Eulogy (2004)

Very Cool!!!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Kate Collins (Zooey Deschanel) receives news of her grandfather's death from her grandmother Charlotte Collins (Piper Laurie). The various members of the family gather for the funeral in Rhode Island. Her father Daniel Collins (Hank Azaria) was a child star reduced to porn acting. Her uncle Skip (Ray Romano) and Lily (Paget Brewster) have rambunctious twin boys. Her aunt Lucy (Kelly Preston) is a lesbian with girlfriend Judy Arnolds (Famke Janssen). Her angry aunt Alice (Debra Winger) dominates her submissive husband with their three silent kids. Charlotte asks Kate to deliver an eulogy at the funeral. Kate tries to avoid childhood love Ryan Carmichael (Jesse Bradford). After Charlotte's suicide attempt, they meet Alice's old friend nurse Samantha (Glenne Headly).This is written and directed by newcomer Michael Clancy. I love many of the great actors in the cast. Zooey Deschanel is super adorable. The homophobic Alice is probably the most hateful. It's a lot of quirky darkness but it's not always that funny. It rambles a bit but I still love the actors.

I'm usually a fan of dramedies that involve family troubles and the hardships that come with loving your parents and siblings but also being annoyed to no living end with them but "Eulogy" was just so bland and flavorless.The script for the film is just weak and sparsely sprinkled with unfunny jokes. They are so unfunny that I found myself getting into an internal debate and question whether what I saw was intended to be funny or was just something spat out on to the script page. Then you have one-dimensional characters that were written without anything neither interesting about them nor deep enough to be relatable and likable. Finally, you have a cast who really, really looks like they just don't give a flying flip about what they are making. It really made for a film that was just one long experiment in boredom and was incredibly tedious. It's a shame because there's decent actors in it and it might have been better if more care was taken with the entire product.

I am all for a sweet, funny, touching independent film about a band of dysfunctional, quirky characters interacting but I felt that Eulogy fell flat, was uninspiring, was over the top and worst of all, was just not believable.Someone dies. The whole family comes together as a result. Interactions and Hilarity and Drama ensue and the audience is supposed to be engrossed. This is nothing new and yet still had potential to be something great if the writing and acting and all the elements came together but they didn't and as a result, this movie was average at best.If someone told me that there was going to be a sequel about this family and their hijinks, I would not watch b/c I don't care and THAT is the problem. I didn't find the characters endearing or likable at all except maybe Katie played by Zooey Deschanel who was the token normal one of the bunch. In fact, at times it seemed as though she was in a different movie since she was so laid back and sane and the characters around her were so over the top and cartoonish. I just didn't find the family interaction or characters believable - it's like each character was his or her own caricature of what a true character should be only not.I wanted to get into this family and this movie. I wanted to care about these characters. I wanted to go on the journey with these characters as they rehashed the past and dealt with repressed demons BUT as I said above, I just didn't care one iota about them and I found the whole dynamic very manufactured. I was very aware at all times that these were actors trying to create a dynamic of a dysfunctional family. It just didn't work for me at all.4/10 since there were some funny moments albeit over the top just like the characters and the dialogue in this movie.Oh and be ready for some cheap jokes at lesbians' expense because apparently the movie is that sophisticated and smart (*snerk*) - many that can be see as offensive including the 10 year old mentality that girl + girl couple = hot lesbian action. Yes, it's that stupid.

I live in a weird world where someone can give this movie 10 stars. IMDb has failed. Right now it has a 6.6 - that is a failure of the rating system. I gave it a chance because of that rating and it has a good cast. But everything is bad. The dialogue, the acting, the over-the-top scenes, the directing. Everything. It's like a bad sitcom. It has that annoying bubbly music playing in the background to remind us it's a comedy. Everyone is a caricature, nobody is a real person. The dialogue is stuff no one would ever say in real life, that why it isn't funny. Things are funny when they strike at truths that you can relate to. This movie fails at that. It's just a bunch of stupid people saying stupid things. I gave it 3 stars because I had a few chuckles and Zooey is sweet but that's it.