Word: idiot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...only is The Dinner Game not as funny as Veber's other films, it is confusingly serious, coating an un-funny plot with a problematic look at cruelty. The super-suave yuppie Bronchant (Thierry Lhermitte) regularly attends an "idiot's dinner," to which each member is challenged to invite the biggest fool he can find. The audience is caught between pitying Bronchant's "idiot," Pignon (Jacques Villeret, pictured) and laughing at his inability to comprehend even the simplest situations. To make matters worse, that laughter is rarely voluminous. When Pignon manages to confuse Bronchant's wife and mistress, leading...
...furnishings and fine wine. Yet the farce never becomes a simple enactment of poetic justice; no matter how much Veber paints Pignon as a really likeable, sweet guy who makes matchstick models of famous monuments such as the Eiffel Tower to numb his broken heart, he remains the idiot. All the misadventures he causes stem from his kindness and gratitude toward Bronchant. This is the awkward basis of the farce...
...even happy to riff on his 12-year relationship with Hurley, the often scantily clad Valkyrie to whom he seems content to play the hapless chorus boy. "Elizabeth made me buy a house," he confesses, "and we spent two years having idiot, pretentious, criminal bozos decorate it. It's now completely hideous, and I'm quarreling with her because I don't want to live there. The shower smells of dead people; I hate it." Instead, he hangs out in their old flat around the corner. "I go there and watch the football and drink beer. But I think that...
...might have solved the problem, but that's not the point. There is absolutely no reason to walk into any store and assume that the person behind the counter is an idiot. Chances are you're wrong and all that you do in presuming otherwise is reveal your own arrogance...
...just this kind of thing (Oklahoma City, O.J.), with noisy experts on tap, interrupting one another from different quadrants of the screen. We round up the usual suspects--in the current case, our cretinous popular culture; the Internet, with its rancid cul-de-sacs; violent movies; idiot television; vicious rap; ubiquitous sex. One high school counselor cast a wide net on MSNBC: "It's all those things, ekcedra, ekcedra, ekcedra." The "ekcedra" includes adolescence itself, a form of temporary insanity that in America is rendered even crazier by all of the above...