All the Los Angeles mornings sucked bellini-like into a camera lens. They go in numinous and come out denuded as old tape. “Death at a Funeral”—I like the conceit, the way an eclipse says, it’s dark, but if you could see you’d know that right now everything’s perfectly aligned.
In every bourgeois tale, humiliation is the stake. Martin Lawrence is in the house, as brother to Chris Rock, grieving their father whose funeral authorizes this whole madcap goatee-fest. The revelation is, the old man was on the down-low with Peter Dinklage. I like that being small makes you arch.
The twist: gay panic manifests as a delicious symptom: thirty full seconds of James Marsden’s sculpted bare white ass in the breeze. Literally, he hangs from a peak of the roof he’s climbed after his accidental ingestion of an unspecified psychedelic drug. Of course the Avatar lady is his girlfriend. Her brother rescues Marsden from the roof—in a perfect reversal of Hot Tub, a black guy almost blows a white guy. White guys are clowns, and all the professional clowns—Lawrence, Rock, Tracy Morgan—are dead serious. Well, not Morgan, whose face, along the way, is compared to Louis Armstrong’s…
“What a wonderful world” would be a line of bad poetry. But “I think to myself, what a wonderful world”—that’s brilliant, that’s the eulogy. That’s the self talking, melancholy thing we’ve got to trip or hide or die to give the slip.
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