Why Jason Patric Should Be in Every Movie

By now Jason Patric has become just about one of my favourite actors. He started out in the 80s as a heartthrob of sorts and made his name in stuff like The Lost Boys. But in 1990 he proved just what an excellent actor he is in a film that got little recognition at the time called After Dark, My Sweet. In it he starred beside Bruce Dern (another inductee in this list) as a worn out drifter who gave up a career in boxing and looks like it was maybe a good idea because he seems to have taken maybe one too many shots to the head.

Here Patric creates a perfect film noir hero. a guy who we don't quite know what to make of: is he good, is he bad, does he have alerter motives or is he really just a burned out bum? Here, as with every subsequent great performance, Patric creates characters out of his presence, not his ability as an actor. He plays things internally, letting notes stew just below the surface. He's the kind of cool, collected man who could burst out at any moment as if he seems to be folding in on himself in order to contain his hidden rage.



It's no surprise then that Patric would go on to star in one of the coldest, most uncomfortable scenes in all of American film in Neil Labute's Your Friends and Neighbours. Watch as Patric looks on, telling his story, completely oblivious to the fact that what is conveying is truly horrifying. This is a man without a pulse and Patric creates him, once again, through presence and not showmanship. He's just there, cold, heartless, empty (note- this scene is at the heart of the film so if you don't want to spoil it, and you shouldn't since it's a masterpiece, don't watch this)



Patric played it tough and gritty and the police drama Narc but it was in another underrated gem, My Sister's Keeper that he changed his tune. Once again, he relied on his presence, but this time he was the emotional heart of a film and every scene he was in was a keeper. Rarely have Hollywood films presented dads as so honestly what they are: caring, understanding, rationale and suppurating from the background. Watch what Patric's presence does to the trailer alone:



Patric belongs to the film's best scene (which appears at the 1:53 mark). Look at how he takes the scene, not by making himself the center of it, but by reacting to it; knowing what it needs and giving it nothing more than that though the look of the eyes, the slant of the mouth, etc. These are roles that many actors would take and go over-the-top with, but not Patric who is an actor who understands the concept of restraint. He finds the truth in a scene and leaves it at that.

Revisiting The Wicker Man Remake (3.5 out of 5)

Considering the first paragraph of my review of Death at a Funeral, I thought I'd look back at a review I wrote for Neil Labute's remake of The Wicker Man a couple years ago.

The Wicker Man is not a very good film, but it’s an interesting experience. It is not engaging, not scary and not even all that entertaining or likable, however I’m giving it three and a half stars which, in some small way, translates into a recommendation. I recommend it because, as big a mess as it is, it’s also dark, angry, cynical and, pessimistic; a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Hollywood has been playing it safe for so many years that it’s kind of uncanny that anyone would have the nerve to make this at all.

That anyone is Neil Labute who, outside of Todd Solandz, is probably the most unrelenting member of the new group of “auteur” filmmakers to emerge from the independent world in the 90’s. However, like many filmmakers before and after, Labute operates under a system that Solandz has thus far been able to escape: the “one for us, one for them” archetype. Thus, filmmakers make a film that the studios can sell, then giving them the freedom to then make the one that’s dear to their hearts. It can’t be stated as fact, but I have a sinking suspicion that if it were not for this system, Labute would not even be interested in poor remakes of cult horror films. However, to view the Wicker Man as the product of its specific maker, we begin to understand why Labute would be drawn to it.

When we first meet the cop Edward Malus (Nicholas Cage) he is involved in an arbitrary scene in which, after pulling over a mother and her daughter whose doll has blown out of the luggage strapped to the top of their car, the car is struck by a transport truck, trapping the two inside as they burn to death.

Miraculously unharmed, Edward, on his time off, receives a letter from a former fiancée who left him at the alter and is now living on a private remote island called Summersisle with her daughter who has gone missing. The letter asks Edward if he could journey to the island and help find her.

On the island Edward is not exactly welcomed. He is greeted by three women who hassle him, asking how he got there in the first place as you must be invited to enter. As Edward begins his search for the missing child he discovers that the island is run by a mysterious figure know as Sister Summersisle (Ellen Burstyn), that men seem to be voiceless slaves and the possibly murderous women talk to Edward in that exasperating way people talk when they are never telling quite as much as they know.

