FILM REVIEW OF ''DEATH AT A FUNERAL" (2010)

Everything that can possibly go wrong at a memorial service does go wrong in “Nurse Betty” director Neil LaBute’s witty but tasteless comedy “Death at a Funeral,” (**** OUT OF ****) starring Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Danny Glover, James Marsden, Tracy Morgan and Zoe Saldana. Ostensibly a faithful rehash of director Frank Oz’s British comedy with the same title, this predominately African-American remake—just three years after the original—qualifies as a side-splitting experience from fade-in to fade-out with our protagonists contending with one surprise after another to get their dearly departed dad and his mourners through the memorial. Incidentally, Peter Dinklage reprises his role from the original as “mysterious stranger.” British scenarist Dean Craig, who penned the original “Funeral,” banks on outrageous situations as well as Chris Rock’s commentary about these incidents to yield laughs galore. Essentially, Craig has relocated the action to Southern California. The primary characters consist of an oddball variety of believable, quirky, but sympathetic folks. Indeed, the cast acts virtually as an ensemble in some scenes. Chris Rock and Martin Lawrence complement each other without trying to outdo each other. James Marsden has a field day with his character-driven shenanigans, while Tracy Morgan draws some of the biggest laughs when he tangles with Danny Glover. The important thing here--as in most good comedies--is that the cast and the director don’t deliberately behave as if they were making a comedy. Nobody tries to be funny. The humor emerges in the collision between the characters and predicaments wholly beyond their control. Watching the reactions of both Rock and Lawrence constitutes half of the fun of “Death at a Funeral.”

Tax accountant Aaron Barnes (Chris Rock of “Good Hair”) is not a happy camper as “Death at a Funeral” unfolds. Imagine Aaron’s reaction when the funeral home delivers the wrong corpse to his house! When they open the casket for our protagonist, Aaron finds himself staring down at an Asian gentleman (Jamison Yang of “Surfer, Dude”) rather than his deceased father Edward (Bob Minor of "The Gingerbread Man"). Since Edward's death, Aaron’s overwrought mother, Cynthia (Loretta Divine of “Waiting to Exhale”), has been pestering both Aaron and his 37-year old wife Michelle (Regina Hall of “Scary Movie”) about giving her a grandchild to take her mind off her late husband. Moreover, Aaron finds himself struggling to compose a eulogy for his father. Tradition dictates that the oldest son must deliver it. Nevertheless, some people, such as Aaron's uncle Duncan (Ron Glass of TV’s “Barney Miller”), think Aaron’s younger brother, Ryan (Martin Lawrence of “Bad Boys”), should have drawn that assignment. As it turns out, Aaron is only nine months older than Ryan. You see, Aaron has written a book, but he has refused to let anybody read it. Meanwhile, Cynthia is so overjoyed when her celebrity son Ryan arrives that she knocks down Michelle in her haste to embrace her baby. Ryan is a bespectacled, mustached, smooth-talking womanizer. He is also a published writer so deep in debt that he doesn’t have a dime. When Aaron asks him to help out with the expensive funeral bill, Ryan refuses. Instead, Ryan sets out to seduce a sexy 18-year old girl, Martina (Regine Nehy of "Lakeview Terrace"), who sends his hormones into an uproar. The inevitable jokes about R. Kelly follow.

Meantime, Aaron's cousin Elaine (Zoe Saldana of “Avatar”) is attending the memorial service with her latest boyfriend Oscar ((James Marsden of “X-Men”), and Oscar is pretty nervous about running into Elaine’s father Duncan again. Oscar doesn’t think that Duncan approves of him. Elaine and Oscar cruise over to pick up her brother Jeffrey (Columbus Short of “Armored”), and Elaine sneaks a Valium. What Elaine doesn’t know is that Jeffrey has whipped up a hallucinogenic cocktail of mescaline and acid for his friends and stashed it in a bottle with a Valium prescription. Jeffrey doesn’t discover what Elaine has done until he notices Oscar’s bizarre behavior. At one point during the memorial service, Oscar is so confident that he has seen the coffin moving that he interrupts the preacher, Reverend Davis (Keith David of “Delta Farce”), in the middle of his sermon. A melee ensues as Aaron and company try to subdue Oscar. Predictably, the casket topples onto the floor and out rolls Edward’s inert corpse! If Oscar’s misguided shenanigans were not enough to contend with, a stranger named Frank (Peter Dinklage of “Elf”) corners Aaron with incriminating photos of Edward and he cuddling up to each other like the gay lovers that they were. Frank demands $30-thousand dollars or he will show the photos to Cynthia.

