Tuesday, January 11, 2011

DEATH AT A FUNERAL : LAUGHTER FROM DEATH

In a world that is inundated with remakes it would seem strange that someone would choose to remake a movie that is only four years old. And yet that is what DEATH AT A FUNERAL is, a remake of a recent film. And while the original film, a British picture that has gathered somewhat of a cult following but never box office success, was hilarious it seems as though this remake has gone and upped the ante. Yes, while I loved the original, I thought this movie was much funnier.

The story revolves around the funeral of Edward (Bob Minor), a man with two sons, held in his home by his request. The first, Aaron (Chris Rock), has stayed in the family home with his wife helping his father and mother. The second, Ryan (Martin Lawrence) is the favored son, the author that has found great success and moved on with his life. Except that in reality he’s broke leaving Aaron the tab for the entire event.

As the story begins, Aaron and his wife (Regina Hall) are now planning on moving on with their lives, finding a place of their own and starting a family. We also discover that Aaron has hopes of being an author as well, though he’s yet to finish his book and had it published. Ryan is such the well known wordsmith that it seems everyone can’t understand why Aaron, the elder of the two, is delivering the eulogy instead.

Around these two focal points is a cast big enough that this could be better termed an ensemble piece. There is Norman (Tracy Morgan) and his friend Derek (Luke Wilson) who are in charge of picking up Uncle Russell (Danny Glover), a mean old coot if there ever was one. Derek is going to the funeral with the hopes of rekindling a romance with Elaine (Zoe Saldana) who is about to announce her engagement to Oscar (James Marsden). Elaine and Oscar stop off to pick up her brother Jeff (Columbus Short), a med student who’s made some hallucinogenic pills for a friend and placed them in a bottle marked valium…which Zoe gives to Oscar to calm him before telling her father (Ron Glass) about the engagement. You see? Plenty of people with plenty of problems going on here, most of them happening before the funeral begins.

But that’s not all. At the funeral Aaron notices a small man, a dwarf actually, that he doesn’t recognize. Introducing himself as Frank (Peter Dinklage, replaying his role from the original film), he finally gets a chance to speak with Aaron alone. It turns out that Frank has a secret he shares with Aaron that only makes matters worse.

And as if that weren’t enough, Oscar is acting more peculiar than one would think. Jeff’s drugs have him seeing a world of green, the casket move during the service and more that eventually lead him to the roof of the house…naked.

In other words, a day when everything should be proper, Aaron finds his life turned upside down. While he wanted everything to be just as it should to pay respects to his father, nothing is as it seems and nothing goes right. With the exception of a ton of laughs.

The movie takes what should be a somber occasion and changes it into a comedy of errors, one leading to another, with characters playing off each other like a pinball hitting bumpers. The stories have their own focus yet connect with one another from start to finish.

Each and every actor involved here does a fantastic job. But where most would say you couldn’t single out one performance over another, I have to say that Marsden is by far the funniest person in this film filled with comedians. His Oscar, totally flipped out on an acid type pill, does the most absurd and hilarious things. Each time the movie flips back to his situation, all you can do is laugh.

Many remakes try to reinvent the original film and make it better, more often than not failing miserably. This movie takes the original almost scene by scene and adds something to it. It’s rare that a remake surpasses the original but this film does it. And in so doing makes what was a wonderfully funny film even funnier. While one would hope that not all funerals turn out this way, I hope mine can be half as much fun as these people experience. But without Frank turning up.

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