A Dr. Monkey Movie Review

I gave the League of Mullets last night off since it was Halloween and all. So the lads went trick or treating dressed up as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. So since they had the night off I'm sitting in for them on this movie review.

We watched this last night on one of those "On Demand" channels:

Right off the bat I need to tell you I love this movie. It's is one of those "mockumentaries" but unlike some of the recent offerings in that genre, this one is actually sweet, funny, and very very very good.

It's about three couples who enter a contest to win a dream home. In order to win this million pound dream home they must put on the most original wedding in Britain. One couple goes with a tennis theme, one goes with a nudist theme, and the other couple goes with a 1930's Hollywood musical theme. The film follows all three couples, the put upon wedding planners, and the magazine staff in the weeks leading up to the big nuptials. That's all I'm going to say about the plot because I don't want to give too much away. As far as performances go there was not a bad one in the bunch. Everyone in this film was perfect, I'm not kidding. All the performances were fantastic, but the ones that really stood out to me were the ones by the guys who played the wedding planners, Martin Freeman's performance, Jessica Stevenson's, Olivia Colman's, and the tennis couple. Jimmy Carr, a smarmy British comedian who I usually can live without even turned in a very funny controlled performance. You can see the rest of the cast here and you can see more photos from the film there as well. This film was conceived and directed by Debbie Issit and she deserves a huge round of applause and much more for making this pitch perfect comic gem.

Honestly, I didn't expect much out of this movie but I ended up liking it way more than I thought I would. And two big reasons why I liked it so much was the fact that they cast Jessica Stevenson and Olivia Colman. These two women if they lived in the USA would never ever get cast in a film like this, or for much of anything else for that matter, because they are not stick thin with bulging lips, bee sting boobs, and blonde hair piled high up on their heads. These gals are real women with a few extra pounds here and there, which makes them, in my book anyway, look normal.

Jessica Stevenson

Olivia Colman

I loved the fact also that the director was brave enough to cast Ms. Colman as the would be nudist bride. Yes, I'm a straight guy who likes to look at nude women in films, so it was nice to see a woman like Ms. Colman in this film. Her body is by no means the Hollywood ideal, her breasts sag a bit, gravity is getting to her bum, and she has a little pot belly, but like I said before, so it was refreshing to see a normal looking woman nude in a film for a change. And for the record, I think both Ms. Stevenson and Ms. Colman are sexy women precisely because they look normal and not like heroin addicts.

I highly recommend you watch this film when you get a chance. It's available on DVD and showing on Cinemax or The Movie Channel this month. I loved it so much that I'll probably pick up a copy on DVD one of these days because it's the type of gentle comedy that we like to watch over and over again when it's too cold or too hot to go outside. And because I want to see whatever extras they put the DVD.