Elaine’s ex-boyfriend Derek (Luke Wilson of “Home Fries”) and long-time family friend Norman (Tracy Morgan of “Cop Out”) have to make a detour at a nursing home to collect cantankerous Uncle Russell (Danny Glover of “Lethal Weapon”) and bring him with them. The wheel chair bound Uncle Russell doesn’t give Norman a moment’s peace. Derek is hoping that he can patch things up with Elaine, and he does his best to change her mind about him. On the other hand, everything that Norman does for Uncle Russell draws criticism from the oldster. Things get really out of hand when Norman has to assist Uncle Russell to the toilet and Norman’s hand gets trapped under Uncle Russell. Mind you, this is only the set-up for even more hilarity that follows.

Between the wrongly delivered corpse and Uncle Russell’s antics, “Death at a Funeral” has enough high-jinks to keep you chuckling out loud. Dull moments are few and far between, and this superficial but funny Paramount Pictures gagfest never loses track with its objective: making us laugh. The refreshing thing about “Death at a Funeral” is how LaBute confines the most action to the family household without inducing a sense of claustrophobia. Anybody who enjoys Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, and Tracy Morgan will have a rollicking good time at this contagiously funny, but dark comedy about mortality and the secrets that death exposes about an individual.

MOVIE REVIEW OF ''THE BIG SLEEP" (1946)

Howard Hawks ranks as one of the least pretentious Hollywood filmmakers. In Todd McCarthy’s seminal biography, “Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood,” Hawks summed up his philosophy about messages into his movies. “I never made a statement. Our job is to make entertainment. I don’t give a God damn about taking sides.” First and foremost, Hawks considered himself a storyteller, and he let nothing come between the story and him. Second, actors and actress either adhered to Hawks’ dictates or he wrote them out of scenes, sometimes movie entirely, and gave their action to others. Not surprisingly, when Hawks hired William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman to adapt mystery novelist Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep,” he told them, “Don’t monkey with the book—just make a script out of it. The writing is too good.”

Between 1944 and 1947, Chandler’s shabby but chivalrous private eye Philip Marlowe appeared in four films, including “Murder, My Sweet” (1944) with Dick Powell, “The Big Sleep” (1946), “The Lady in the Lake” (1947) with Robert Montgomery, and “The Brasher Doubloon” (1947) with George Montgomery. During this period, Hollywood filmmakers made what French critics later called ‘film noir’ movies. Essentially, ‘film noir’ movies occurred at night either indoors or outdoors. The gritty black & white photography stressed gutter realism, while the expressionistic lighting forged haunting shadows with a fatalistic flavor. Urban thrillers more than detective mysteries bore the marks of this movement. Unsavory male heroes and the fallen women that trapped them in a web of intrigue populated these films. The atrocities of World War II and Nazi persecution of the Jews destroyed the innocence of American isolationism and created more mature movies where characters suffered from flaws. Although “The Big Sleep” fits into this oeuvre, Hawks shunned such artificial narrative gimmicks.

In “The Big Sleep,” Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) works for $25 a day and expenses. He uses his wits and fists to relieve the wealthy but crippled General Sternwood (Charles Waldron of “The Real Glory”) of an extortionist. Sternwood has two beautiful but pampered daughters: a divorcee, Vivian Sternwood Rutledge (Lauren Bacall of “To Have and Have Not”), and a drug addict Carmen Sternwood (Martha Vickers of “Marine Raiders”). An amusing scene occurs early on when Carmen tries to sit in Marlowe’s lap while he is standing up. Later, when Marlowe visited General Sternwood, he has to weather the hot house heat that enables the decrepit General to survive. The General explains that he has to indulge in his vices by proxy. In other words, he sits and watches Marlowe as our hero drinks and smokes.

