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THE SPOILS BEFORE DYING
July 8, 2015  | By David Bianculli

IFC, 9:00 p.m. ET

 

MINISERIES PREMIERE: This sequel to last year’s IFC comedy miniseries, The Spoils of Babylon, embraces the same goofy conceit – to equally winning but weird effect. Will Ferrell plays Eric Jonrosh, a late-period, low-rent Orson Welles-ish filmmaker equally besotted by booze and his own inflated ego. Once again, Jonrosh introduces and summarizes each episode, appearing (while drinking, eating and complaining) as a framing device to present the long-delayed premiere of his long-dormant “filmitization” of his own overblown novel. The Spoils of Babylon was a soap opera spoof in the vein of Giant; The Spoils Before Dying is a 1950s film noir spoof, starring Maya Rudolph and Kristin Wiig as jazz songbirds, one of whom is murdered. Other featured players include Michael Sheen, Kate McKinnon, Haley Joel Osment and Tim Robbins, and the star, playing jazzman turned detective Rock Banyon, is Michael K. Williams. He’s one of the two big surprises here, because his previous roles, as Omar in The Wire and Chalky in Boardwalk Empire, have been searingly tough and no-nonsense. Here, even while playing it straight, he’s all nonsense, committing to the concept fully. The other major surprise is Wiig, when she gets to sing. The lyrics (also purportedly by multi-hyphenate Jonrosh, the alleged writer and director of Dying) are absurd – but her singing voice, as a jazz chanteuse, is lilting and lovely. Both these Spoils spoofs are directed by Matt Piedmont and written by Andrew Steele, the team also behind the Ferrell-Wiig teaming in the recent Lifetime movie, A Deadly Adoption. But that effort, so straight-faced it was indistinguishable from any other cookie-cutter crazy-woman Lifetime melodrama, was not at all enjoyable, whether it was a spoof or an homage. A Deadly Adoption was bad bad. The Spoils Before Dying is good bad…

 
 
 
 
 
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