Monthly Archives: December 2014

Random Movie Night: Death at a Funeral (2007 British Film)

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Here’s a movie I’ve never heard of, with Alan Tudyk, just starting the opening credits. Recording now, let’s see if it’s any good!

Welcome to Random Movie Night, brought to you by TiVo and sheer dumb luck!

Cast of Death at a Funeral (2007 British film)

Death at a Funeral is a 2007 British comedy film directed by Frank Oz. The screenplay by Dean Craig focuses on a family attempting to resolve a variety of problems while attending the funeral of the patriarch.ContentsPlotCastProductionReleaseCritical receptionBox officeAwardsHome mediaRemakesReferencesExternal links

via Death at a Funeral 2007 film – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

9:11 pm – caught it just as the credits began and decided to watch when Alan Tudyk’s name came up. I’m in, because Wash lives. The credits have this little cartoon coffin making its way along a tortuous route, on a map, around the roundabouts, and eventuallly making it’s way up to a largish country house in a nice suburb somewhere near Gatwick. Directed by Frank Oz. Should be good for a laugh!
9:14 Yes, that’s a passing bell ringing, because this is England.
9:15 Oops, wrong body. Sorry, sir! Comedy cartoon coffin quicklyy returns to the mortuary to fetch the right cofffin.
9:16 The one son, Daniel and his wife, are very posh. They live in the nice house with Daniel’s mom, and his dad while he was alive. Apparently they’re trying to come up with enough money to get a flat in London to further Daniel’s career, but currently he’s not doing much other than messing about writing a novel. Meanwhile, his successfful younger brother steals all the writing limelight, living in New York. His flight’s delayed but he’s just landed and on his way.
9:17 Alan Tudyk! Tension in the family. His girlfriend is a relative of the deceased and nervous about introducing him to the family at the funeral, but this way they’re all there. Tudyk isn’t so sure about barging in during a time of mourning. She is probably fun at parties as she slags off a tosser in traffic. Tudyk is very, very nervous about meeting the brothers and wants to make a good impression.

9:20 Return of the Coffin. So is this your father, sir? All’s well.
9:21 Ah, the widow. She and Daniel’s wife get on like a house afire with no firemen handy.
9:22 Hey, it’s Hump from “Trouble in Paradise!” Still in underpants, being picked up by Tudyk. He appears to be an amateur pharmacist, supposedly studying at university. Sure, Hump. Put your pants on.
9:23 Taking random pills from Hump’s table probably won’t work out well, Alan Tudyk.
9:24 Posh younger brother Robert turns up with black leather bags. Makes clanger joke. Mum cries.
9:25 The two guys in a Golf, cousins? Pick up foul mouthed uncle Alfie, who’s in a wheelchair. “Where the fuck have you been? We’re going to be late!”

9:27 The brothers talk next to the cofffin in the posh parlor. What to do about Mum? And money.
9:28 The drugs are taking effect. Cousins bringing Uncle Alfie thwarted for convenient parking space to offload Uncle Afie and his wheelchair, and must back all the way down the drive.
9:30 Tudyk’s character is called Simon and is talking to invisible dogs and garden furniture. He is tripping on the green, and at one point sticks his head in a hedge out in the garden, where he’s not as likely to disturb the rest of the family gathering in the parlor. He remarks “It’s all so…. GREEN.”
9:31 Who the hell is that guy? It’s Theron from Game of Thrones, you numskull. Peter Dinklage!
9:32 It looks like everybody’s arrived at the… wake? It’s not a shiva, there’s a priest. Private funeral, I guess.

I think this sets up the characters. The posh brothers need money, the cousins are less posh and are stuck trundling Uncle Alfie, Peter Dinklage’s relationship with the deceased will become clearer.. And the “Valium” Alan Tudyk took was something a biiiit stronger, like LSD, mescaline and Ketamine. Alan Tudyk is going to make a great impression on the family. And now that Uncle Alfie’s finally arrived, they can begin the service in the parlor. The service begins.

Alan Tudyk’s facce on drugs is priceless. Family ructions are priceless. And oh, this Bible reading about David and Jonathan is going to be significant as it was the patriarch’s favorite passage (sidelong look at Peter Dinklage, who looks pretty hot).

Aaaand Tudyk hits peak freakout. Blame it on the “Valium.” He thinks the coffin is moving and making scratching noises, and throws it over, with dead Daddy rolling out to his widow’s feet. Chaos!