Arthur Gwynn Geiger (Theodore Von Eltz) demands $5-thousand dollars from the General for a sheaf of gambling debts that bear Carmen’s signature. No sooner has Marlowe gotten onto the case than an assailant shoots and kills Geiger. Marlowe enters Geiger’s house moments after the murder and finds Carmen sitting in a nearby chair drugged out of her mind. He finds a concealed camera but the film has been removed. Marlowe discovers a black book of addresses and hustles Carmen back home. Marlowe’s former boss, Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls (Regis Toomey of “Spellbound”) with the District Attorney's Office, pays him visits at home while Marlowe is examining the black book. Bernie informs him that a Sternwood limo has just been pulled out of the ocean with Owen Taylor, the Sternwood’s chauffeur, dead behind the wheel. Ohls wants information. Marlowe explains the blackmail angle and later divulges what happened to Geiger, but he leaves Carmen’s part out of the murder. Marlowe runs into a cagey gambler, Eddie Mars (John Ridgely of “Air Force”), who is flanked by a couple of goons, while he investigates the death of Geiger. As it turns out, Vivian and Mars are connected to each other. B-movie cowboy hero Bob Steele makes an impressive cameo as murderous gunsel Lash Canino and has a shoot-out with Bogart at the end of the movie.

“The Big Sleep” qualifies as one of the most convoluted murder mysteries to emerge from Hollywood. Hawks and Bogart argued over the identity of who killed the Sternwood chauffeur. They called up Chandler, since he wrote the novel, but he could not conjure up a plausible answer to their question. “I don’t know,” Chandler told them. Eventually, Hawks and Faulkner contrived a solution. The solution to Taylor’s murder, however, remained hidden until 1995 when the original version of “The Big Sleep” was made available to the public. Initially, Warner Brothers showed the original to American troops overseas, but Jack L. Warner shelved the movie until after the war so the studio could release its other war-themed movies before the Axis surrendered.

Meanwhile, after winning the critics’ approval in “To Have and Have Not,” Bacall had received abrasive reviews for her performance in “Confidential Agent” (1945), and her agent, a worried Charles Feldman, pleaded with Warner reshoot several scenes and invent new ones to showcase the insolence of Bacall’s character. When Warner Brothers released “The Big Sleep” in 1946, Hawks had jettisoned the expository Taylor murder solution scene and added other scenes that would have been more appropriate in one of his screwball comedies. One of the scenes that they added contained the risqué horse racing scene that serves as a veiled commentary about sexual relations. Somehow the censors at the Production Code Administration neither complained nor demanded that Warner Brothers delete this dialogue. Ultimately, Marlowe solves the case, eliminates the villains, and woos Vivian, but the plot makes very little sense, which may account for the film’s following. McCarthy quoted Hawks about the director’s own perplexity: “I can’t follow the story. I saw some of it on television the other night, and I’d listen to some of the things he’d talk about and it had me thoroughly confused because I hadn’t seen it in twenty years.”

“The Big Sleep” is really a classic. The Warners Home Video contains both the 1945 pre-release version and the 1946 theatrical version.

REVIEW OF ''THE BIG HEAT'' (1953)

Tennessee Democratic Senator Carey Estes Kefauver became synonymous with the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce that convened during 1950. The Kefauver hearings took place in 14 cities, and 600 witnesses testified as a part of them. Prominent gangland figures, among them Willie Moretti, Joe Adonis, and Frank Costello, appeared before the committee. Not only did these televised hearings wreck some political careers but also the hearings advanced others, such as Everett Dirksen, while the hearings publicized for the first time the idea of a criminal syndicate called 'the Mafia.' The Kefauver hearings exerted considerable influence on Hollywood, too. Revelations of organized crime’s pervasive corruption of America furnished filmmakers with fresh plots. The hearings forged an entire subgenre of crime movies about Mafia corruption in city hall, including “The Enforcer” (1951) with Kefauver appearing in a forward, “The Mob” (1951), “Kansas City Confidential” (1952), “Captive City” (1952), and “Hoodlum Empire” (1952). Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat” (1953) concerned Mafia domination of city government and escalated the levels of brutality and violence. Afterward, movies like "Rogue Cop" (1954) about a corrupt cop (Robert Taylor) would follow in the wake of "The Big Heat."

