Rat

2000 comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: An Irish guy, after a night of drinking, metamorphizes into the titular rodent. His wife, son, and daughter try to figure out what to do about him. A writer moves in with the family to write a byook with the hope that it will be made into a feelm some day.

That's how they pronounce those words. I'm not really sure how they'd spell them, so I just did my best. This play on Kafka's short story is frequently clever even if it doesn't seem to have all that much to say. There were a lot of cool visual things going on. There's some funny visual humor with the dude's empty clothes, a picture where a resemblance to a rat can be seen, the drying out of the rat after it nearly drowns in a glass of beer, a hurling over a fence, a scene with a washing machine. There's also some interesting camera work. I dug the rat cam which I imagine was accomplished by giving a very tiny camera to a very tiny man and having him run around the room or down the sidewalk. Or I guess the very tiny camera could have been attached to a mouse. There's also some weird camera work during a family meeting where the camera sort of slithers around the characters, really invading their spaces. It was nearly distracting, but I kind of liked it. The whole thing's got a playful tone although the actors play everything straight. The performances were all fine even if the accents made it difficult to understand them at times, but I was really really impressed with Imelda Staunton, best known for her voice work as Bunty in the great Chicken Run, who played the wife. Her character here is hilariously ruthless, and she really drives this thing. The oddly-named Niall Toibin (explains why they say "feelm" and "byook," I guess) is very funny as a priest. We learn from him that the fridge is a very dangerous place to put a demon, and there's an exorcism scene that is hilarious. We also get to hear part of a sermon, and although I had no idea what Toibin's character was talking about, he ends it with "If I hit you, you'll die bouncing!" which is how more sermons should end. At least I think that's what he said. Again, the accents. The story is a little too simple perhaps, and the characters' motivations are confusing by the end of it all, but this is a fun enough little movie that very few people have probably seen. One of my favorite bits: The daughter's reading of a letter from Dad.

Note: I gave this a bonus point since I watched it right after Smokey and the Bandit since that movie would make everything else look like crap.

Look at that poster. On the one hand, I like the minimalism of the poster there with just the three colors and the short title in a simple font. But how many people are going to see this movie based on the "From the director of" advertisement? Or that horrible tagline?