Funny Farm Foods Tim Millson, (CEO & National Sales Manager) tmillson@epicsourcefoods.com Julia Millson, (CFO & President) jmillson@epicsourcefoods.com Our Team (pictured at our corporate phone booth) left to right Gayle Franks, Promotions Princess (Sales / Marketing Support) gfranks@epicsourcefoods.com Kari Thibeault, Head Bean Counter. Weed shop 2 pc mod.

Conditions are not perfect. The birds sing too loudly. The mailman speeds by in a cloud of dust, hurling letters from the window of his pickup. There are snakes in the lake and a corpse buried in the garden, and it costs 20 cents to make a call from the pay phone in the kitchen. And the townspeople, they discover, are drawn more from Stephen King than Norman Rockwell. By wintertime, Chase is withdrawn and bitter, drinking heavily and sleeping past noon, while his wife has sold a children's novel about a city squirrel who moves to the country and has the same name as her husband.

None of this, I imagine, sounds as good as it plays. 'Funny Farm' has a good screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, and yet in other hands it might have yielded only a routine movie. George Roy Hill, the director, makes it better than that because he finds the right tone and sticks to it - a sort of bemused wonder at the insanity of it all in a movie that doesn't underline its gags or force its punch lines but just lets everything develop naturally. Notice, for example, the timing in the sequence where the sheriff first comes to chat about the corpse in the garden.

Chase is not exactly playing a fresh kind of role here - his hero is a variation of the harassed husband he has been playing for years - but he has never been better in a movie. He has everything just right this time, and he plays the character without his usual repertory of witty asides and laconic one-liners. It's a performance, not an appearance. Smith makes a good foil for him, although she isn't given enough to do in scenes of her own, and one scene in particular - a visit to an antique shop - felt suspiciously truncated.