Movie Crush Monday:Little C and Death at a Funeral

Hello Readers,
Last week CT told you about one of our favorite modern fairy tales. And I got excited because sometimes CT likes to pick movies that strand me in the middle of nowhere and I'm forced to use some pretty obscure connections to get to my next Movie Crush. But this time she handed me a string of A-List actors and the choice was slightly easier. So after careful deliberation I followed Peter Dinklage from Penelope to my favorite British comedy.

Death at a Funeral (2007)

The movie is about a big family that has come together for a funeral only to have everything go disastrously wrong. The dead man's secret lover (played by Dinklage) shows up, one family member accidentally drugs another, there's an epic sibling rivalry. Basically it's every bad family get together you've ever had thrown into an hour and a half but way funnier because IT'S SOMEONE ELSE'S FAMILY! Most of the time movies about big families with lots of drama send me huddling in a corner having 'nam style flashbacks about pictionary games and present exchanges of past years. But somehow, the circumstances are so over the top and the performances so perfectly balanced that I'm neither stressed nor traumatized. 

It's hard to say what my favorite thing about this movie is. Is it the sympathy I feel for the character of Jane as her mother in law remains perfectly icy and bitchy through all attempts to console her? Is it the sibling rivalry between Daniel and his trainwreck brother Robert? Or cranky Uncle Alfie? No. It's Alan Tudyk, playing the accidentally hallucinating boyfriend who spends most of his time locked in the bathroom, watching his hand move. 

Perfection. 

As we head into the season of family togetherness, we often need small, subtle reminders that our family is not as crazy as it seems. That at the end of the day, though our family is usually tailor made to drive us up the goddamn wall, there are families out there that are WAAAAY worse than us. 

Happy watching,

Little C