CONFETTI
A bright and breezy British comedy which is frequently very amusing, Confetti borrows from the mockumentary style developed by Christopher Guest (Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman), but actually manages to be a lot funnier than his last effort A Mighty Wind. It also benefits from using a cast largely familiar from recent TV comedies, who all make an impressive leap on to the big screen.
Writer/director Debbie Isitt shows great confidence in a genre that could so easily provide plenty of pitfalls. This is sharp, well-observed and infectious stuff which surprisingly pulls at the heartstrings and deserves to be a commercial success.
It's a relatively simple plot that is explained very quickly at the beginning: the owner of Confetti magazine (an obnoxious Jimmy Carr) decides on a competition to find the Most Original Wedding of the Year. He and his editor (Felicity Montagu, best known as Alan Partridge's long-suffering assistant Lynn) choose the three couples who will contest the final and the rest of the film charts their progress as they attempt to win their dream marriage.
Couple one (Martin Freeman and Jessica Stevenson) are intent on an old-fashioned musical wedding, despite the fact that neither of them show much prowess in that department. Couple two (Stephen Mangan and Meredith Macneill) are competitive tennis freaks who insist on a centre court wedding (complete with Cliff Richard lookalike). Finally, Robert Webb and Olivia Colman (two of the stars of the excellent Peep Show) play a pair of naturists, and bravely wander around for ninety minutes in the buff.
Most of the preparations for the weddings prove to be very funny, but best of all are the two wedding organisers Heron and Hough (Vincent Franklin and Jason Watkins). A camp postmodern Gilbert and George, they are the comedic highlight of the affair and hold it all together, without diminishing the impact of the main three couples.
Confetti won't change the world, and doesn't even have a big message to make. It sets out to entertain, and more than does so. It looks like it was a lot of fun to make, and it's certainly a lot of fun to watch.
Paul Hurley
-(talktalk.co.uk)
If you're still bemoaning the end of The Office there's salvation to be found in this mirthful mockumentary that's a cross between Four Weddings and Best In Show, via Wernham Hogg. Focusing on a competition set up by wedding mag Confetti to find the most original nuptials, we follow three couples as they try to organise their big day. There's the tennis-mad, competitive duo (Stephen Mangan and Meredith MacNeill) who want a Wimbledon affair, the sweet naturists (Peep Show's Olivia Colman and Robert Webb) yearning for a nude ceremony and the musicals fans (Martin Freeman and Spaced star Jessica Stevenson) who dream of a Fred and Ginger extravaganza. Largely improvised, Confetti relies heavily on the considerable talents of its Brit TV stars, whose inventiveness make for a beguiling mixture of moving moments, sniggers and excruciating silences.
-(totalfilm.com)
Plot
Bridal magazine Confetti offers a luxury home for the couple with the most original wedding of the year. The finalists — whose nuptial themes are a Broadway musical, a tennis match and a nudist rite — find that pre-marital jitters and family tensions are exacerbated by competitive pressures.
Review
Here’s a cute, silly affair that may be just the ticket if you are in need of visual aid to deter a crazed intended from plotting wedding overkill. A hundred-odd minutes of the ludicrous matrimonial mania on show here makes a quick, quiet little registry office ceremony look like the height of taste and class.
Confetti owes most of its laughs (the tone here suggests a conscious effort to progress from the ‘niceness’ of Working Title’s genre dominance) to a seasoned company of ‘cringe comedians’ that enfolds stand-ups and British TV comedy sparks, many of them familiar from Peep Show, The Office, Spaced, Alan Partridge, Green Wing et al, as well as improvisational veteran Alison Steadman in its ensemble.
And who doesn’t get a kick out of a kooky mockumentary? But ever since This Is Spinal Tap nailed the rock documentary, the bar has been mighty high for faux fly-on-the-wall parody, with Christopher Guest still pre-eminent in the field. Whereas Guest’s documentary-like structures and improvs foster sharp but fundamentally affectionate observations of real human behaviour, however absurdly extreme, director Debbie ‘Nasty Neighbours’ Isitt is having more of a satirical crack at the unreality of TV-type ‘reality’ — from the surreal Bridezilla series on down.
The trigger is conniving publishing folk (Jimmy Carr, Felicity Montagu) who need a stunt to boost their bridal-style mag, and duly interview a string of ridiculous couples. The three pliant pairs they settle on are pretty lame themselves. Most believable are couple number one, Matt and Sam (Martin Freeman and Jessica Stevenson). These two are sweeties who love musicals and want to play Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on their big day — if they can nudge mother-of-the-bride Steadman and Sam’s pushy cruise entertainer sister out of the spotlight for once.
