Schmuck who’s coming to dinner

Film review

Dinner for Schmucks
DIRECTED BY: Jay Roach
STARRING: Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, Bruce Greenwood, Zach Galifianakis
CERT: 12A

Here’s a bunch of people who know how to be funny. Paul Rudd and Steve Carell are fine comic actors, Zach Galifianakis can make you laugh without saying a word and director Jay Roach has done the Austin Powers series, Meet The Parents and helped Mr Baron Cohen bring Borat to the big screen.
So why isn’t Dinner For Schmucks a riot of laughs? Or more to the point, why do I even care anymore?
Rudd is Tim Conrad, an ambitious chap whose life’s goal is to get himself promoted to the office in the corner. He gets the chance of a leg up when his boss (Greenwood) invites him to join him and his millionaire pals for their exclusive annual dinner party, where everyone invites a guest who would not be the sharpest spoon in the drawer – someone for the rich boys to make fun of. Whoever brings the dumbest guest is the winner.
It just so happens Tim has just gotten accidentally acquainted with Barry Speck (Carell), an eternally happy fellow and gold medal eccentric who, among other delights, dresses dead mice in fancy costumes and positions them with loving creativity in doll houses.
Barry is clearly the man to bring to dinner, the only snag being Tim’s fiancé, Julie (Stephanie Szostak), who’s not happy that the party is clashing with their big date, or that Tim is taking advantage of the harmless Barry.
Dinner For Schmucks is not without some decent laughs, most of them arriving when dinner finally rolls around and we get to meet the other guests, some of them almost as subtle as Barry the social bulldozer.
But it should have been a lot funnier than it is. If writers David Guion and Michael Handelman had provided sharper comedy, director Roach would not have had to resort to slapstick and the kind of Big Lesson ending that could have come straight from Sesame Street.
Carell brings his usual frantic energy to the role and most of the cast are up for the laugh but they don’t really get the chance to let loose (some Christopher Guest-style improv could have been a hoot) and poor Paul Rudd gets stranded in straight man limbo with hardly a good line to his name.
Overall, a reasonable distraction at best.

The Last Exorcism
DIRECTED BY: Daniel Stamm
STARRING: Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Louis Herthum, Iris Bahr
CERT: 15A

As horror fans wait for the Paranormal Activity sequel and another dose of shaky camera spooks, here’s a decent chiller to keep you entertained and dizzy, it’s a story of demon possession that works despite a weak final quarter and the fact that it’s clearly looking over the shoulder of an old hag from Blair.
I wouldn’t be a big fan of this faux documentary carry-on and all that running around with hand-held cameras. It’s getting tiresome now and in any case, if I want to get nauseated, I can do it for free by watching our home videos.
But where Blair Witch and the godawful Cloverfield fell down, The Last Exorcism scores well by establishing strong characters and employing good actors to play them. It makes the assault on the eyes almost bearable and, for a nice change, you find you’re not cheering on the boogeyman to hurry up and slaughter some bunch of whiney, whimpering idiots.
Colin Marcus (Fabian) is an evangelical preacher, a charming and charismatic personality who’s made a nice living by conning the faithful, a professional phoney exorcist who was trained in the art of the pulpit from the age of 10 by his father.
Now’s he’s troubled by it all and wants to come clean, so he brings along a documentary crew to film what will be his last exorcism, a deliberate exposé of his lucrative fraud.
Marcus has been requested to come to a remote farm in Louisiana, where devout believer Louis Sweetzer (Herthum) wants him to cast demons out of his daughter Nell (Ashley Bell), who’s taken to scrawling diabolical drawings about the place, while simultaneously developing a new talent for contortionism and an appetite for raw livestock.
A bit of a challenge for a man who makes it up as he goes along.
Director Daniel Stamm builds his story nicely and takes the time to create palpable fear, suspicion and tension among the crew and the staunchly traditional family, concerning what’s really going on with the poor girl crawling the walls played well by the apparently multi-double-jointed Ashley Bell.
Unfortunately, it all collapses badly at the close and it does throw up the odd distracting niggle like the fact that no one in this family sounds like a rural Southerner and if the documentary cameraman is really as scared as he says, why didn’t the eejit just run away?
Who knows these things?
Still, for much of its running time, The Last Exorcism is a fine addition to the demon canon, anchored by Patrick Fabian’s strong central performance.
If only someone would have told them that this wild shaky camera thing is already old.