The plot thickens as Edward discovers that the little girl may be his own child and may have been kidnapped by the cultish inhabitants of Summersisle in order to sacrifice her so that the coming year produces a good honey crop (Summersisle is a bee keeping colony after all). I doubt that I would be giving much away if I tell you that nothing is as it seems.

Watching the Wicker Man we get the sinking feeling that it is simply playing by the numbers: the opening sequences spin the wheels of a plot that Labute never fully seems to be engaged in. Instead we discern that he is using the film as a backdrop in which to deal with the fears and anxieties that he so brutally and hilariously tried to repress back in his 1997 debut film In the Company of Men. That film centered on a corporate slime ball named Chad who, feeling threatened by the inclusion of women into the office world, makes a bet with his friend to become romantically engaged with one and then crush her when she least expects it.

In the time that has passed since, we have seen the equality of women in the work force rise and the uncrowning of men as rulers of the working world. The Wicker Man shows us the next logical social progression: a society that has been taken over by women who have created their own laws to govern their own ways of life and are ultimately vengeful towards the men who have repressed them for all these years. Notice how the only man of power on Summersisle is Edward because he is a working professional: a police officer with a badge and a gun, constantly threatening to arrest the women for misbehavior under a law created by men to govern a man’s world. If In the Company of Men was an attack on the shallowness of corporate men in a dog eat dog world, The Wicker Man serves as a counter attack against feminism in a sexually liberated social setting. These women are like Chad in reverse.

What else is interesting is that Edward is allergic to bees. If we trace the bee’s mythology we understand that they were seen as feminine creatures. Homer in his work also thought of bees as wild, untamed creatures. The list of comparisons is endless. It might not be a stretch to believe that this is how Labute perceives militant feminists: as wild and untamed creatures that are willing to sacrifice any man for the betterment of themselves. It seems no small irony that the one man on Summersisle who has the ability to overpower the women is also fatally allergic to bee stings.

The problem is that if Labute’s metaphor makes sense, his film doesn’t. It seems to be operating under the framework of the 1973 Wicker Man, but the plot never becomes more than this; as if Lebute is just spinning the wheels while his interests lay elsewhere. The car crash scene at the beginning seems without purpose, even worse is Edward’s constant flashbacks to it. Characters appear and we don’t know who they are, Cage runs around the island yelling at women, and an ending ritual in which the inhabitants of the island dress up in animal costumes is so strange that we can never quite grasp whether or not Labute is making a horror film or a strange comedy.

The truth is that a lot of people who see the Wicker Man will hate it; it is sloppy, convoluted, and confusing. Yet to not see it might be a shame as it unflinchingly goes for the throat when most horror films seem to be stuck on autopilot. I’d rather a film fail interestingly than succeed without inspiration. I therefore could have hated the film too, but I wasn’t satisfied: why would a great filmmaker reduce himself to a by-the-numbers picture? I’m reminded of a quote from Labute’s great 2003 film The Shape of Things in which a character states that Picasso didn’t take a shit and call it art. He knew the difference and that’s what made him Picasso. I think Neil Labute knows the difference too.

Death at a Funeral (4.5 out of 5)

A reviewer should never be faced with the feeling that their review requires an apology and yet that’s just the sentiments I am faced with over my thoughts on Death at a Funeral. Nothing about this film should work: it’s a remake of a very very minor British film from 2007 that was directed by Frank Oz (the voice of Miss Piggy), it stars Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence and Tracy Morgan, whose names aren’t exactly associated with measures of cinematic quality and it was directed by Neil Labute who is a brilliant director, writer and playwright, but who usually focuses on dark films (often comedies) and shallow, wounded people. This movie has paycheque written all over it.

But here’s the thing: it’s funny as hell. It not only surpasses the original despite being almost an exact remake, but keeps on going until its memory is completely out of sight. Here’s proof that Godard may have actually been on to something when he said that the best way to criticize a film is to make another one.

