In 2007 there was a funny little dark comedy titled Death at a Funeral. I watched it recently, the main attraction being that it was directed by Frank Oz and that Peter Dinklage and Serenity alum Alan Tudyk and were members of the ensemble cast.

In 2010, since seemingly Hollywood is completely fed up with the concept of coming up with new ideas, an American re-make was produced. This version had a different but impressive cast including Chris Rock, Danny Glover, Tracy Morgan and Luke Wilson. For the geek inclined, also in the film were Zoe Saldana (Uhura!), another Serenity connection in Ron Glass (who of course played Shepherd Book), and James Marsden (Cyclops!). Marsden takes an impressive comedic turn and steals the show, in a similar manner that Tudyk did in the original in the same role.

There were two extra interesting and trivia note-worthy curiosities of the re-make of a film that only came out three years previous. One is that Peter Dinklage plays the exact same character as he did in the British version. The other oddity is that the credit is simply listed as 'written by Dean Craig'. My suspicion is that the script wasn't even adapted, that they just used the exact same one used for the original. I don't know if that's another trend for unambitious Hollywood, though it seems like a logical turn if they want to save some pre-production development money. The movies seemed pretty much exactly the same, with only a couple of dialog divergences that I would guess came from improved lines from Chris Rock or Tracey Morgan.

Not a bad movie, but with remake's of this fashion there's always a slight disappointment, even when the movie is ok. I'd rather see everyone involved do something interesting and new, instead of re-hashed, traced, and recently seen in original form.

PS - Look at that poster. Horrible. The level of movie poster artistry is shameful. A kid on a Mac could photoshop a better poster together.