While they stash Tudyk in an upstairs bathroom and tidy Daddy back into the casket (it’s actually the kind with the double-hinged lid), Dinklage asks to talk with Daniel, somewhere quiet. They go into the study, a beautifully decorated little room with its own en-suite bathroom.

So now we’re going to get the big reveal of the relationship between the dad and Peter Dinklage. And he’s got pictures… he pulls them out to show Daniel. As he explains where and when they were taken, surrounded as they are by tasteful male nudes in sculpture and painting and photography, plus some “gay icon” movie memorabilia, Daniel has a pifanee. His dad was gay?!?!? Suddenly, his dad’s taste in objets d’art and Bible readings becomes horrribly clear.

I has a pifaneee!!1!

It’s blackmail, and there’s extremely graphic proof that it wasn’t Platonic. And Daniel now has to have a whip round to find some cash to pay Dinklage off, to the tune of about 15,000GBP, or Dinklage will show the pictures to everybody at the house. Meanwhile, the buffet table looks really good.

Oops, the unposh cousin and the widow are at the garden house, where the not-Valium pill bottle got dropped earlier during Tudyk’s epic freak-out.

Dinklage: he’s a master of sticking the brothers where they live.

Tudyk: has escaped the bonds of clothes and the bathroom he locked himself into, and has climbed out the second-floor window mother-naked to greet the Sun. What a glorious movie! Why was he not cast in the American remake! I need another beer to celebrate this, his skin is absolutely flawless.

Dinklage: Is too much. I sum up: he’s just been stuffed full of not-Valium affter being wrestled to the floor of the study by Robert, with Daniel’s help, and the helpful hypochondriac cousin just offered the Valium bottle. Hump comes in and now this set piece is ready to roll once the drugs take effect. I don’t think Dinklage will make it to the end credits. AWK-ward!

Previously, Uncle Alfie had to take a shit and can’t go upstairs and besides which the door is still locked, so the schlumpfy cousin brings him through the study. Dinklage has been stashed behind the couch. There is actual pooping on screen – the hypochondriac cousin comes up with a handful and has his own epic freakout, before catching sight of the spatters on his face in the mirror and having another. Meanwhile, the brothers are in a little room off the kitchen, arguing. Hump has disappeared. Dinklage pops up from behind the couch, clearly hallucinating but not too bothered about his hands and feet being bound. He begins hopping around the room, climbing on furniture. Will he surrvive? it’s called “Death AT a Funeral,” after all. Still, he looks like he’s enjoying the not-Valium trip.

Crash! he’s lying on the floor, having cracked his head on the coffee table.

And no, it appears he didn’t survive, but at least it was a silly accident, and he died happily hallucinating, jumping on the couch while tied up with… ties. The hypochondriac cousin goes to fetch the brothers and Hump, with a horrible rictus on his face and a shitstain on his shirt. The family conspirators gather in the study, panicking and trying to figure out what to do. They’ve got a dead little man in the one room and a dead old man in the other, who’s got quite a big, roomy casket actaully.

But at this point, I want to know what Alan Tudyk is doing on the roof.

Oh good, everybody’s on the lawn, as the service is still on hold since the unfortunate epic freak-out when he thought the coffin was moving and dumped Daddy out on the floor. The opportunity for the ingenious solution presents itself, but first the brothers have to argue about money and writing novels.

God, they must have used vats of sunscreen on Tudyk! he must have been up on the roof for hours doiing the crazy. His girlfriend, who is never clearly identiified I think, finally climbs up on the roof, tells him she’s pregnant, and wants to get marrried. So he calms down and agrees to put some pants on and join the famiy in the parlor for the much-delayed funeral service. I could be wrong, she may be a niece, as her father seems to be very much alive, and forbidding her to see Alan Tudyk any more. By this time, we’ve seen a HELL of a lot of Tudyk ourselves. He looks pretty good but we never get any frontal nudity.

And I really hope Dinklage is dead, because otherwise he’s going to be buried alive, in a notoriously bad position on top of his former lover. But in the meantime, this needs to be a closed-coffin service if they ever manage to re-start. And Uncle Alfie’s been on the pot in the bathroom off the study the whole time, where he’d seen the brothers, druggie Hump, and the hypochondriac cousin wrestling with the dead body of Dinklage through the open door. What a lovely time had by all, except of course poor old Peter Dinklage.

