My Dead Boyfriend

It's pre-2000 NYC. Mary McCrawley (Heather Graham) gets fired from her temp job. She comes home to find her loser temp boyfriend Primo Schultz (John Corbett) dead in front of the TV. She's left with his dog. It's a long line of loser temp boyfriends. Zoe (Katherine Moennig) is her best friend. She's mildly taken with Joey Lucas (Griffin Dunne)'s credit card. Helene (Gina Gershon) tells her about Primo who seems to be completely different than the loser that she knew. Howard (Scott Michael Foster) inspires her to write about him and enter into a contest. She finds his baby mamma Sue Watt and joins her band.

I love Graham but she's not a lead comedian type. She's more of a straight man who can do odd deadpan. I can't tell if the material is actually funny but the movie isn't. It's mildly quirky at best. This character would be cute as a twenty something slacker. As a thirty something, it's no longer cute. I don't hate this except for its weak attempts at being funny.

I don't think the producers of this movie thought this was a great movie themselves but the effort they put into it was just fine. Everybody who was giving this a bad reviews just being too hyper critical . The writing is excellent

I took a chance on this movie after seeing the low IMDb ratings, largely because it starred the magical Heather Graham. And boy, does she deliver. For example: Every time she tells someone that her boyfriend is dead, check out her casual, distant, throwaway delivery of the line. It's slightly different but funny each time. That's craft!

The supporting cast shares Graham's idiosyncratic acting style, which works well with the odd but interesting plot twists and the occasional cartoon animations that are tossed in randomly and never really explained. But somehow, they seemed to fit. Some of the lines were laugh-out-loud funny. A weird comedy about someone's dead boyfriend may not be to everyone's taste, but if it sounds intriguing, check this one out.

The story is so messed up it is mesmerizing. It is a unique look at someone who is dead and offers an engaging voyage of discovery and misadventure.

I guess this movie is a specialized taste, given the discrepancy between my review and the average rating, but I thought it was freaking hysterical, with the advantage of being substantially original.

Ever the optimist, I watch (or at least start to watch) a lot of so-called comedies and, believe me, most of what's called comedy is basically "story that couldn't find a better genre". Which is my way of saying that I appreciate a real comedy. Having said that, this is not your traditional Inspector Clouseau or American Pie sort of comedy --- creating funny situations that usually involve someone looking silly, slapstick, misunderstanding, that sort of thing. It's the harder, and more rarely successful, comedy of the absurd --- a ridiculous situation, where everyone behaves just slightly off-kilter. Much of that sort of thing relies on embarrassment, ie excruciating comedy, and while I like my Sasha Baron-Cohen in small doses, I find that hard to watch.

But this is something completely different. The situation is (and remains) hysterical because our heroine has such ridiculous reactions to everything, starting with her utter lack of concern at coming home to her dead boyfriend. In addition to the absurdity of each successive stage of the story, Mary, the main character, is a marvelous collection of incongruous attributes. She appears to be the embodiment of a dozen comedy stereotypes, but she's not quite any of them. She's utterly self-centered and uninterested in anything that's not to her immediate benefit or interest --- but she's Heather Graham and so, not just pretty but sweet and innocent looking, that you can't really believe her narcissism. She's a slacker and a moocher --- but she does have some real talents. She's irresponsible and short-sighted --- but she is also competent where it matters.

I'd put it in the same sort of category as _Violet & Daisy_, or _Family Weekend_, or _The Big Hit_, three other movies I can think of with ludicrous plots and characters, that all work because they buy into the storyline enough that you care what happens, while simultaneously playing up how insane their story is.