MOVIE REVIEW: 'Death at a Funeral'


Movie review in today's Oregonian....



So director/puppeteer Frank Oz -- smarting, perhaps, from the disappointments of "The Stepford Wives" and "The Score" -- has gone off and made a tiny British comedy.

"Death at a Funeral" is modest in every sense but one: Its cast is huge. Something like 80 billion people, most of them pasty-faced Brits, descend on an English country cottage for a father's funeral. Among them are a meek wannabe writer (Matthew MacFadyen), his lit-star brother (Rupert Graves), a drug dealer (Kris Marshall), the poor sap he accidentally doses (Alan Tudyk), a dwarf with a secret (Peter Dinklage) and assorted long-suffering girlfriends, fiancés and mean old people.

A lot of low-key Brit-com wackiness follows -- some of it living up to the film's title -- as Oz stuffs all these characters in a metaphorical bottle and shakes. The results are sporadically funny (Tudyk does a great drug freak-out), but for the most part, "Death" is just incredibly modest: modestly funny, modestly well-acted, modestly shot and modestly ambitious. If those British sitcoms you see on PBS on Saturday nights had swearing and poop jokes, they'd play like this.
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C; 90 minutes; rated R for language and drug content.

'Death at a Funeral' (The Oregonian, Aug. 17, 2007)

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Posted: Fri - August 17, 2007 at 08:17 AM        

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