The vicar asks “do you want to have the casket open? We’ll really have to whiz through this” because he has a wedding or something in a few minutes. So Daniel begins the eulogy. And the cofffin begins knocking and rocking and moaning.

Jack-in-the-box! Pop goes the Dinklage! HELLLLLLLOOOOO! His eyes are on FIRE.

He manages to get out of the coffin and tries to escape, but the photos falll out of his jacket pocket at the widow’s feet, and she goes half-ballistic. Chaos ensues.

But then, Daniel shouts the opening line of his boring eulogy again.. a frustrated novelist, forever in the shadow of his younger, cooler brother, who’s already a successful writer, he was previously irritated that everybody expected his brother to give the eulogy.

And somehow, it’s heartfelt, and moving, and loving, and acknowledges that their dad, uncle, and brother had some secrets and found some happiness late in life, but he was still a good man.

It’s enough to shut everyone the hell up, even Dinklage, who looks somewhat mollified though he’s still tied up with curtain tie-backs. The widow, who was on the point of throttling him, smiles sadly and pulls herself back together. She’s very elegant, but it’s been a long and difficult day.

Finally, after everyone is gone, the brothers sum up in the empty parlor and work some things out. Daniel’s wife comes in to tell them everyone’s gone at last, except poor old Uncle Alfie, who was still going on about the dead body in the study. She thougt it best to put him to bed rather than put him through the stress of being driven back to his care facility.

“Oh, and I gave him some of that Valium that was in the study, to keep him calm.”

Horrified looks from the brothers, the music comes up, Alfie is somehow on the roof naked, and remarks “it’s all so.. fucking GREEN.”

Credits: the little animated coffin comes to the end of its journey, goes into the ground, and some fucking green grows on top.

FIN

So that was a fun movie – not a classic, not a cult favorite, but funny even though you could see what’s coming, and nearly all of Alan Tudyk besides.

Vicar arrested, bailed out in baby murder mystery

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"A vicar and his daughter have been bailed after their arrests on suspicion of murdering a baby.

The Reverend James Percival, 64, of Holy Trinity Church in Freckleton, and daughter Ruth, 28, were also arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to conceal the birth of a child."

I've been following this one for a couple of days; I think it'll turn out he was helping his daughter hide a pregnancy and it went horribly wrong. It sure reads like the beginning of a particularly shocking murder mystery.



Vicar bailed over newborn baby murder

Read at Google+

Storycorps: “Oh Mama, I Knew You’d Come”

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Ruth Coker Burks was a young mother in her 20s when the AIDS epidemic hit her home state of Arkansas in the early 1980s. She took it upon herself to care for AIDS patients who were abandoned by their families, and even by medical professionals, who feared the disease.

Coker Burks, now 55, has no medical training, but she estimates that she has cared for nearly 1,000 people over the past three decades, including her friend Paul Wineland’s partner.

She became involved after visiting a friend at a Little Rock hospital where one of the state’s early AIDS patients was dying. “The nurses were drawing straws to see who would go in and check on him,” Coker Burks tells Wineland at StoryCorps in Hot Springs, Ark.

“And so I snuck into his room. And he wanted his mama. And so I marched myself out to the nurses’ station and I said, ‘Can we call his mother?’ And they go, ‘Honey, his mama’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming.’

“And so I went back in and he looked up at me and he said, ‘Oh, Mama, I knew you’d come.’ I stayed with him for 13 hours while he took his last breath. I called his mother and I told her that he had died and she said, ‘I’m not burying him.’ So I had him cremated and I brought him home.”

Caring For AIDS Patients, 'When No One Else Would' : NPR.

Earlier today, this Storycorps installment made me burst into sobs. I was reminded of some Seattle friends who died of AIDS; I knew a few people whose family had abandoned them to their fate and left them to rely on the kindness of strangers. I know people who volunteered at AIDS hospices years ago in the Chicago area, too. They had also sat with the dying, because the families would not be there for them, in all senses.

The sobs came when Coker Burks said “Oh Mama, I knew you’d come.”

I was overcome with grief for an unknown mother’s son, and had to log out of my work phone line for a few seconds so I wouldn’t be caught crying on the line if a call came in.

I sobbed for the son who wanted his mama, and for the mama who would not come, and for the kind woman who stood in for so many mothers and fathers who would not, or could not, be there for their sons and daughters, dying of AIDS.

Those were dark days, but thank God for Ruth Coker Burks. It reallly did get better because of people like her.