Here’s the situation. A man has died and it is the day of his funeral. His family is gathering at his home where Aaron (Rock) is hosting. The eldest son, Aaron is worried that his eulogy will not be sufficient especially under the close scrutiny of those who believe his writer brother Ryan (Lawrence) should be giving it. Also around for the proceedings is the boys’ mother, a cousin played by Avatar’s Zoe Saldana whose father hates her white boyfriend Oscar (James Marsden) and would prefer she ended up with Derek (Luke Wilson) who is there with family friend Norman (Morgan) who is in charge of looking after grumpy old wheelchair-bound Uncle Russell (Danny Glover stealing the show). Also around is Frank (Peter Dinklage, reprising his role from the original) as a man with secrets from the father’s past.

See how they all connect like that? So does Labute who, like a brilliant stagehand orchestrates the ongoing slapstick comedy that arises out of the situation like a master conductor. Although the film forges on at full comedic tilt at all times, with several different subplots taking place around the house within the same temporal space, Labute never loses focus amidst the chaos. We always know that Oscar is in the backyard, Frank is in the guest room, Uncle Russell is in the bathroom, etc, with all of the threads building to an equal pitch so that the film not only stays its course, but never loses its momentum either.

The idea behind the film is that of classic screwball comedy. A man just wants to get through the day with as little problems as possible only to have everything go wrong from the beginning. And that’s the essence of the film’s comedic approach: just one damned thing after the other. That’s appropriate. It’s always better when it feels like funny things are happening as opposed to people trying to be deliberately funny. So Labute and his cast take full measures in pushing this situation to the very brink of its comedic potential. There are things in this movie that are vulgar, tasteless and at least one that is just plain wrong, but oh boy are they all ever funny. There’s something about this cast in this situation under the guidance of such an assured filmmaker that everything just clicks. Sometimes films succeed just on the basis that they find that special cocktail of elements and personalities that just go off and magic is born. That happened last year with The Hangover. Here it is again.

Another interesting aesthetic device that Labute employs is that he films many of the scenes in close-ups. It’s as if he understands the actors are funnier than the actions and so therefore focuses on the actors performing them instead of the gags themselves. That makes sense. Labute makes films about people and how they interact and influence each other. Screwball is such a broad generic convention that it can speak for itself, but by keeping the distance between audience and actor an intimate one, we not only focus on the individual, allowing several quick moments of humanity and sweetness to sneak through, but the comedy is played off of the reaction as much as the act itself. Take the James Marsden character, who gets himself into a predicament too funny to even hint at. The situation is inherently hilarious but the mileage that Labute gets off of Marden’s face is invaluable. Anyone could have filmed this same bit (and Oz did) at a medium or long distance and we would have laughed for a moment and then been tired with it. By keeping us close, Labute keeps our interests vested.

And then the film works because of how completely shameless it is willing to be: how far it is willing to go for a laugh and how many it actually gets in the process because of the strange logic every joke follows. Like The Hangover, there is nothing redeemable about this film: it has nothing to say about death, life, society, race, sex, religion, anything. All it wants is to be funny and it succeeds. I used to think that Neil Labute was only good at making Neil Labute films but with this, Lakeview Terrace and The Wicker Man it turns out he can make good films about just about anything, no apology required.

Laughing into the Darkness: The Forms and Functions of the Black Comedy

I've been promising this for at least two weeks when I wrote about my joy over IFC picking up Todd Solondz's newest film Love During Wartime. This is an essay that I wrote a couple years ago and presented at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN, as part of the Midwest Undergraduate Film Conference. Hope you enjoy it.

Some of the most brutal, cynical, pessimistic and emotionally devastating films ever made have been comedies. One may find it hard to concur with such a statement knowing how comedies have found themselves functioning within the film industry of yesterday and today. Almost entirely forgotten come awards season, the most popular comedies are mostly light and fluffy entertainment vehicles dumped into multiplexes during the summer season in order to draw teenagers with nothing better to do. That may be a stereotype, but with shallow, juvenile offerings such as Little Man, Scary Movie 4, You, Me & Dupree, and Beerfest, the film industry would be hard pressed to argue its case otherwise.