Couple number two, jealous, controlling Josef and put-upon Isabelle (Stephen Mangan and Meredith MacNeill), are highly-strung, aggressive tennis enthusiasts whose ceremony on a mocked-up court with ball boy attendants and an umpire celebrant involves rather a lot of puns about balls. Mangan shines as the most unpleasant contender and delivers the best petulant outbursts: “Please get it into your thick head how much I respect you!”
Couple number three, Michael and Joanna (Robert Webb and Olivia Colman, who deserve some kind of a prize for letting it all hang out with such seeming nonchalance), are dippy naturists whose hopes for a dignified and spiritual experience au naturel seem doomed the minute Confetti’s editor realises that nudes on the cover sell mags of the upper-rack variety, but not one pushing satin Cinderella gowns and out-of-control consumerism.
Upstaging all of them are the squealing, wildly enthusiastic wedding planners, Gregory and Archie (Jason Watkins and Vincent Franklin), a dandy duo who appear to have been styled sartorially on eccentric artists Gilbert and George but as characters are very much in the queenie panto tradition of the two camp dudes that Martin Short and B. D. Wong played in the Steve Martin Father Of The Bride. That they are fairly hilarious is probably something we should be heartily ashamed of, since swishy cinematic wedding planners/interior decorators/choreographers are as stereotypical as the fey hamsters in that bizarro credit card advert. But hey, satire and sensitivity, not a good match.
The expected highlight — the actual weddings, performed one after another before judges — falls a little short since the clearly modest budget delivers something closer to a school revue than parodic spectacle. It also dawdles long enough to set you wondering about details, like, “Why don’t the tennis players have any friends?” and, “How is it that when performing her vows, Sam suddenly has a pair of pipes like Ruthie Henshall when she was previously tone deaf?” We’d argue that their efforts would be funnier if the singing and dancing were more toe-curling — like Round One of X Factor auditions. In this respect, Confetti doesn’t quite manage to keep up the courage of its convictions.
Apparently, having established the concept and situations, Isitt had the cast improvise all the dialogue; now we know why Mike Leigh improvises before shooting but has a script down cold when the cameras actually roll. The actors riffing here are funny up to a point; their body language and expressions are more eloquent than the dialogue. A wordsmith honing the better ideas would have trimmed the flab, and since Isitt is a playwright one would have hoped for tighter content, more pointed and more consistent in tone. Still, it’s cheerfully daft enough to be good fun, and even if you won’t be quoting it the next day, it’ll keep you laughing from start to finish.
Verdict
he performances of the chiefly Brit-com cast remain spot-on, but for nails-on-blackboard brilliance, top honours go to Alison Steadman; best pain in the arse mother-in-law ever.
-(empireonline.com)
BORAT
Sacha Baron Cohen looks set to have an even bigger success with his second film than he did with Ali G Indahouse. Borat (full title: Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) is the year's funniest film. Most viewers are probably going to want to watch it at least twice, as their laughter the first time around is likely to obscure much of the soundtrack.
From the opening scenes which show us Borat's supposed village in Kazakhstan (highlights include his sister, the country's fourth-best prostitute) to his trip across the Atlantic with his ursine producer Bagatov (Ken Davitian) in order to make a 'reporting' about the United States, the movie rarely fails to be anything less than spectacularly hysterical.
Baron Cohen takes a major swipe at the US in every scene and it's astonishing that he comes out alive. His initial attempts to make friends in a subway train are met with hostility bordering on physical aggression (Borat being Borat, he decides to calm the situation by releasing his pet cockerel in the carriage). He naively asks a group of street youths for fashion advice, attempts a bizarre version of the Star Spangled Banner in front of a rodeo crowd who boo him off the stage, and manages to convince a bunch of fervent evangelists that he is not only saved but speaking in tongues.
Everywhere he goes, calamity follows, not least if his bedraggled producer is in tow: their naked wrestling match proving to be the film's comic highlight. Even Pamela Anderson gets in on the act as the object of his cross-country affections.
Right wing evangelical Americans will be mortified and outraged: exactly the response Baron Cohen is looking for (and deserves). One can only hope that the more tolerant sections of the biggest power on earth may just realize that although most of this is largely exaggerated, their country faces becoming the butt of the rest of the world's jokes.
The film's slim running time, not usually a great sign, is also one of its strengths: it's hard to laugh non-stop for ninety minutes. With regular Curb Your Enthusiasm director Larry Charles at the helm it's not only a masterpiece of character comedy, but of comic timing.
