Who's in It: Matthew MacFadyen, Keeley Hawes, Andy Nyman, Ewen Bremner, Alan Tudyk, Jane Asher, Rupert Graves, Peter Dinklage
The Basics: At a wacky British funeral, a large group of people gather and create farcical havoc. They fight and fall down and blackmail each other, tie up unwelcome guests, take drugs and get naked. Sounds funny, right? Well, it almost sort of works out that way in the end, but it takes a long time for all the labor-intensive mechanics to pay off. So I've decided that while I'm all for wacky British funerals, I'd like it better if the people responsible for planning such an event took better care to make sure that the wackiness was start-to-finish hilarious.
What's the Deal? This movie is from Frank Oz. That's right, Miss Piggy and Yoda co-directed this film. And he's directed some other funny ones along the way (The Muppets Take Manhattan, for example), as well as some torture-rack-style unfunny ones, too (The Stepford Wives). So I guess we should all be grateful it's slightly more like the former than the latter. But still, you should only shift in your seat a lot at a real funeral, not a fake comedic one.
Who Makes It Worth Seeing: Tudyk (Serenity; Knocked Up) as the accidentally high person who gets naked and stays that way for most of the movie. Also, Dinklage continues to make sure that even when his lack of height is one of the sources of humor in a movie, the joke's not actually on him.
Butts, Butts and More Butts: The MPAA is so weird. You can see full-frontal female nudity in just about any R-rated movie, but you never see a penis unless it belongs to Ewan MacGregor. And normally, I wouldn't really care about this, but when what you end up with is a comedy where male nudity is one of the ongoing gags and then you're never allowed to see the man actually nude, it becomes its own distraction and makes you stop paying attention to the movie and start thinking about how weird the MPAA is and how the cinematographer is contorting himself into new shapes trying to avoid the front half of the actor he's shooting.
Not as Funny As: The Loved One, Kissed, the episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show where Chuckles the Clown dies.