Enter the black comedy, an unrelenting genre that exists at the crossroads somewhere between humor and tragedy, in a vacuum of confusion and indifference, balancing itself on a sliding slope of irony. Alas, black comedy is a mish-mash of the senses providing viewers one thing and then ripping that out from under them to reveal another. The black comedy is as emotionally penetrating as the best of dramas and yet as funny as any straight comedy. Thus, black comedy poses a distinct question of morality: Is it okay to laugh or should we be crying? How do we feel about laughing at masochism, misogyny, or pedophilia? Are these viable subjects for comedy or should such subject matter be left to serious films?

Three such films raise these very questions. They are Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men (1997), and Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998). All three address the function, or in most cases dysfunction, of sex, the alienation of being an outsider in a society that has no use for you, and that funny way in which uncomfortable situations tend to leapfrog back and forth between hilarity and brutality at the blink of an eye.

I was raped once…. He came in through there on the fire escape. He held a knife to my throat and said if I made a move, he'd cut my tongue out. He tied me to the bed... he took his time... six hours. Actually it was a boyfriend of mine. To tell you the truth, I slept through most of it. So... there you are.- Marcy, After Hours

Marcy’s comment functions not a lot unlike the structure of After Hours itself. Where Marcy’s anecdote begins in horror and descends into banality, After Hours begins in banality and descends into chaos. And like Marcy’s speech, After Hours explores the cruelty of sex. It is a film in which its main character Paul Hackett sees sex as an opportunity to escape the boring routine of his life as a word processor, but in order to attain any he must venture into a strange section of New York City called SoHo, a world completely foreign to him. SoHo is a place that Ben Nyce, in his book Scorsese Up Close: A Study of the Films describes as, “A world where others accept deviant behavior with cool detachment” (88).

It is Paul’s naivety from which Scorsese derives both his comedy and drama as it stands in sharp contrast with this sexually deviant world where Paul quickly realizes that he is disgusted by the behaviors permeating the underbelly of SoHo and wishes simply to escape back home to his banal existence. What is most shocking about the film is that we as an audience exist on Paul’s side of the sexual coin: the straight man in a crooked world. This is how After Hours derives its blackness. By the time it is over and we have shared Paul’s grueling journey into the darkest realms of sexuality, we are drained. We, like Paul, just want to go home.

Maybe most disturbing and hilarious is After Hours’ outlook on the disgusting nature of sex. It is rare in any of Scorsese’s work for one to see sex as being synonymous with pleasure, but After Hours is particularly brutal in its depiction of the underside of the sexual conscious. We see this in one particularly funny scene in which Paul suspects that Marcy’s roommate Kiki has been robbed by a group of burglars. She drops him her apartment keys from her window which overlooks the streets below. He runs upstairs to find her tied up. He is impressed by the professionalism of the knots that bind her hands behind her back. A man cloaked in leather enters the room. Turns out Kiki was not burgled, but was simply engaged in a little friendly S&M. Again Scorsese has allowed the banal to descend into the obscure and the joke is on us, the innocent naïf.

However, for as many jokes as the film makes about Paul, the sad sack of an outsider trying to escape this world of sexually deviant women, it is also unsettling in its treatment of said women. As Ben Nyce points out, “More disturbing and damaging is the films portrayal of women. As agents of Paul’s disorientation, Marcy, Julie, Gail and June are uniformly hurtful” (91). Even more to the point is the fact that Paul approaches all of these women as if they can provide him a portal of escape. Yet all of the women, mirroring the films perfect comic structure, appear normal upon introduction but descend into beings who only desire to entrap Paul, both literally and metaphorically. What the black comedy givith with one hand he takith away with the other.

