By Morris Dean
We watched a VERY DELIGHTFUL movie Wednesday night: Our Idiot Brother (2011, story and direction by Jesse Peretz). I know, stupid-sounding title, but it's a fine comedy, with serious inner lining.
I may have been "in a mood" for something like this, because a couple of days previously we had watched the VERY serious and utterly uncomic Best Foreign Film of 2012, Amour, directed by Michael Haneke and reviewed by Jonathan Price on March 24. I don't THINK that Amour depressed me—even if it might have put both my wife and me in mind of what our respective lives might be like if either of us had a stroke and could do virtually nothing for him or herself, and the other devoted her or himself to providing care....
But be that as it may, Our Idiot Brother portrays a naive flower-child sort of 30-ish adult (played likably by Paul Rudd) as he collides with both the system of laws (which don't look kindly on a helpful, friendly person's selling a bit of weed to a policeman in uniform who seems desperately in need to someone not suspiciously wondering what might be going down here) and the reality of his three sisters' lives and self-deceptions.
Rudd, whom we had seen fairly recently in Admission (which I thought I had reviewed last Sunday but seem to have been only imagining I had—I must have written it in my head but failed to write it down), is completely companionable among "leading men." And his three sisters are played kooky-perfectly by Elizabeth Banks (Miranda, erstwhile writer for Vanity Fair), Emily Mortimer (Liz, married with two children), and Zooey Deschanel (Natalie, the ambivalent lesbian).
Plus, Steve Coogan (Liz's philandering husband Dylan) has to call only subtly on his great zany gifts to add to the off-beat humor that gushes over the sides of the vat of this movie's vast, foaming comedy.
Take a night off, enjoy!
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean
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I (we ) will check it out. I was happy to just learn I can watch it on Netflix !
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