Gators Gonna Gate, Or Why Peter Pan Live Wasn’t That Bad, Really

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https://twitter.com/TikTokCrock/status/541018340639395840

So last night, the folks on Jezebel were all set to hate-tweet NBC’s second annual live musical theater production. This time around, it was #PeterPanLive, starring Allison Williams, aka Brian Williams’ daughter and some kind of star on HBO or something we don’t watch. Once again, I set up to watch live, or as close to live as possible given that we had to put dinner together, but I caught up via TiVo. And I tweeted, and tweeted, and hung out at Jezebel in the “live blog,” trying to get out of the “greys” (the pending comments).

Today, Jezebel followed up with the five most mockable moments, including this oddity, which was stuck in the middle of a commercial break:

First of all, I’ve only highlighted five moments because Peter Pan Live!, first and foremost, was terribly boring. Not only is it a dull play to begin with, but this one was starring Allison fucking Williams. And, worse yet, not a single fly wire broke during the show. Point being, I really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find five moments that seemed mildly worth the precious time that you and I typically dedicate to Clickhole quizzes. But find them, I did.

via The 5 Most Mockable Moments of Peter Pan Live! .

So I mostly don’t agree that #PeterPanLive was a mockable hot mess for what it was, a musical on live television. Unlike last year’s mess with Whatsername Countrysinger, it wasn’t awful with a few good moments. It was actually pretty good with some awkward bits, uninspired casting. and a less-racist version of the song “Ugga-Wugga-Wug.”

Christopher Walken was weirdly and badly made up, not like his promotional photos had looked, and was moving and speaking slowly (and obviously reading off cue cards and only occasionally camping things up). Also, he had a throne built like a La-Z-Boy recliner that seemed to be ALL THE FAVORITE THINGS for him; he was constantly working the big gold lever to lift the leg rest. Given how little energy he had for dancing, singing, or swordfighting, it may have been written into his contract that he needed a lot of throne time with his legs up. Something was horribly wrong with his eyebrows, so that he looked like Ming the Merciless on Talk Like A Pirate Day.

Still, Allison Williams sang really well, looked disturbingly fey in the part (she has a strong jaw), had sort of British diction, and danced and flew around like a boss.

Wendy looked very mature, as did all the “Lost Boys” but hey, that’s theatre. People on Twitter seemed to be missing Rufio from “Hook” a lot and there was a lot of hooting at the psychedelic croc, but I liked it (and of course it quickly had its own Twitter handle).

They cut some of my favorite stuff, but maybe that’s stuff that was more from the Disney cartoon, like when Peter shouts PIXIE DUST! and makes the pirate ship fly off into the moonlight. And Tinkerbell’s big moment was kind of rushed, and weirdly urgent, since most of the children that needed to clap to keep her alive were asleep by then.

The length of the show was a problem, especially for a show meant to be viewed by children, as it went too late and most little kids couldn’t stay up. There were a few odd things, like the flight wires being very noticeable (especally when the Darling boys first take off).

And yet, I liked it. I liked the set design, I liked the costumes (especially on the pirates), I liked the stagecraft, I liked (for the most part) the camera work. The weird thing is, that the most memorable parts were the weird things that got in the way of the wonder; Peter Pan is a very odd story and it does have some problems for a modern audience, yet people seem to love it anyway. There was shiny sparkly stuff all over, like theatrical Awesome Sauce. It was like the art director decided that MOAR GLITTER on top of bright, intense blues, greens and purples was a given.

“Pixie Dust: They Put That Shit On Everything.”

Yeah, it was shiny. And ludicrously colorful (yet very beautiful, in some shots). And I appreciated the tricks with forced perspective and false scale that they used for some scenes (such as looking over the London rooftops towards the nursery window). The music was vigorous, the dancing was energetic (if a little over-the-top, especially between Lost Boys and Indian braves). There was a lot that was good, and quite a bit that was unsettlingly creepy (if I’m asked to go on an adventure that consists of cooking, cleaning, and making pockets for boys, no thank you).

Of course, lots of people hated it, hooted at it, complained that it was long and weird. But it was never boring, just odd in the way that dreams are sometimes weirdly beautiful.

And I do hope NBC does something like this again next year – but they should either pick something that’s definitely geared and scheduled for family viewing, or do something wild that starts later but isn’t as long. As long as it’s not remotely a holiday theme, since we get enought of that “event entertainment” stuff this time of year, I’d be happy to watch (and tweet) again next year.