DeadlyBy John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
"Let me get this straight: our dad was "bromantically" involved with a guy that could fit in his pocket, and you're mad because he's white?" Aaron (Chris Rock)
That's the story line for Neil Labute's remake of Frank Oz's Death at a Funeral. And that's the best line in the film, a foolish, slapstick send up of a funeral service in which Chris Rock's Aaron tries to keep the event from sinking with the news that their dead dad was, when he was alive, very much alive with his short lover, Frank (Peter Dinklage).
Funereal is how I would characterize the humor of this iteration, in which the most offensive scene is not as good as any other like it in film slumdom. By that I mean when Norman (Tracy Morgan) holds Uncle Russell's (Danny Glover) excrement for everyone to see on his hand, face, and shirt, comic scatology has reached bottom, so to speak. (Oh, Danny boy, how low can you go for a buck?). To compare this scene with the pool sequence in Caddy Shack is to make Caddy Shack the Citizen Kane of comedy. Similarly James Marsden's manic turn as the guest on a hallucinatory drug must be embarrassing for an actor whose role as Corny Collins in Hairspray now looks favorably like Ryan Secrest after a summer at Actor's Studio.
I'm wasting your time by trying to make up for this lame comedy of bad manners. If you want to feel as if you've died and gone to purgatory for indiscriminate filmgoers, then see Death at a Funeral.
John DeSando teaches film at Franklin University and co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee, which can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.RR.com