Rating: 15/20
Plot: Two middle-aged brothers come to Mom's for a visit and against the best wishes of one of their wives and the mother, resurrect a sports rivalry from their childhood. They begin competing in twenty-five events to determine the champion of the titular Do-Deca-Pentathlon.
Rapid Fire! Because life sometimes gets in the way of what you really want to do!
It's the Duplass Brothers again with another understated comedy about the awkwardness in human relationships. This one reminds me of my brother--Anonymous, not the stoner--because we always threatened to have a "Sports Day" during which we would compete similarly to these two brothers. And for the record, I would have been the Sports Day champion because although my brother is a very good athlete, I could do a lot of stupid things--ping pong, miniature golf, one-bounce volleyball--a lot better. But I digress. And this is Rapid Fire, so there's really no time to screw around here! I'm really impressed with the acting here. In something this downplayed, a bad performance or two could totally ruin it, but everybody's really good here, especially the beleaguered wife played by Jennifer Lafleur. The dialogue feels improvised and really natural. It's mostly good except for one point when one character actually says, "Let's go seepy." The funniest thing about this is that the music and style give these silly competitions this tremendous weight. And because the conflict between these two brothers isn't just about sports and lots of other unspoken stuff burbles below the surface, you don't really care a lot who wins any of these things. You look for band-aids instead of trophies. This is not an uproarious comedy if you're looking for one of those, but I really liked it.
"Here's the stuff."
No comments:
Post a Comment