Saturday Evening Movie Post [moviegique]: Over Your Dead Body

The Boy and I had a blast at this violent Jorma Taccone (MacGruber) black-comedy, but I couldn't help but notice this was the second romantic-dark-comedy in a row, after The Drama. Is Hollywood maybe inching its way back toward the perennial crowd-pleasing romcom genre, but can't find a straight path?

I have no idea.

When the movie opens, we see sad sack Dan (Jason Segel) being bullied on the set of the commercial he's directing, and he's very ostentatiously telling everyone within earshot about how he's going up to the cabin with his wife Lisa (Samara Weaving), and how she's insisting—insisting!—on going on this very dangerous hike by herself.

OK, so, obviously, he's planning to kill her.

When he gets home, one of his wife's girlfriends is leaving, and she smiles at him and says, "Happy hunting!" which is perplexing because of course he's not any kind of a hunter.

So, somewhat less obviously, she's planning to kill him.

Somewhat more obviously.

This movie does a really excellent job of seeding little things throughout and then recontextualizing them through flashbacks. This is done for laughs, primarily, but Taccone manages—despite the mix of relationship dysfunction, serious violence and comedy—to give the film a pitch-perfect tone that treats its characters with respect—and, like The Drama, is weirdly, cautiously optimistic. Buried in the shenanigans is a fairly profound statement about how we exaggerate our neuroses, and it's only when we come up against some hard psychosis that we straighten out.

Where R Patz and Zendaya (in The Drama) are dealing with near lethal levels of cringe, Segel and Weaving are working on a much more primal level, and this is both more fun and more satisfying. Also more preposterous, but who cares?

Part of the non-working dynamic between Dan and Lisa is that Lisa, an actress, married Dan, a director, because as an older man with a vision, he had a clear path forward for his life. Seven years later, he's making pop-up ads, and he's encouraged (coerced?) her into being an actress in community theater, which has resulted in them burning up all their money. Dan is a spendthrift, impress-your-colleagues-with-reckless-spending kind of guy.

I had a little trouble with Lisa being only ten years younger than Dan, because Weaving is a younger, prettier, better acting Margot Robbie and Segel is halfway to being the crypt-keeper.

Seriously, this is The Muppets guy? I mean, accounting for acting, lighting, makeup—he still looks like he's melting, and he's, like, 45.

Sorry, dude. I look way older than nearly 29, myself.

Weaving, whom I've primarily seen covered in blood from the Ready or Not movies, looks like she's comfortably in her 20s. She's 34. Nonetheless, both she and Segel are by turns despicable, petty, cruel, sympathetic, pathetic—oddly real feeling for a movie like this.

Rounding out the cast is Timothy Olyphant, who's way prettier than Segel (and 12 years older) to say nothing of a haggard Juliette Lewis (who's right between Olyphant and Segel in age) and Keith Jardine, reprising his career-long role as a goon. He's funny in this. Paul Guillfoyle is Segel's I'm-Very-Disappointed-In-You-Son father, who thinks the problem with the younger generation (this would be X) is that they didn't have a Vietnam.

Guillfoyle, besides being a good actor you've seen in a dozen different things, has a relatively small part that really illustrates how well the story is constructed, and its attention to detail. As Michael, Dan's dad in the old-folks home, you could see his rambling as out of touch and just comic relief. But it's his cabin, and his guns in the cabin, and there's a great bit where he's driving a tricked out Honda or something and he can't get the radio to stop playing techno, which is very old folks, but then he starts to really dig the music, and you realize that, like every other aspect of this movie, nothing was "just a joke". It all contributes to story, to character and to an ultimate payoff.

It's very hard to find images of this film that aren't spoilers. So, let's just enjoy Weaving's high-waisted jeans which, at some points during the film, come up to nearly her armpits.

It's weird when someone seems to know what he's doing, and it's weird that it's weird. We've been seeing more competence in storytelling lately, and we're beside ourselves.

The writing, editing and direction are terrific. The camera moves purposely and without that sense of clichéd, pre-canned motions most films use these days. The music (both diagetic and not) also contributes to the story, as when Lisa and Dan can't decide on a streaming channel.

The only thing that would keep me from recommending it is the violence. It is increasingly brutal and graphic. The way Taccone uses this to maintain the tone is the sort of thing few Westerners can pull off. Early on, we are told to take the characters' intentions sincerely. They mean to do each other harm—they're just not very competent. But this incompetence leads to serious injury. And the movie takes increasingly dark turns without losing either its sense of humor or its earnestness.

It is, in some ways, much easier to watch than the very awkward The Drama, and certainly more fun—if you can stomach it.

They did the meme!

posted by Open Blogger at 08:30 PM

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