The House comes from the writing duo Brendan O’Brien and Andrew Jay Cohen, representing Cohen’s directorial debut.
O’Brien and Cohen are perhaps best known for their work on Neighbours and Neighbours II: Sorority Rising, two of the more successful “overgrown manchildren” movies of the past few years. (They also worked on the somewhat underrated Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates.) While these sorts of movies about grown-ups behaving badly are a dime-a-dozen in the modern comedy landscape, Neighbours and Neighbours II were elevated by a number of factors: attention to their female leads, very canny casting, clever shifts in the film’s moral weight at key moments.
They are so money.
The House is perhaps a more modest proposal than Neighbours and Neighbours II. It is certainly a lot more straightforward in its plotting and character arcs, a simplicity reflected in the relatively abridged run-time of eighty-eight minutes. (To be fair, both Neighbours and Neighbours II kept their runtime just over the hour-and-a-half mark, which seems about right for a broad comedy.) However, it shares one key strength. It is a movie that very skilfully captures the feeling of a mid-life crisis, and the yearn to return to into a belated adolescence.
The House is a little uneven in places, prone to the structural problems that haunt a lot of contemporary blockbuster comedy from the jokey asides that jar with the narrative to the oh-so-tidy resolution, but it has a solid core. It is a movie that understands the middle-class middle-aged urge to break bad in the most banal of fashions, just a hint of sadness lurking beneath its more absurd twists. The House doesn’t always win, and maybe it hedges just a little too much, but it knows the game that it is playing.
A dicey proposition.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, Movie, non-review review, review, the house | Leave a comment »
the m0vie blog 