Cinema 2011 #5: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Ah, the perils of being upper-middle-class. Ever since Emma Bovary first looked indifferently upon the perfect household she’d painstakingly acquired and thought, “Nah… screw zis, where’s the cyanide?”, being a yuppie has positively become a death sentence. Couple this with the perilous pressure of cycling uphill on a fixie as a hipster teen and it’s obviously only going to be a quick hop, skip and jump to your death from the Brooklyn Bridge. And with such fears, 16-year old Craig Gilner (Keir Gilchrist) commits himself to a mental ward, little realising that the charming caboodle of crazies and crackpots he finds himself with will change his life forever…


There’s really nothing original here, with a gauche teen mentored by a sagacious Zach Galifianakis, flitting between Mr. Miagi waxing lyrical on picking up chicks and chilling out, and McMurphy outbreaks of tormented psychosis. An underused Emma Roberts fails to make an impact as self-harming Noelle, who merely comes across as vain and self-serving, and Craig’s parents are such elitist phonies that their boorish disinterest in his breakdown explains why he had one in the first place.

That said, the film has some things going for it; Gilchrist makes for a fresh and watchable lead, despite the fact that the majority of his problems seem to stem from a desire to bone his best mate’s girl. The soundtrack is suitably indie, ranging from some Egyptian rock and teenage synth to a bizarre glam-rock recital of the inmates’ performance of Under Pressure.

But at the end of the day, this doesn’t know what it wants to be; too comic to be a drama, too slight to be effective and ends up being mediocre.

Two Likes.