A Masterpiece!

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

So viewers are complaining about it being dull and lacking in decent plot.In my opinion plot was good enough which keeps your attention from start to finish.I agree there were not many laughs in this flick but comedy is sprinkled here and there.The old lady is the most evil old hag i have ever seen in a movie.Part of the dullness is due to poor performance from both the lead stars.As far as acting goes the old lady steals the show.Few of the scenes were disgusting and plain awful.The laptop scene was actually hilarious to which most people are complaining about. Writer took liberty with the common sense displayed by the couple,but its quite plausible.Some people just can't say no,and end up being awfully nice most of the time.Entire plot is driven by this very same characteristic of the lead stars. I must say be nice and do not say no to this movie,its quite enjoyable.

This is a slapstick comedy starring Ben Stiller as Alex Rose and Drew Barrymoore as Nancy Kendricks. They play a young couple who had just moved into a duplex in Brooklyn - a home of their dreams. However, the elderly Mrs. Connelly (Eileen Essell) lives upstairs and won't move out, despite Alex and Nancy desperately trying to convince her to leave. Soon, Mrs. Connelly makes life miserable for them.The script of the movie seems funny, but the movie is filmed in a way that you really end up feeling sorry for Alex and Nancy and having hostility towards Mrs. Connelly. Though supposed to be a nice little old lady, she was portrayed in a way that generated no audience sympathy (at least for me). She was an annoying and conniving little witch, and despicable, too, were all those characters who stood on her side. Also, the ending sucked, adding salt to the wound.The acting was OK, but didn't make up for the otherwise forgettable movie.Grade D-

This geriatric variation of Home Alone, with more of a dash of The Ladykillers and an obscure French film called Tatie Danielle thrown in, is given a cartoonish presentation as the new owners of a Brooklyn duplex deal with the outwardly sweet upstairs tenant they can't evict. A series of juvenile visual gags are shot out like machine gun bullets, with the seemingly sweet old Irish doll tossing out insults at the couple with passive aggressive glee. Seemingly immortal, the old buzzard becomes the road-runner like target of the couple's coyote where you begin to hope that for once the coyotes will kill their target. This leaves the viewer with a slight guilt complex which reflects on the general mean-spiritedness of the script.Hysterically funny much of the time, this can't escape the fact that its laughs come from that part of the human soul that hates humanity. The young couple are in a no-win situation and the genuinely evil hag has them by the scrotum. The attempted murder sequences are sometimes uncomfortable to watch, even though the first part of the film makes you want to see them succeed. I would have liked to had a different leading man as I never have seen the appeal of Ben Stiller, but found no fault with Drew Barrymore, once again truly likable. As the old lady, Eileen Essell takes the role and runs with it, being alternately a combination of Old Mother Hubbard and the tenant of a gingerbread house. A perfect supporting cast (including raspy Harvey Fierstein as a shady real estate agent, Wallace Shawn as Barrymore's irascible boss and Swoozie Kurtz as Stiller's publisher) helps the surprising twists and turns which alternately hurt the stomach from laughing too much and the guilt which goes along with it.

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.