Le dîner de cons

you know there's a good chance it's going to be funny. Also Paul Rudd was good too. Rudd plays Tim, a businessman up for a promotion. His boss invites him to a dinner party in which guests bring someone with a special talent that makes them look stupid. The idea is to make fun of them. Reluctantly, Tim agrees to do it even with his disapproving girlfriend, Julie. He literally runs into Barry, played by Carell and Tim soon realizes Barry would be just the one to invite to this dinner. His talent is stuffing dead mice and creating scenes with them.

Problem is Barry shows up the day before the dinner party and Tim just can't get rid of him. Barry creates all these hilarious problems with Julie and inviting over Tim's stalker, Darla. The funniest scene is when Tim meets the swiss couple at the restaurant and Barry shows up to solve the problem of a missing Julie by bringing Darla. That had me LOL. Next funniest part was the mind control by Zack G. over Barry and his wife and the pudding. There's too many funny things to list them all.

FINAL VERDICT: By far this was the funniest comedy I've seen in quite a long time. I highly recommend it.

This film shocked me. A new premise of cinema I am not familiar with, and had a very silly, very quirky style of story telling. I have to stick my neck out on this one but I enjoyed it.

I like my comedies, from the classics to the obscure, and this feature manages to slot itself in there somewhere. It's not rip roaringly funny but it makes you smile, makes you giggles and still manages to create a personal attachment to the characters. When they feel bad, we feel bad. When they put themselves through awkward, cringe-worthy situations we cringe along with them and we all end up laughing at the other end.

Stop trying to take this film seriously, it's not trying to be a serious film. It's about a group of idiots being shown of for being idiots by a bunch of corporate idiots. It's silly, fun and worth seeing.

I found the acting was good, little ropey in places but general was to standard, the direction was well thought out, the cinematography was clever and the set design and props (especially the mice) were all manufactured so well and realistically they helped to hold the film together.

This is no Godfather II but it'd no Manos: The hands of Fate either, it's a very silly, very goofy, very fun film to watch with friends, family or on your own. Everyone knows a Schmuck and everyone can relate to this film.

Not only is it hilarious, it has a great message. To be able to tell a meaningful story about friendship, acceptance and triumph over adversity surrounded by physical comedy and ridiculous characters isn't easy to do. This one nails it!

"Dinner for Schmucks" has a clever title but it needed to spend more time on the main course. The audience is subjugated to almost one and a half hours of build up time before the dinner bell rings. It's not time wasted though, the story does make good use of its two hour run time. However, I felt like I was on a plane taxiing down the runway trying to get up enough speed to take off and once in flight the plane kept dipping and then pulling back up; then it finally it made an abrupt landing and the flight was over.

We are first introduced to Tim (played by Paul Rudd), an investment analyst, who is presented an opportunity to pounce on a new promotion at work. The story is set up as most business tales are told. The boss has an important client, the main character is presented with a once in a life time opportunity to prove his worth and so on and so forth. While in the process he learns something about himself.

The business men (one of whom is played by Ron Livingston from "Office Space" fame) are the typical jerks who will do anything to keep on top of the dog pile. In this particular dog pile they also like to pick on the smaller, weaker dogs. It just so happens that the big dogs are having their "dinner for winners" in a few days. Tim now has a great chance to prove to his boss he will go to any length to earn the new position. The catch is that he has to find a loser to bring to dinner. They then have a contest, unbeknown to the losers, to see who the biggest schmuck is.

Tim finds his loser immediately the next day not by chance but because as Tim so wisely says "everything happens for a reason". Welcome aboard, Barry (played by Steve Carell), here the story starts picking up a little steam. Barry has a unique talent of finding the positive in almost any situation, he mispronounces words that any 5th grader knows, works for the IRS and in his spare time works on his "Mouseterpieces". A perfect fit for Tim. A "Mouseterpiece" is Barry's taxidermy side projects where he takes dead mice and mounts them in familiar historical and everyday scenarios (i.e. The Last Supper, mice having a picnic, Whistler's Mother, etc).

A lot of activity happens in that single night before the big dinner; Tim and Barry break into one of Tim's girlfriend's biggest clients' homes and finds him in a weird sexual perversion act. Next Barry accidentally invites Tim's ex-fling, Darla, over to the apartment and the first laugh riot is finally given to the audiences through a funny fight scene between Barry and Darla. Then it is on to the IRS to talk to Barry's boss, Therman (played by Zach Galifianakis), who is also a self proclaimed mind reader. Have you noticed they still haven't made it to the dinner yet? The next day Tim has a brunch appointment with a potential multi million dollar client where Barry and Darla show up trying to smooth things over. Again the straight man, Tim, and goofy man, Barry, routine starts up and we are given another good laugh. It was a pretty easy set up; take a high pressure situation and place it in any restaurant that has a Maitre d' next mix in a socially inept character such as Barry and something funny is bound to happen.

After all of this we are finally taken out to dinner. The peculiar thing was that the dinner only lasts 15 minutes. This was a shame because the story could have spent more time on the losers that came to dinner. There was some great talent there, one being Jeff Dunham, a humorous ventriloquist who has been working stand up clubs for the last two decades. It felt like the director (Jay Roach) should have pumped the brakes, slowed up and gave these losers some more screen time. We did get another laugh riot when Therman and Barry had an invisible shoot out between their mind reading capabilities. Then it was over with a nice epilogue to the story through Barry's "Mouseterpieces".

