LastingAware The greatest movie ever!

Tockinit not horrible nor great

Animenter There are women in the film, but none has anything you could call a personality.

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

SnoopyStyle Alex Rose (Ben Stiller) and Nancy Kendricks (Drew Barrymore) are looking for a place. They find a nice duplex in Brooklyn for a very reasonable price except Mrs. Connelly (Eileen Essell) is the rent control tenant upstairs. Kenneth (Harvey Fierstein) is the real estate agent. Officer Dan (Robert Wisdom) comes in to investigate when the couple keeps getting in trouble over the little old lady.Director Danny DeVito is pushing hard for this slapstick dark comedy. I find little of it funny. I really don't like this couple and I like the little old lady even less. The old lady is too fake and really annoying. It's a lot of fake niceties and passive aggressiveness. I don't like passive aggressive characters sometimes and I really dislike this one. As annoying as it is for the couple, it is more annoying to watch them being annoyed. The more annoying the annoying old lady gets annoying the annoying couple, the more annoyed I got about the annoying antics. I did like the reveal or maybe I like that it was over.

DICK STEEL The home gatecrasher, the unwelcome guest, and the tenant from hell. These can be used to sum up the story of Duplex, directed by comedian/actor Danny DeVito and featuring the first time pairing of comedians Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore as the husband and wife suburban couple who through an animated opening credit sequence, go through property after property looking for the perfect place to set up their home, which should also double up as a home office for Stiller's Alex Rose, an up and coming writer due to complete his next novel without having to write at Starbucks.Thanks to their housing agent, they settle for the titular duplex, which seemed like a great idea for their housing plans and one that's within their budget, a good deal even though it comes with a caveat that they cannot throw out the existing tenant, an old lady called Mrs Connelly (Eileen Essell) who stays upstairs and well, pays the rent. But little do they know that their lives would soon turn topsy turvy through the skillful manipulation that senior citizens can be capable of, appealing to good citizenry in wanting to help others, only to be willingly exploited to run errants, and face a crisis of sorts in either wanting to stay put, or leave.So we go into full gear of the battle between households, where sleep gets interrupted through the elderly lady putting on her TV at full blast, and the couple getting back in tit- for-tat fashion. But it seems that Mrs Connelly is always one step ahead either in the luck department, or having the authorities, Officer Dan (Robert Wisdom) on her side. After all, who would you rather believe - a frail old woman in her twilight years, or a young yuppie couple whose backfiring revenge tactics put them in bad light as discourteous, intolerant people? Oh if only everyone else knew the cunningness of the elderly!Danny DeVito's film, based on a story by Larry Doyle, however keeps things rather firmly in PG fashion even though the couple's intent move from nice tactics into murderous territory, deciding to employ desperate measures given that they're driven up the wall and with the couple both having their household revenue stream impacted. Both Stiller and Barrymore provide good comic timing especially in their individual scenes (well, someone has to bring home the bacon) when their characters get stuck with "entertaining" the bothersome old lady whose benign requests usually turn out to the contrary.But the scene stealer would of course be Eileen Essell as Mrs Connelly with her playing both the fragile old Irish lady who is more than meets the eye, a force to be reckoned with beneath the aged exterior, capable of tugging at your conscience and making you feel guilty should you not accede to her gentle pleas, which almost always come laced with sarcasm, or the nitty gritty that makes you feel bad. Convincingly playing her role without which this film would probably have not been able to make us laugh with or at Stiller and Barrymore's characters as they get stuck in their predicament which comes with a predictable twist at the end. It's evil, I know.

Sandcooler This starts out as a very standard Hollywood comedy, but I quite like how it gradually gets more sinister. Though the murder plans are all handled in a rather quirky way, it's still somewhat intriguing to see the unbearably nice people from the beginning of the movie eventually turn into cold-blooded killers. Especially the casting of the inherently cute Drew Barrymore contributes a lot to that plot element. The actual jokes mostly consist of pedestrian situational comedy (Ben Stiller clumsily breaking into an apartment and always staying at the verge of being caught, that sort of thing), but it's all pretty well-acted so it still makes me laugh. The movie really stands out near its ending though, which is just very well-written and unexpected. It caught me off-guard a little, it's kind of an unpredictable factor in an otherwise rather predictable yet funny film. Quite worth seeing.

kirk-246 Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore make such a good looking couple in "Duplex".Danny Devito also directs the film and adds so much humor and energy into the film that will have you laughing on your sides.My friend gave me 2 choices between watching this movie and "The Hot Chick".He told me that "The Hot Chick" was really funny but he also told me that "Duplex" was also really funny.So I told him "Duplex" and I have to say that I was quite surprised at how funny and entertaining this movie was.The performances by Stiller and Barrymore were simply wonderful and I'm glad that Mr. Devito chose these 2 brilliant actors and put them in such delightful roles.There's also Eilleen Essell's performance, who plays the elderly person who ruins Stiller's and Barrymore's lives when they movie into a big house and have to share it with her.Although she did actually do some things to the couple that actually got me mad, I really thought that she was just a sweet person who obviously needed a lot of help around her house.I also need to mention that I think that this film is very underrated.How can something like this get a 5.7? It's not brilliant, but it's definitely not bad by any standards.As I always say, just watch the movie and just enjoy it for what it is.You actually may be surprised like I was.