Right to Die Film: Paddleton
In spite of a self-imposed ban on Netflix for boning Orson Welles, I find myself up to my eyeballs in gratitude to Faye Girsh, whose continuing Right to Die film screenings earlier this year introduced local pursuants of lost cinema to Hitler’s 1941 pro-eugenics primer I Accuse. Girsh describes this month’s presentation as, “a ‘guy’ way of looking at...the process of using the End of Life Option Act.” The title refers to a made-up game involving rackets, a hardball, and the back of a dead drive-in theatre screen. Andy (Ray Romano) and his terminally ill downstairs neighbor Michael (Mark Duplass) spend their evenings together watching the same movie, a chop-socky epic titled Death Punch. Together, they travel six hours in search of the closest pharmacy that stocks do-it-yourself-curtains kits. (Were it 1946, Paramount would have teamed Hope and Crosby and called it Road to Assisted Suicide.) Andy freaks out to find that the druggist he spoke with isn’t on duty. What if this one fills out the wrong script? Wrong script, indeed. With that level of joshery, screenwriters Mark and brother Jay Duplass needed to spend more time crafting a screenplay rather than casting their fate to the lethal winds of improv. I’m betting the post-show discussion led by Hemlock Society member Pat Fisher will be more enlightening than the movie. — Scott Marks