God Said, "Ha!"

[1999, Movie, PG-13, 87 mins]

God Said, "Ha!": Review

If you've ever had that awful nightmare where you're suddenly back in high school and living at home with your parents, you have a pretty good idea of where Julia Sweeney is coming from. After her stint on Saturday Night Live ended (remember "Pat"?), Sweeney moved back to Los Angeles, only to learn that her brother Michael had been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. In almost no time, Sweeney, a recent divorcee looking forward to life as a single Angelino, found herself sharing her dream home with not only her ailing brother but both her parents, who moved down from Washington state to help care for their son. Sweeney coped by doing what any gifted monologist would do: She turned her experiences into an acclaimed one-woman stage show, captured here by Sweeney herself. The result has none of the finesse of, say, Jonathan Demme's films for Spalding Gray, but Sweeney's remarkably warm and often hilarious material easily compensates for any technical glitches. The term "inspirational" is thrown around far too cavalierly, particularly when it comes to movies that deal directly with illness and death. But Sweeney's one-woman show truly deserves the honor: Sweeney not only walks her audience through the pain of watching her brother die while recounting her own frightening brush with cancer, but also offers a dry-eyed strategy for survival rooted in humor and familial love. And what begins as a series of very funny takes on the everyday annoyances of living with impossibly provincial parents becomes in the end a poignant tribute to two remarkable people who found the strength and courage to help their son leave the world they once brought him into. --Ken Fox

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1	--	Eagle Eye	3	29.2	29.2
2	--	Nights in Rodanthe	3	13.6	13.6
3	1	Lakeview Terrace	10	25.7	7.0
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6	4	Igor	3	14.3	5.5
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8	3	My Best Friend's Girl	10	14.5	3.8
9	--	Miracle at St. Anna	3	3.5	3.5
10	6	Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys	17	32.8	3.2

Photo courtesy C. Gallo/Miramax

God Said, "Ha!"

[1999, Movie, PG-13, 87 mins]

God Said, "Ha!": Review

Movies Box Office

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