And yet, despite this bleak content, there is something strangely funny about Paul’s Kakfaesque journey through the streets of SoHo. Because he is so innocent, so naive, so out of place in this strange world, we must laugh at the absurdity of his situation. Take the pathetic line the timid Paul uses in order to escape Marcy after becoming disgusted by the idea of sex, as he projects all of his sexual insecurities upon her once the possibility arises that she could be horribly burned enters into the scenario. He asks her to show him one of the bagel and cream cheese paper weights that Kiki makes, “As we sit here chatting,” he says, “There are important papers flying rampant around my apartment because I don’t have anything to hold them down with” (Minion, 1985). Not only does Paul not know how to deal with Marcy as a sex object, but once it arises that her sex is undesirable to him, he doesn’t know how to handle that either. He is, after all, a long way from his home as a word processor.

Or yet another perfect scene which balances sexual obscurity with hilarity in which Marcy explains that her husband was so fascinated by the Wizard of Oz that he only called her Dorothy in bed. Once again, sex is a hotbed for obscurity and deviancy instead of pleasure. Sex is not escape in After Hours, it is entrapment.

After Hours, at its comic center, operates as a juggling act, constantly presenting us with one thing and then ripping the rug out to show us something else more disturbing and perverse. This is, the very essence of what makes it a black comedy.

This process may not be clearer than in a final scene in which Paul meets a lonely lady at a bar; the most seemingly normal he has met all night. They have a sweet moment on the dance floor in which genuine emotion seems to circulate back and forth between them, she hides Paul in her apartment from an angry mob that wants him dead, and we think that he has finally found someone who can truly help him. She then, in order to hide him, makes him into a paper machete statue, thus making him her own private prisoner. What the film makes us question in these moments is in the true tradition of black comedy: do we laugh at the absurdity of Paul’s situation or do we feel bad that he has been forced to realize the irony that sex is just as entrapping as his 9-to-5 desk job? Are we disgusted by the film’s inherent misogyny or amused by its audacious sexual deviance? The film, like all great black comedies, does not answer these questions, and nicely paves the way for true unrelenting filmmakers like Neil Labute and Todd Solondz.

Women. Nice ones, the most frigid of the race, it doesn't matter in the end. Inside they're all the same meat and gristle and hatred just simmering.- Chad, In The Company of Men

If After Hours is a film about how devious women entrap men, In the Company of Men is a film that takes revenge with gleeful abandon. Written and directed by Neil Labute, In the Company of Men is a savage look at misogyny within the corporate world. The film tackles serious issues with cold detachment, and if it is a comedy, our laughter stems from a disbelief in just how brutal it is willing to be. It thus employs humor for two purposes: first as a coping mechanism and second, in order to sideswipe us by not allowing us to realize the true extent of main character Chad’s cruelty.

Neil Labute seems to make films about a specific kind of individual. His characters come from a place of position, they are the elite. Labute deals with people of status, be they corporate players, university professors or art students. Because of this, Labute easily projects his anger upon these people. He brings to the surface their shallowness, their greed, their hollow existences, their lack of a moral center; attacking them simply by showing us who they truly are. The comedy of Neil Labute seems to stem from a deep disgust and disdain for his main characters.

In this, the true spirit of black comedy, there is an inherent sadness that lurks underneath the scenes of humor. Labute sees Chad as a product of his own environment, a man who has been socialized into crushing everyone in the way of his path to the top of the corporate ladder. He and his friend Howard are constantly framed by office doors and windows, the camera never moving; they are trapped within the confines of their own corporate world with little room to move. If there is humor in any of this it is in the fact that one man could be so evil and yet so outside of caricature. We laugh at Chad out of fear; a fear that a man like him could actually exist among us.

Chad is thus a corporate slime ball whose plan is for him and the meek Howard to make an innocent deaf girl fall in love with both of them and then ditch her when she least expects. In a scene of utter cruelty, Chad describes with complete exaggeration to his co-workers how the mute girl Christine sounds when she talks. He laughs emotionlessly while comparing her to a dolphin, as she struggles to form words, spit gathering at the sides of her mouth. And yet the scene is funny; funny to think that any human being could be so cruel and unsympathetic; Chad is such a monster that we don’t know how to deal with his extreme behavior other than to assume he must be putting us on. The laugh therefore seems to erupt from a place of confusion; not because we are enjoying ourselves, but as a way of dealing with the underlying sadness of the scene; convincing ourselves that no one could possibly be so cruel by nature.

