Death at a Funeral

Death at a Funeral is a movie filled with zillions of characters, each with his orher own problems, who are all thrown together at a family funeral. Here’s just a sampling: Aaron (Chris Rock) is saddled with the burden of planning and paying for his father’s funeral while his younger brother Ryan (Martin Lawrence) gets all the admiration from family without doing anything. Elaine (Zoe Saldana) is planning on revealing to the family that she is going to marry her boyfriend Oscar (James Marsden), but accidently gives him LSD, which causes him to hallucinate and act inappropriately. Norman (Tracy Morgan) has been given the responsibility for looking after crotchety Uncle Russell (Danny Glover). And then there’s the mysterious little person who appears at the funeral, revealing something about Aaron’s father that his family never knew.

That’s just a fraction of the many plotlines that Death at a Funeral puts forward. Unfortunately, I did not find the majority of them to be funny. Watching Marsden’s trip and the chaos it caused was the only part of the movie that made me laugh; generally, the jokes were lowest common denominator. Additionally, though Rock is an excellent comedian, his serious acting left more to be desired – much of his delivery sounded like emotionless reading.

Though Death at a Funeral’s glut of characters and situations took away from the movie as a whole, it kept the time moving quickly. Even though I wasn’t really enjoying it, I didn’t find myself counting the minutes until the movie was finished. Still, I wouldn’t recommend it. It gets a 2/5.

Watch Jon Stewart’s interview with Tracy Morgan (This is a funny one. For some reason, Morgan reminds me so much of my paternal grandfather in this clip. I know that's irrelevant, but since many of the people who read this are my relatives, I figured I'd put it out there.)

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The Losers

I will admit from the outset that The Losers is definitely not my type of movie. That being said, I didn’t hate it. But I didn’t like it either.

Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is the leader of a Special Forces unit made up of himself, Jensen (Chris Evans), Roque (Idris Elba), Pooch (Columbus Short) and Cougar (Oscar Jaenada). While on a mission, the five find themselves framed for a crime by a man they know only as Max. They are presumed dead and are hiding out in Bolivia when Aisha (Zoe Saldana) appears saying she will smuggle them back into the US if they will kill Max. They agree, and the majority of the movie is spent tracking the guy down.

The Losers seems to be like any typical action movie, though this is just a guess on my part. There’s fighting and guns and a heist. To me, though, these things are boring when there’s not much of a story to go along with it. It was nice that the characters’ motives for tracking Max were explained, but I would’ve liked to have a little more substance to the story. Of course, this probably wouldn’t fit well with the movie’s genre.

The Losers is based on a Vertigo comic of the same name. I’ve never read the comic, so I have nothing to compare it to, but I still appreciated the film’s attempt to represent the comic form. It took advantage of freeze frame images during battle sequences and extreme close-ups that brought to mind comic frames.

All in all, though, I didn’t enjoy The Losers. I’m giving it a 2/5. But if you’re an action movie fan, you might enjoy it.

Watch Jon Stewart’s interview with Zoe Saldana

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