As a tough-talking, two-fisted, homicide police sergeant bent on revenge, Glenn Ford's Sergeant David Bannion in Fritz Lang's superlative thriller "The Big Heat" served as a kind of prototype for Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" character. This seminal saga about police corruption and metropolitan crime syndicates in the fictional town of Kenport appears a little dated by today's standards with its obvious studio sets and Charles Lang's crisp black and white cinematography, but it still packs a wallop. "Mystery Street" scenarist Sidney Boehm based his screenplay on William P. McGivern's Saturday Evening Post serial. Before veteran cop Tom Duncan commits suicide, he leaves a written record of his corrupt dealings with big-time hoodlum Mike Lagana (an urbane Alexander Scourby of "Seven Thieves") for the district attorney. Duncan's greedy wife wants the payoffs to continue, however, so she blackmails Lagana for $500 a week. Sergeant Dave Bannion finds himself assigned to the case. "When a cop kills himself, they want a full report," he says to a fellow policeman at the scene of the suicide. Bannion generates a lot of hostility in getting that "full report" not only among the paranoid criminal figures but also with his superiors some of whom may or may not be on the take.

Everything comes to a head one evening when Bannion and his pretty wife Katie (Marlon's older sister Jocelyn Brando of "Ten Wanted Men") are bound for a movie. Katie commandeers their car while Dave tells their young daughter Joyce (Linda Bennett of "Creature with the Atomic Brain") a bedtime story. She is going to drive off to pick up the babysitter. Unfortunately, Katie never gets out of their driveway because several sticks of dynamite attached to the ignition explode and kill her when she starts the car. Of course, the criminals expected Dave to die in the explosion. Dave survives and sends his daughter off to live with some friends while he starts smashing heads. Mike Lagana isn't any too happy about this error. Meanwhile, Dave's superiors turn up the heat on him to cool off, but he refuses to and quits the force to take care of business. Along the way, he crosses paths with a dame, Debby Marsh (Oscar winner Gloria Grahame of "The Bad and the Beautiful"), and they chat in his motel room. Word reaches Debby's thuggish boyfriend, Vince Stone (up and coming Lee Marvin of "The Dirty Dozen") and he takes his rage out on his girl by splashing her face with scalding coffee. Earlier, Stone burned a bar girl, Doris (Carolyn Jones of TV's "The Addams Family"), with his cigarette and attracted Dave's interest.

Later, Dave has harsh words with Lagana, and our hero is forced to leave the force to complete his investigation. Dave and Debby become unlikely friends, and he confides in Debby that everything will blow up in Lagana's face if the wife of the dead cop were to release his death note. Debby visits Bertha Duncan (Jeanette Nolan of "Tribute to a Bad Man") and she has an interesting dialogue exchange with her about being 'sisters in mink' before she guns her down in cold blood as a favor to Dave. Actually, Dave turns into a rogue himself and he isn't much different from the scum that he wants to put away for the murder of his innocent, defenseless wife. Women fare horribly in "The Big Heat." Indeed, all of the women involved in the plot, with the exception of Doris, wind up dead by fade-out. . Altogether, “The Big Heat” resembles a film noir thriller, but Lang and Boehm violate one of its chief tenets. Instead of women destroying men, the opposite occurs. Bannion, who is warned by a colleague about his “hate binge,” winds up destroying four women, including his wife, in his crusade for justice.

Lang directs "The Big Heat" without any pretensions, and it is better for this treatment. He never wears out his welcome at 90 crisp, no-nonsense minutes. The coffee burning incident happens off camera. We see Marvin grab a boiling pot of coffee and Graham screams. Later, Graham returns the favor, but this time the action occurs in a semi-darkened room and we see liquid flying across a room like a serpent lashing out. The only complaint of mine is that we don't visually see Lagana suffer as a result of Bannion's investigation. Although Bannion has banished chaos and restored order by the last scene when his new superiors reinstate him, the cost has been catastrophic. Indeed, in Lang’s sadistic mise-en-scene, the hero must wipe out virtually everything—sometimes even his loved one—before peace can be regained.

Representative of several film reviews that appeared during the initial showings of "The Big Heat" is Robert Kass' review in "Catholic World: "The present vogue for sadism and violence reaches some kind of apex in "The Big Heat," a truly gruesome crime thriller in which a detective-sergeant singlehandedly battles corruption in city government controlled by a ruthless racketeer." Later, Kass adds for effect: "I wonder that someone hasn't protested about the frightening display of viciousness which must have an even greater impact on young minds. Apparently, though, sadism is not considered on a par with sex."