Paul Hurley
-(talktalk.co.uk)
Plot
Kazakhstani TV presenter Borat Sagdiyev is commissioned to travel to New York to learn about American culture. While there he goes rogue, setting off for LA to follow his dream of making nice sexytime with Pamela Anderson…
Review
If you were ever partial to a bit of Ali G, you can be forgiven any trepidation you may feel towards Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest small-to-big-screen translation. With his juvenile observations and clueless gangsta-isms, Ali G was an amusing enough creation, but what made him work satirically was seeing him interact with real people. It wasn’t so much that he was a ludicrous ‘yoof’ TV presenter, but that his unsuspecting interviewees thought he was a ‘yoof’ TV presenter. So when Cohen took him out of that context and placed him in his own fictional world, the result wasn’t quite the comedy riot it could have been. You might have slapped an ASBO on it for indecent exposure, but it was certainly no riot…
With the Borat movie, Cohen’s learned his lesson. Like Ali G, Borat — who made his debut on Da Ali G Show, instantly becoming the funniest thing on it — works by being thrown in front of real people who, somehow, think he’s for real. So Cohen’s simply taken the format of the Borat sketches on the show and expanded them into episodes on a sorta-mockumentary East-to-West Coast road trip.
Perhaps it’s easy for us to say this, being in on the joke from the start, but Borat’s such an inherently funny character, it’s hard to believe that anyone could think he’s bona fide. Still, he is constructed with astounding precision. Clad in cheap grey suit, with grey tie and two-tone grey striped shirt, he walks in awkward little steps, his body language stuttering uncomfortable deference as an apologetic smile beams out from beneath his heavy ’tache. The accent drawls and lilts erratically, the broken English dribbling out plenty of catchphrases (“Jagshemash,” “naiiiice”, “haigh faive!”) and some gobsmackingly offensive comments.
Because, yes, as amiable as Borat is, he’s also sexist, deeply anti-Semitic and has an irrational hatred of gypsies. The film doesn’t exactly ease you into this gently: early on we see a depiction of his village’s traditional ‘Running Of The Jew’, in which we witness children playfully stamping on a huge egg laid by a “she-Jew”, encouraged by their elders to smash it before it hatches. To know that Cohen himself is Jewish may not, for some, be enough to excuse such outrageous humour, but this is all part of the set-up: the outrageousness isn’t so much in Borat’s prejudices, but in how those prejudices go unchallenged by his American interviewees.
Example: Borat walks into a gun shop. “Which gun is best for killing Jew?” he asks. The salesman doesn’t bat an eyelid. “That’d be a 9mm or .38,” comes the unhesitant reply. Cohen has impressively scant regard for his own well-being, but he’s sharp enough to know when to keep Borat schtum, too; in one instance he lets an ageing Texan cowboy hang himself with his own lariat, nodding silently as the objectionable old bigot lectures Borat on how he should shave off his moustache because it makes him look like a Muslim. (Borat, it should be noted, isn’t actually a Muslim; “In Kazakhstan, we worship hawk,” he solemnly tells the rodeo guy). Such ignorance provides very rich fuel for Cohen, and it keeps the comedy powerful — both in the strength of the laughs and the shock of the disbelief — throughout.
This isn’t just a few smirks and chuckles. Instead, it’s rib-crackingly, face-hurtingly, endorphin-flushingly hilarious. Empire laughed so hard we had a full-blown asthma attack. They should slap a health warning on this movie. And, all the while, you’re getting a very disturbing insight into the casual prejudices of the average American (although we recognise that Cohen was hardly going to include footage of those people who lambasted Borat for his views, or rumbled the ruse).
It’s tough to fault. One or two of the ‘sketches’ are admittedly reworks of wind-ups Cohen performed as Borat for Da Ali G Show here in the UK, while some of his interviews do feel either a tad clipped or too crowbarred into the coast-to-coast format. But you can’t ignore the force or the regularity of those laughs. This is Sacha Baron Cohen’s finest hour, a cult comedy that will likely endure and mature like an Airplane! or a This Is Spinal Tap. Just don’t go along if you’re easily offended…
Verdict
Absurd, outrageous, gross, disturbing, insightful, and so funny it’ll burst half the blood vessels in your face.
-(empireonline.com)
DROP DEAD GORGEOUS
When boiled down to that old idea of high concept, Drop Dead Gorgeous is Happiness meets There's Something About Mary - - a slightly uneasy blend of indie irony and adolescent shock comedy.
And bizarrely, it works as a deliciously mean-spirited satire that sinks its teeth into the soft underbelly of Middle America. But the flag-waving, God-fearing patriotism of the pageant industry is an easy target, so the movie also plays the gross-out card, gaining mileage from a series of horribly graphic visual gags.
It's hard to think of a more self-consciously unpleasant flick since veteran sicko John Waters was at his most outrageous. Anorexics, amputees, burn victims, Jesus and, most of all, the good ol' US of A fall prey to the less than gentle attentions of writer Lona Williams, who was herself a Minnesota pageant queen. But any potential offence is disarmed (well, some of it) by the use of the documentary crew to tell the story. As a result, crude shock tactics become self-referential parody.