As stated prior, the second way in which Labute uses humor is to sideswipe the viewer. Just like After Hours, In the Company of Men makes us think we are inside a comic universe only to pull the rug out from under us. Alas, Chad, in an act that uncovers the true unrestricted nature of his cruelty, not only destroys Christine but also Howard in the process, without care or concern. If In the Company of Men is so emotionally affecting, it is because the film steps outside of comic expectation and serves the audience with a cruel backhand to the face during the unexpected climatic moment.

Suzanne Fields states that “What makes the movie especially horrible is that the man who hatches the scheme and seduces the girl gets away without punishment. There’s no justice, poetic or otherwise, for his cruelty” (1998). By doing this, Labute has turned the black comedy upside down. In After Hours the comic tone, as critic Roger Ebert states, lets us know that “We’re not supposed to take it seriously” (1985). However Labute’s approach is more cynical, more real. Fields, explaining Labute’s purpose, says that, “He wants an audience to be deprived of the satisfaction of a moral resolution to make them-and us- experience the depths of moral callousness running amok in our society” (1998). In other words, Labute makes us believe that we have stepped into the comic world which is not to be taken seriously, a satire of the shallowness of corporate players, and then shows us that the situation is all too real by ripping the satire out from under us, leaving only shallowness, and showing that life is cold and cruel and that it is possible for evil to continue to exist without punishment. That Chad rises in status and position among his corporate cronies after his little stunt may be Labute’s cruelest joke of them all.


I want kids that love me as much as I hated my mother- Diane, Happiness

Todd Solondz is one of the most fascinating makers of black comedy. He is, in my opinion, the most unrelenting filmmaker working today because he is willing to bring modern taboos to the surface; dealing with them by having the courage to admit that they exist. His subject matter has ranged from childhood neglect, to rape, to pedophilia, to abortion, and yet, unlike Labute, who seems to have little but contempt for the inhabitants of his films and the society that created them, there is a strange, morbid sweetness lurking within the Solondz universe. He may be just as, if not more dark and relentless in his comedy than Labute, but he also sympathizes with the outsiders of his world.

A true auteur in the sense that his films are mirrors that reflect the state of mind of their maker: to understand Solondz’s films is to understand Solondz himself. In an interview with writer Sigrid Nunez from The Believer magazine Solondz says that,

When I want to show the kind of meanness people are capable of, to make it believable I find I have to tone it down. It’s in real life that people are over the top. And if I have a certain view of how people behave in this regard, it’s because I’ve been a target for a certain kind of comment all my life. Perfect strangers have always felt free to say things to me in the street, or shout things from passing cars (2005).

Alas, seeing that he is an outsider himself, we begin to understand why Solondz is attracted to the people who inhabit his films. Happiness is comprised of a suburban pedophile who rapes his son’s friends, a sex addict who combs the phone book looking for random women to make lewd phone calls to, a novelist who wishes she had been raped as a child so that her new novel could be more authentic, and a woman who has killed her doorman and placed his remains in plastic baggies in her freezer.

This is dark material, and even though Solondz doesn’t sympathize with the actions of the pedophile or the sex addict, he sympathizes with the individuals as human beings, which is what makes them funny. These are the people who live next door, who appear normal on the surface, the “quiet ones” as the neighbors always say; and although Solondz doesn’t go so far as to make excuses for the behavior of his characters, he does attempt to show that they are in fact normal, or at least in the sense that they too are human beings. There is something ever so sweet about a perfect scene in which Allen the sex addict and the woman across the hall who has recently murdered their doorman find each other and go to bed together, only to lie on top of the sheets, facing away from each other. Solondz is a master of allowing his characters exactly what they would want.

However, it is in the tradition of black comedy that the comedy works at the surface while darker subtexts hide underneath, and this is no expectation for Solondz with Happiness. Although he my align himself with the outsiders who he portrays in his films, there is still the inescapable reality that pedophilia is a serious crime and mental disorder, and for every scene of hilarity there is a moment of absolute bleakness such as the one in which Billy confronts his father about his pedophilia, resulting in a perfectly written scene which is also one of the most uncomfortable and heartbreaking ever to be put on film.

