Stiff Upper Lips

This 5.7-million-dollar British comedy from writer/director Gary Sinyor satirizes the now-familiar Merchant-Ivory style of period dramas. So no one will miss the joke, the central setting is Ivory Hall, the Ivory family mansion in rural England. In 1908, young twit Edward Ivory (Samuel West) plans ...more

It's easy to see why Stiff Upper Lips was not a bigger hit. Traditional parody movie fans would gravitate toward broader target genres -- action movies, mob movies -- rather than Merchant-Ivory fare, and ardent fans of British period pieces may not naturally enjoy seeing their sacred cows lampooned. But Gary Sinyor's film contains some very witty observations about the stuffed shirts who populate films like A Room With a View and Howards End -- and, implicitly, the screenwriters who create such ...more