Despite all this, Drop Dead Gorgeous could well earn prime chick-flick status. Hollywood `laws' tell us that girls like to watch dewy, hormonal tear-jerkers, preferably with a baby thrown in somewhere. Not so. The kind of pics women really enjoy have nasty, bitchy cat-fights with sick jokes at the expense of... Well, everything really. And beauty queens coming to horrible and violent ends rates highly.
The cast is almost entirely female; the men are either perverts, retards, creeps or corpses. Both Dunst and Richards are excellent as the duelling teen princesses, but their mothers grab most of the best lines. Alley is in her element as the mendacious pageant co-ordinator with ambitions for her daughter and Barkin is equally entertaining as the beer-swilling, trailer-dwelling Annette Atkins, with an admirable sidekick in the form of wise-cracking, man-hungry Loretta (Janney).
The fast-paced narrative climaxes, naturally, with the talent competition, boasting a hugely funny song-and- dance routine from Richards. The only problem is that the competition happens a good 30 minutes before the end of the movie, and what follows is the only real indication that neither writer nor director have any previous experience in feature films.
It's not that the denouement is disastrous, as the script is still extremely funny; rather that the storyline ends up losing its way in an effort to be too many things to too many people. Consequently, Drop Dead Gorgeous isn't entirely successful all of the time. That aside, however, it is a blissfully malicious attack on everything cloying and sentimental.
Verdict:
At times it is painfully funny; occasionally it's just painful. But mostly, Drop Dead Gorgeous is a thoroughly enjoyable movie about the lengths to which a nice Lutheran girl will go in her quest for beauty, fame and the American dream.
-(totalfilm.com)
In the guise of sending up beauty pageants (now there's a new one!) ''Drop Dead Gorgeous'' manages to load up on stereotypes, sneer smugly at Minnesota, stage a scene in which beauty contestants vomit en masse and make its audience wince through what may be a record number of miserably unfunny jokes. Under these circumstances, putting the words ''drop dead'' in the title really is tempting fate.
Pausing briefly in theaters before it sends home video enthusiasts reaching for the rewind button, this would-be comedy takes the form of a bogus documentary, one that seems patently fake even by bogus documentary standards. It purports to look behind the scenes at a small-town beauty pageant that is run by a cosmetics company. With Kirstie Alley bulldozing her way through the role of a pushy pageant organizer, the film trots out a series of contestants who have each been allotted precisely one personality trait.
There is a nyphomaniac. There's somebody threatening to sing and dance to ''New York, New York.'' There are smiling, dimpled Kirsten Dunst as the nice girl from a trailer park and exotic, sultry Denise Richards as the spoiled rich girl who looks like a shoo-in. (After all, the pageant organizer is her mother.) These actresses are conspicuously more appealing than their roles. The same might be said for Ellen Barkin, who plays Ms. Dunst's boozy mother, if she didn't sink so enthusiastically to the lame level of these proceedings. She is last seen here opening a beer can with a hook. As her best friend, Allison Janney is one of the few players in the film to emerge reasonably unscathed.
With highlights including a masturbating pageant judge who is nicknamed ''the retard'' and a scene making fun of not one but two maimed characters in wheelchairs, ''Drop Dead Gorgeous'' need not fear accusations of being politically correct. Nor need it worry about being accused of undue wit, what with lines like: ''The family's steamin' like a cow pat in July.'' The screenplay is by Lona Williams, who was once a beauty contestant herself and clearly knows how they feel about Diane Sawyer. As directed by Michael Patrick Jann of various commercials and the MTV comedy ''The State,'' the film seems to have been a shade or two funnier on the page than it is limping across the screen.
One of the first directors to fully realize the possibilities of the mock-documentary was Rob Reiner in the classic This Is Spinal Tap. Since then, audiences have had an onslaught of variations on the form, including the decent Drop Dead Gorgeous. This reckless little film was brought forth from the sarcastic pen of Lona Williams, who previously had written and produced for The Drew Carey Show. Williams' attention to detail should come as no surprise: she had been first runner-up in the national Junior Miss competition. Her over-the-top satire may be too much for some audience members -- some of the jokes seem to be beaten to death. But Kirsten Dunst is convincing as golden girl Amber Atkins, strutting around her trailer park practicing her talent routines, and Denise_Richards adds a quiet honesty to the role of Becky Leeman. In fact, these two actresses take the script and run with it, making it their own. It's ultimately a pretty good laugh. Laura Abraham, All Movie Guide
-(starpulse.com)
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