Format: Streaming video from Hoopla Digital on The Nook.
This is the third in a series of twelve films suggested by Chip Lary at Tips from Chip.
Funerals suck. Like most people, I’ve been to my share of them and I’ve been a pall bearer enough times that I don’t look forward to any of it. Funerals, it has been said, are for the living and I think that’s true. In the case of Death at a Funeral, the funeral is very much for us, the audience. This is a very good example of the genre of comedy in which everything goes wrong at the same time with ridiculous and often hilarious consequences.
It’s worth saying right off the top that this is a genre that is very difficult to do well. Too much insanity and the film spins out of control. Not enough, and there’s not enough humor to warrant watching the rest of the film. Make things too improbable and it’s not believable enough to make watching worth the time. To work as well as it can, a movie like Death at a Funeral has to walk a knife edge, keeping the humor happening and upping the ante at just the right pace to keep things understandable, funny, and consistently moving. And for what it’s worth, I think it helps that it’s British in this case. There’s something about British comedy that pulls all of this together.