Herein lies the trick to Solondz’s brilliance. He leads us by the hand into situations that we don’t want to be in and then abandons us there, leaving it up to the viewer to interpret how we feel about a given situation. We laugh at a character’s actions and then analyze our own sincerity; do we feel right about ourselves having laughed about rape, pedophilia or abortion? Therefore, Todd Solondz is probably the master of the black comedy (a term he himself hates).

Where Scorsese amplifies his comedy into a state of nightmarish weirdness which could only exist in a world of its own, or at least New York, and Labute only provides us with the option of sharing his distain for his characters, Solondz is a fence sitter. He follows the rules of the black comedy, viewing sex as a function for displeasure, seeing the world from an outsider’s perspective, and making us question how we feel about what we have seen, but he also offers no easy answers or conclusions.

Instead he presents the audience with only indifference, seeing the pedophile, sex addict, and murderer as both people who perform horrible actions and also have a human side, forcing us to look inside of ourselves and assess how we feel about the characters and their behavior based on our own moral judgments. In a sense, although all three directors discussed have either played within the realm of black comedy (Scorsese) or built a career out of it (Labute), it is Solondz, with his complete indifference, pulls the rug out from under us himself, which, despite the hilarity of his films, makes us wonder if he is even operating within the genre of comedy, black or otherwise, at all. No wonder he hates the term.

Death At A Funeral (2010)

When I was at the theater on Saturday night to see Up In the Air, I couldn't help but see a large cut-out advertising a remake of Death at a Funeral. The original film of the same name was a minor British comedy back in 2007 and was directed by Frank Oz who is maybe most famous for being the voice of Miss Piggy

I can understand why someone would want to remake respectable foreign language films like say Brothers or Funny Games to open them up to a wider international audience, but Death at a Funeral was in English, came out a mere three years ago and wasn't special enough in my opinion to warrant remaking.

What now baffles me even more is that today I find out it was directed by Neil Labute. Let me write that again. The remake of Death at Funeral was directed by Neil Labute! The same Neil Labute who wrote and directed some of the best movies of the 90s including In the Company of Men, Shape of Things and my favourite Your Friends and Neighbours, with that heartlessly sadistic yet brilliant performance from Jason Patric.

Needless to say Labute has been one of my favourite writer/directors for some time now. I praise the above mentioned films every chance I get, I could get behind Possession, enjoyed the complexity of Nurse Betty and Lakeview Terrace even though he didn't write them and was even one of the sole defenders of his remake of The Wicker Man with Nicholas Cage, but what the hell is this all about?

The film was written by Dean Craig who also wrote the original film and, as a side note, is also writing a script based on Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures, a non-fiction examination of the Sundance Film Festival and Mirimax Films. That film will be directed by Kenneth Bowser who also made the informative documentary Easy Riders, Raging Bulls based on the Biskind book of the same name. Both books are very much worth reading, but if the forgettable Darwin Awards and What Just Happened? (based on producer Art Linson's non-fiction book of the same name) taught the world anything, it's that non-fiction books lose their appeal when an arbitrary story is laid atop them.

Back on topic. The new Death at a Funeral stars a predominately black cast which includes Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence doing his typical of mugging for the camera, Tracy Morgan doing his typical thing of not being funny, and others including James Marsden, Luke Wilson and Peter Dinklage (who reprises the role he played in the original).

I won't get into what the story is about because if you've seen the original this new one looks like almost an exact remake and if you haven't, the trailer (which you can see here) gives away just about everything anyway.

But what is really the heart of the matter here is my complete bafflement over the trajectory that Neil Labute's career has taken with this entry. I know in my heart that he will one day make great films again, but why would a man of such gifts who specializes in such penetrating and unapologetic dark comedies and social commentaries, be interested in turning what was essentially a British sitcom into what looks like a routine, uninspired African American comedy?

Once upon a time Neil Labute would be ripping films like this to shreds. Now he's making them? I think it's time he stopped whatever it is he is doing and get back to directing his own scripts. Then again, who knows, maybe the thing will be good after all.