Director Jesse Peretz, actor Paul Rudd, and the rest of the cast of My Idiot Brother brought their unconventional comedy to Park City this weekend for the Sundance Film Festival, and got a theater full of laughs.
My Idiot Brother is a riot. Rudd plays Ned, your average pot-smoking hippy who owns organic vegetables and a dog named Willie Nelson. He enjoys making other people happy so much that he sells a bag of pot to a uniformed police officer who claimed he was having a bad week.
Ned is released from jail and ventures to the place he used to call home. To his dismay, he learns his dread-locked girlfriend, played by Kathryn Hahn, has found another man and won’t give him his beloved Willie Nelson. He is inevitably forced to go back to his mom’s house to live until he can gather some money to get a place of his own. His mother, played by Shirley Knight (Grandma’s Boy), is a bit of a wine-o, but a sweet lady all the same.
Ned is not a fan of staying with his mom, and who can blame him? His sisters Liz (Emily Mortimer), Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), and Nat (Zooey Deschanel) each take a turn helping their brother out by letting him stay with them. He is able to stay just long enough to unknowingly discover a huge problem in each of their lives.
He only means well, and he has absolute faith in everyone around him to tell the truth and be honorable. Ned is the guy that is always happy and smiling, says “man” a lot, and probably suffers from a mild case of word vomit, saying far too much. As a result, the sisters kick him out one by one, forcing him to go back to his mom’s house and back to the green stuff.
My Idiot Brother is very funny and has lots of unexpected twists and turns. The rest of the population should line up to see this movie when it hits theaters. Keep in mind that there is full frontal male nudity, drug referencing, and lots of swearing.
