Killing some time at CineFile the other evening, I came upon the DVD of
Smother, the not-so-funny Diane Keaton movie I
panned last year for
The Village Voice. Imagine my surprise, then, when I noticed the blurb "Hilarious" on the
DVD's cover attributed to the
Voice. "Wait a second," I thought. "I remember thinking that Keaton was kinda funny in it, but did I ever use the word hilarious?"
I went home and looked up my review. Here's the opening of the piece:
Noah (Dax Shepard) has just gotten fired, faces pressure from his wife (Liv Tyler) to have a baby, and must contend with her socially inept cousin (Mike White), who wants to stay with them for a few days while he finishes his screenplay. That’s when Marilyn (Diane Keaton), Noah’s high-maintenance mother, announces that she’s moving in, turning Noah’s bad day into a presumably hilarious and awful one.
Yeah, that's what I thought. For future reference, it's important to read all the words in a sentence before determining if something's being used in a positive way or not.
