps, and swears a lot (actually, everyone swears a lot; it’s a Neil LaBute film). There are family friends Norman (Tracy Morgan) and Derek (Luke Wilson), who still pines for Cousin Elaine (Zoe Saldana), who is now dating Oscar (James Marsden), much to the chagrin of Elaine’s dad (Ron Glass). And, then there’s a mysterious, diminutive stranger, Frank (Peter Dinklage, who starred in the British original), who reveals a furtive relationship with the dearly departed.

You get the picture, and so does LaBute, who gives lip service to a potpourri social dividing lines – racial, gender, age, class, sexual orientation, and familial strife. None of them are enough to give Death at a Funeral any particular import – it’s far too slapsticky for that. But, they strike enough familiar chords to conjure that edgy, discomfiting LaBute ethos.

The two most restrained actors are the ones you’d least expect, Rock and Lawrence. LaBute wisely leaves the hijinks to others, including Morgan, Glover, and especially Marsden, whose scene-stealing antics after Oscar unwittingly drops acid carry the movie until their 20-minute or so screen-life expires and begin testing the audience’s patience.

While the film is briskly paced at an efficient 90 minutes, its premise begins to wear thin by the last half-hour. And, LaBute too often goes the Farrelly brothers route by relying on the crutch of scatological snickers. Still, it’s an entertaining farce that works best when it thinks least. Death at a Funeral is anything but DOA, but it is hardly the long-awaited second-coming of Neil LaBute’s career.

Neil Morris

2012

Ah-ha, I think I found your leak.

Grade: D +

Director: Roland Emmerich

Starring: John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton, Oliver Platt, Thomas McCarthy, Woody Harrelson, and Danny Glover

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 38 minutes

In every Roland Emmerich disaster flick, there are always the digital money shots that not only sustain Emmerich’s inexplicable filmmaking career but seemingly redeem the poor audience members who plunk down their hard-earned scratch to witness tsunamis swamping Manhattan and aliens imploding the White House.

They also usually come about midway through any one of his excruciatingly long apocalyptic forays – Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow – leaving the rest of the time wasted with the same character archetypes. There is the intrepid scientist who warns the noble U.S. President and some skeptical member of his staff about impeding doom, along with a third-party hero who just wants to save his family and the world, in that order. And, always along for the ride are barely realized secondary players who supply annoying comic relief and/or cannon fodder for all the CGI cataclysms.

So it is in 2012, Emmerich’s latest act of paranoia profiteering. Scientific advisor Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor, mortgaging his talent for a paycheck) discovers three years out that on December 21, 2012, the occasion of the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, the moon and stars will align for the first time since the demise of the dinosaurs, igniting solar flares and flinging neutrinos into Earth’s core that will heat and melt the mantle, causing massive tectonic shifts and, more importantly, lots and lots of F/X earthquakes.

World leaders, including President Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover, slurring his lines like a punch-drunk pugilist), are forewarned, but the cursory, slipshod preparation montages are merely an appetizer for the calamitous main course. Chasms open, buildings crumble, tidal waves crash down, and volcanoes erupt. Our principal tour guide through the Book of Revelations is middling author Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), whose chance encounter with another Emmerich archetype, the nut-job conspiracy theorist (played here with ease by Woody Harrelson), sends him on a mission to rescue his estranged wife Kate (Amanda Peet), her new boyfriend (Thomas McCarthy), and his kids from peril.

The disaster scenes are loopy, but they do constitute popcorn-chomping amusement to a point. Where this and every Emmerich cinematic shipwreck runs aground is its woeful attempts to interject character development, sentimentality, and morality into their narratives. Endless aerial escapes from danger are punctuated by unending tearful telephone goodbyes (yes, apparently satellite and cell phone technology will survive the End of Days as long as cockroaches). Scenes of a tsunami engulfing Washington, D.C. are juxtaposed against Curtis and his wife blithering about why their marriage hit the skids.

The rendezvous point for the lucky or lucrative few is a series of metallic arks anchored in the Himalayas that will house man and beast until the flood waters recede, a comical incarnation of Strangelove’s mine-shafts. When Helmsley and comely First Daughter Laura Wilson (Thandie Newton) protest the fate of those who slaved to construct the mammoth boats, a grouchy bureaucrat (Oliver Platt) sarcastically invites them to give their boarding passes to a couple of poor Chinese workers. The moment is cloying enough. What’s unintentionally hilarious is Helmsley and Wilson’s reaction: They shrug their shoulders and climb aboard their ship, summarily leaving the peasants and Emmerich’s principled pretense to a watery grave.

Emmerich doesn’t just pander to tableaux of death and destruction; he relishes in them. Indulging in new levels of rank nihilism, the director conspicuously razes St. Peter’s Basilica upon the heads of the Papacy and thousands of praying parishioners. This is the second or third time he has demolished the White House, this time using a tidal wave carrying the USS John F. Kennedy (the motive behind Emmerich’s choice of ship is peculiar considering the actual “Big John” is decommissioned and berthed outside Philadelphia).

Ultimately, Emmerich rationalizes the end of the world and the deaths of millions as an excuse for Helmsley and Wilson to hook-up and a way to get Kate’s boyfriend out of the picture so Curtis and his family can reunite. Lovely. If the apocalypse ever actually arrives, let’s hope every copy of 2012 is among its first casualties.

Neil Morris

Blindness

Grindhouse Presents...

Grade: C

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Starring: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Alice Braga, Yusuke Iseya, and Gael Garcia Bernal

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hours

Who does not like a healthy dose of nihilism in their movies now and again? The problem with Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness is that the end of civilization has never looked so bleak and irredeemable.

As an outbreak of blindness suddenly afflicts the world’s populous, the first patch of victims are quarantined inside a dilapidated hospital. Among their number are an eye doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore), the latter being the only sighted person in the number. Frustration leads to unrest leads to disintegration as the blind patients divide into tribes, one of which hijacks the hospital’s food supply and begins to ration it out for a price: first valuables, then sexual favors. The latter sequence is a scene brutally raw that could have been audacious if it were not so utterly ugly.

About the time the patients start running the asylum, they discover that the rest of the world is also in the dark. That leads to an extended coda showcasing a society gone mad just before Meirelles (City of God; The Constant Gardner) and screenwriter Don McKellar, adapting Jose Saramago’s novel, flash a light at the end of the tunnel. It is a giant shoulder shrug capping off an art-house, high-gloss B-horror film that does not have the strength – or humanity – of its ambitions.

Neil Morris