As someone who knows several families going through this horror with their spouses or their parents, I don’t see the humor in making fun of anyone with Alzheimer’s disease. This seems to be bad taste at its lowest.
If this is going to be a comedy, then it is really, really bad taste.
If this is a question, then the answer is no.
It’s Will Ferrell and yes, it is supposed to be a ‘comedy’.
People in the movie industry need to walk a mile in the shoes of families dealing with Alzheimer’s and then they wouldn’t think it is so funny.
honestly, if this is the only material that hollywood can find to make into a movie, they have hit rock bottom. And is it okay because the target is Richard Nixon?, and that makes it more acceptable to liberal hollywood and people will just give them a “hall pass” because it’s Nixon? what’s next? Comedies about cancer? Autism? Suicide? Anyone who looks to hollywood for good taste, I guess is looking in the wrong place. I like Will Ferrell, but he must be desperate for money.
Well, Hogan’s Heroes was a comedy about POWs. The Producers is a comedy involving a Hitler-themed play. Things can be horrible and funny too.
4 - The movie purports to be about Reagan not Nixon. I can't think of another movie that makes fun of a terminal disease.
I can’t stand Will Ferrell, and this is just the sort of garbage I’d expect of him. Not funny.
And I was NO fan of Ronald Reagan, believe me.
sorry…I may have had a senior moment typing Nixon vs. Reagan. Sorry about that. It is still in very bad taste.
Imagine if The Theory of Everything had made Stephen Hawking and his ALS a subject of comedy. ( Look at the funny scientist falling on his face, haha)
Frankly one wonders who greenlights these things.
The same people who greenlight endless comic book movies, no doubt.
Reagan’ s daughter’s reply.
“Perhaps you would like to explain to them (dementia sufferers) how this disease is suitable material for a comedy,” Patti Davis wrote on her blog.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ronald-reagans-daughter-criticizes-will-888473
I’ll preface this by saying this sounds like a terrible idea for a show.
That said, both my husband’s parents and mine suffered from some form of dementia. And there were times when you had the choice to laugh or cry and mostly we chose to laugh. It really was kind of funny when my mother-in-law tried to pay for a restaurant meal with play money. It was funny that my father-in-law could still play a mean game of chess, despite remember nothing that he read in the paper. And he read the newspaper every single day. It was funny whenever my Dad asked my older son where he was going to college, he’d ask, “Why not Harvard?” (He did get into Harvard so it wasn’t hurtful.) It was funny when my mother could not remember which machine was the washer or dryer and couldn’t figure out why you needed to push two different buttons to turn them on. (I could never remember which was which either - why do front loaders have to look so identical? And what’s with the two-button thing anyway?) It was funny when my mother would talk about the hallucinations she had, but how since she knew they were hallucinations she could order them to go away.
i don’t see Will Ferrell as having the subtlety to hit the right note on this if there is one to be hit. Like @Consolation, can’t stand him.
Add me to the list of people who dislike him.
@TatinG, Family Guy has actually done this in numerous shows.
My MIL has Alzheimer’s disease. According to my husband, who is her primary caregiver, she is often “cheery,” but she can’t speak in coherent sentences, is confined to a wheelchair, and wears diapers. I not only could not watch a comedy about someone with Alzheimer’s disease, I can’t even stand to watch dramas about the subject.
Perhaps we’ll all be surprised and the movie will be tasteful and poignant - difficult to deliver, but wouldn’t that be great to see? My FIL has Alzheimer’s and we see him almost daily…at his stage, still aware of his surroundings but living in a very small world, it’s helpful to see the humor in what’s going on, otherwise life will become too difficult.
FIL is still able to laugh at some of his forgetfulness and repetitive behavior, and it often helps to make a joke and move on. Humor can be good medicine. I remember Maria Shriver talking about keeping a sense of humor when her father had Alzheimer’s and her comments have stayed with me.
I can’t yet watch or read anything (serious or comedic) about such topics – and maybe I never can (as my mother died about one year ago, while suffering from Lewy Body dementia). That said, in the midst of the nightmare, there were still moments …
The time I got her hospitalized against her will when she was delusional and a danger to herself while staying with us. She was sure we were trying to poison her. In the hospital, she refused to eat a bite. I still remember when the Dr. asked her why she wasn’t eating, she fixed him with a steady and defiant glare, and all 100 lbs of her responded, “I’m on a DIET!” I almost spit out my coffee.
And then she orchestrated her escape attempt, involving my adult children. It involved some planning and deception!
I, too, have a father sinking into Alzheimers. Inside the family, some things can get really funny. It became very obvious that he shouldn’t drive about a year ago. His doctor reported him to the DMV and they sent a letter revoking his driver’s license, but it had a section to fill out to ‘appeal’. My father called hourly (because he forgot he had already called) and demanded to get a lawyer because he was going to ‘sue’ the DMV. He then started wandering around the neighborhood asking all his neighbors for the phone number of a good lawyer.
We had to sneak over in the middle of the night and ‘steal’ the car away and return it to the leasing agency because he refused to stop driving. When he realized that he didn’t have a car anymore he invented hilarious complicated schemes which involved buying a car in Mexico and bringing it back and then the DMV would never know he was driving !