Should you see this movie? Ummm…OK, why not? There were some funny bits to it, the storyline was solid and the comedic actors were funny but didn't have to try too hard for the jokes. Rudd plays a good straight man in these situations where Carell and Galifianakis can play off of him quite easily.

It's remarkable how quickly the new comedy Dinner for Schmucks disappears from your brain. I can recall laughing my way through the vast majority of the film--mostly soft laughs, but there were more than a few big, hearty laughs from deep down in the diaphragm. (One might more economically call such a laugh a "guffaw," but guffaw is such a silly word I refuse to acknowledge I might ever participate in one.)

Despite the inarguable fact that I was entertained throughout the entirety of Dinner for Schmucks -- a film that never actually uses the word "schmuck," but we'll get to that -- I can't deny feeling rather empty while considering it a little more than a day later. I think this must be why many reviewers are giving the flick fairly lukewarm marks, though they had to be laughing their respective asses off on occasion just as I was.

There are lots of reasons not to respect the movie. There's the fact that it's reportedly a fairly pale "reimagination" of a French film, Francis Veber's Le dîner de cons (The Dinner Game). (I haven't seen the original, so I can't compare.) The screenplay is inarguably mediocre. Some of the characters, especially those at the eventual dinner, are lazily imagined. And it's disappointing to see Paul Rudd, who's capable of much more interesting, brilliantly caustic characters (in Wet Hot American Summer and Anchorman, for starters) relegated to playing yet another purely-reactive straight man.

And yet... Dinner for Schmucks is funny. Very funny. Occasionally laugh- out-loud funny. It's like a frozen Snickers bite-size bar when you're having a chocolate craving: Incredibly satisfying for about five minutes... after which, you'll forget all about it.

Yet I can't help wanting to recommend Schmucks, and dammit, that's exactly what I'm going to do. Because for the ninety minutes you're in the theater, it is a lot of fun. It's a much better date night film than, say, the relentlessly mediocre Date Night.

Those two films don't just share a star in Steve Carell. They also share a philosophy: Take a half-interesting situation, flesh it out a bit with half-written characters and a half-written screenplay, and let the stars make it sing. Date Night was only moderately tolerable because it had Carell and the always-entertaining Tina Fey as its leads. With Carell and Rudd joined by a far more interesting supporting cast (and a much sharper director), Schmucks is like Date Night done right.

Carell and Rudd are consummate comedic pros with perfect chemistry together. You can't help but figure working together in Anchorman and The 40-Year-Old Virgin played a role there. With the expert guidance of director Jay Roach (helmer of the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents/Fockers series), they mine every possible laugh out of every line, every expression, every reaction shot.

That's especially impressive because neither actor is working with a particularly well-crafted role here. Barry (Carell) is an amalgam of all sorts of odd eccentricities and levels of confusion, though his meticulous talent at turning dead mice into works of art suggests he's some sort of idiot savant. As many a commercial has already informed you, he gets invited to a very different sort of social dinner by Tim, a finance executive desperate to impress his bosses.

Tim is virtually indistinguishable from the other "straight men" Rudd has played in recent comedies. Only the goofball buddy and the gorgeous girlfriend change. In Role Models, Rudd suffers through Seann William Scott's crazy schemes, which threaten his relationship with Elizabeth Banks. In I Love You, Man, Rudd's new "bromance" with Jason Segal threatens his engagement to Rashida Jones. And in Schmucks, Rudd's dinner plans with Carell threaten to derail his planned engagement to fresh face Stephanie Szostak.

Schmucks ramps up the funny thanks to Roach's direction and some extremely well-chosen supporting players. It's very strange that Zach Galifianakis' name doesn't even appear on the Schmucks poster, especially given how hot he is following The Hangover and how heavily he's featured in the commercials. Though he appears in what amounts to only two scenes, the actor hijacks the film wholesale, and not in the wild, over-the-top sort of cameo you might expect from, say, a Will Ferrell or Ben Stiller.

Following suit, albeit with much more screen time, is Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement, who does do the over-the-top thing as avant garde artist Kieran, and it's perfectly brilliant. (One can easily foresee a Get Him to the Greek-type spin off for the character.) Every time Schmucks threatens to stall, it wisely finds a way to weave Kieran back into the proceedings.

The longest period in which we don't see Kieran is also Schmucks' weakest stretch, the actual dinner itself. The French original apparently never included the actual dinner, and maybe that was a good move. The boss who puts on the dinner actually considers it a "dinner for idiots" -- the word "schmucks" is never used, and one figures that term came from some studio exec worried about the word "idiot."

Barry's fellow idiots at the dinner aren't particularly funny, and this is where the film goes for some fairly broad laughs that are only fitfully amusing. In fact, the best part of the dinner is when Barry gets to show off some of his "mousterpieces," a segment that's more than a little touching.

Despite such faults, Schmucks plays it smart most of the time. It's sad that Office Space's Ron Livingston doesn't have much to do as Tim's nemesis, but two Daily Show personalities, Larry Wilmore and Kristen Schaal (also of Conchords), are pitch-perfect in small roles.

On the whole, Schmucks isn't one of the decade's great comedies. But if you're satisfied with laughing for 90 minutes, and enjoying talented actors rise (well) above their material, it's definitely worth your time.