Film Review: Jeff Who Lives at Home

Director: Jay and Mark Duplass

A 2012 comedy film from the writing duo Jay and Mark Duplass (Mark is renowned for playing Pete in TV series The League and his wife Katie Aselton from the same show makes a cameo appearance). It's renowned for being part of the mumblecore aesthetic which normally uses only amateur actors but is known for giving the actors a share of writing credits due to the heavily improvised nature of the script and screenplay.

Jeff (Segel) is an unemployed stoner living in his mothers basement in Baton Rouge, his mum Sharon (Susan Sarandon) calls to ask him to go to Home Depot to pick up wood glue to fix a door shutter. Believing heavily in the importance of random occurrences, due to the movie Signs, he boards the bus and sees a man with a basketball jersey with the same name as the name asked for by a wrong number call earlier. This seemingly insignificant event sets up an important afternoon with his brother Pat (Helms)

Jeff (Jason Segel) and Pat (Ed Helms)

A slacker yet feel-good comedy does vaguely strain towards the territory of the Kevin Smith films with Jay and Silent Bob, although the comedy and script is possibly less vulgar and more innocent. Whilst the second comparison that immediately came to mind was with Mark Duplass' other project \The League where the characters get themselves into embarrassing scrapes. It's a feel good movie and Jason Segel is great at acting out characters that you just can't help rooting for, the ending is a little Hollywood but still a fun film.

2.5/4 Enjoyable and likeable comedy