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Sadly Over-hyped

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

As Good As It Gets

The first thing I would say about this film is .. that I liked it!..which is quite a rare thing these days. It is a slow burner that turns into a little gem. It is actually laugh out loud funny at times which is very rare for a modern comedy film ranging from gentle humour to fairly blunt and direct stand up Jewish jokes.There are some intelligent and caring points made about generational differences, family, success and failure and life in general ... nothing completely new and which has not been covered in other films but put together in a very original and charming way by the very talented writer/ director Sam Hoffman. Jermaine Clement excels as the very dry down at heel playwright and is ably supported by a great supporting cast including veterans Gould and Neuwirth. Recommended.

This movie is a lovely tale about a man who finds new meaning at a low point in his life when he's forced to move in with his widowed father, who now lives in a retirement community. The casting is fantastic, it's full of "dad" jokes which people will either love or hate, and it has a lot of heart.

In intercutting his narrative with black and white enactments of grim jokes, writer/director Sam Hoffman pulls an interesting feature film out of the material of his first work, the online TV series Old Jews Telling Jokes. The film centres on familiar family tensions - sibling rivalry, dealing with widowhood, growing old, the abyss between father and son, the smothering between mother and daughter. But it's arguably most distinctive for its reflection on how comedy enables us to deal with life's harshness, if at the risk of intimacy. As any tale-telling wag may realize, jokes can either connect us to or isolate ourselves from, other people. Bob Kroll's penchant for funny stories connects him to his buddies. They sit around swapping one-liners. Now, the film makes no explicit reference to anything Jewish here. But it's still old Jews telling jokes. It's Jewish humour typically providing an enabling spirit in the face of tragedy. Bob's gag reflex has protected him from grieving his wife's death, but at the cost of burying his emotions. He stashed her belongings in a a storage closet and his emotions behind his barrage of Zimmerman jokes. That comic reflex also prevented his emotional closeness to son Nate. Brother Randy has succeeded in life by glibly adapting (i.e., plagiarizing) his father's real estate slogan. Nate is too serious and sensitive for that easy success. As the attack of digestion jokes encapsulates, Nate is blocked. Hoffman plays out the stories as film events, life scenes separated only by colour from the narrative "life" action. He's showing not just telling. That strategy gives comic storytelling the same heft and value as real life. Bob's stories are as central to the film's concerns as the plot is. The film is centrally about their interrelationship. So Nate's growth is from disdaining his father's comedic compulsion to making it work for him. He rescues the doomed Mikado production by interlacing the three girls' song with bawdy jokes. Once he realizes his father's emotional life continued behind the protective shell of jokes, Bob unblocks himself and rediscovers his creativity. Bob's first play, the big and promising success, was based on his mother's death. The new blocked play is a drama about the meaning of the Pompeian corpses found frozen dead after a volcanic eruption. Great metaphor. The lava has frozen the humanity in dead postures, life arrested in a still where motion used to be. Bob has trouble scripting his characters' reaction to that. He himself is frozen, blocked, buried, because he doesn't know how to confront such a tragedy. Then he realizes his father's way. Jokes. Only the energy of the comic burst frees him. It works. By converting the Gilbert and Sullivan to contemporary joking, Nate recovers his confidence, energy and spirit. He returns to finish his Pompey play. He has a new comfort with his father. He can stay independent of his dumped ex-wife and warmly introduce his young son to his new girlfriend. Life goes on. If you can find the right gags to lubricate it.

This was an amusing little story about family, complacency, dealing with loss (or not), moving on and redemption, couched in jokes and likable characters. It wasn't a must see film, but it wasn't bad either. I didn't feel like I wasted my time like with some movies, but I think the cast is what made it worth seeing. Jermaine clement is great as always, and it was interesting to see him with an American accent. Elliot Gould did a fine job as the dad who's constantly telling corny jokes, and it was also nice to see Annie Potts in the first thing I've seen her in since Ghostbusters. All in all, it was a decent film, with humour and some heart.