Category Archives: Comedy

Comedy, Imaginary Danish Cinema

#135 – Fra Midnat (From Midnight)

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(2006, Den, 109 min) Dir Jan Hodl (Uncredited). Cast Per Spee, Tomas Peter, Michael Samsa.

When people think of Dogme 95 they invariably think of the first two, Festen and The Idiots by Vinterberg and Von Trier when in fact there were a great many more that received the official certification but didn’t make as much of an impact on the public consciousness. Number 47, Midnight On, is one such film. Like the great majority of Dogme film, the muddy mundanity of the visuals seems, at a glance, to be reflected in the content, following as it does one night in the life of a trio of suburban Satanist youths as they drink, smoke drugs, take a stolen car for a spin and, from the titular time of night, worship their dark lord. A closer inspection reveals the dark comedy at play with mothers not having washed certain members cloaks, a sacrificial kitten being too cute to kill and even the joyriding going awry when they are confronted by the vehicle’s burly owner. The film’s kids are trying their best to be grim and gritty but just don’t have what it takes. Even the patented Dogme style works for once too – while not a found footage film it looks like it could have been filmed using equipment any one of these middle class children have lying around in their house.

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Black and White, Comedy, Drama, Imaginary French Cinema

#133 – Roi Du Canard, Le (King of the Ducks, The)

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(1954, Fr, 65 min, b/w) Dir Albert. Cast Albert, Romy Pice, Joseph M.

A young man (deadpan director/performer Albert) is found in his pyjamas on the early morning streets of Paris, walking to and fro with his hands behind his back, stopping occasionally to bob his head. A passing milkman stops to ask if he is okay but in response the man just quacks. The milkman eventually takes him to a nearby police station where he is jokingly named Donald by the officers. A massive campaign to identify him is launched with no luck but in the meantime a local doctor offers to take Donald in where he befriends the doctor’s daughter. All is well until a mix up with the shifty groundskeeper one night leads to the young man being incarcerated in a local asylum where, during a midnight ceremony, he is crowned the King of the Ducks by his fellow inmates, complete with cardboard crown. The film ends with the downcast Donald sitting on the grass outside wearing his crown, looking up and smiling at a V of ducks passing overhead and off into the distance, calling after them with proud quacks of his own. Though it starts as a comedy it ends firmly in the realm of the classic weepy and any public screening I’ve attended has been awash in hot salty tears by the end.

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Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema

#130 – Flunkies

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(2002, US, 105 min) Dir Andy Farmer. Cast Matt LeBlanc, Michael Imperoli, Adam Goldberg, Paul Sorvino.

The late 1990’s and early 2000’s were a golden time for the mob comedy with Analyse This, Mickey Blue Eyes and The Whole Nine Yards, among others, providing lackluster laughs for the less discerning audience. Pitching in a little late for the party is 2002’s Flunkies starring Matt LeBlanc as the lead knucklehead of a trio of wannabe heavies (along with Imperoli and Goldberg) for mob boss Tony ‘Two Fish’ Mogiano. In the course of protecting Tony ‘Two Fish’ from an imagined hit by a postman the three idiots manage to accidentally off the big man themselves with a badly placed bird feeder. Hilarious peril results with everyone from the cops to the Triads battling it out for supremacy. In lieu of any actual jokes the film is meta instead with Imperoli a veteran of Goodfellas (along with Sorvino) and The Sopranos and the three guys having witless conversations about TV shows and foot massages that is supposed to nod to Tarantino’s pulp literate hitmen but instead serves to remind us how much better QT does that kind of banter.

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Comedy, Imaginary Mexican Cinema

#129 – Mentiroso (Liar)

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(2000, Mex, 100 min) Dir Ramon Vélez. Cast Diego Luna, Ana Álvarez, Demián Bichir.

The last film of Ramon Vélez and one of the first of Diego Luna’s. Luna plays nineteen year old Bruno who still lives at home with his mother in a leafy street in Mexico City. His desire to move out is curbed by the arrival of a new next door neighbour in the shapely shape of Ana Álvarez and suddenly the sole purpose of the summer months is to steal glances of her whenever he can. Then, when returning from an errand one afternoon, he runs into her in the hall of their building and lies, telling her that he lives on his own in his apartment. The problem is when he gets back to his apartment he finds that his lie has come true – his mother is nowhere to be found. More than that, every subsequent lie he tells her comes true as well, from the new Lamborghini he’s claimed to have bought to the award he’s receiving from the mayor. Of course he gets in over his head real quick and before long he’s being chased all over town by Bichir’s drug kingpin while pining for the return of his mother and the sleepy normality he’s lied away. A slight bit of adolescent wish-fulfillment from the previously magisterial Vélez. It’s diverting enough but I can’t help but think that he would have been at least a little embarrassed that this turned out to be his swan song.

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Comedy, Imaginary Swedish Cinema

#126 – Färska Hallon (Fresh Raspberries)

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(1963, Swe, 75 min) Dir Isak Borg. Cast Isak Borg, Berit Alman, Henrik Åkerman, Charlotta Borg.

By the time the early sixties had swung by Isak Borg should have been a happy man. Of the three films that he had so far written, produced, directed and starred in all three were slapstick comedy classics that had broken the box office in his native Sweden. Isak Borg, however, wasn’t a happy man. A legendarily paranoid and depressive man, he had grown to resent more and more the influence of his fellow countryman Ingmar Bergman who was taken so very seriously while Borg was scorned by critics, festivals and awards ceremonies alike. Thankfully that curse that had struck so many before him had not struck him – he had no desire to be taken seriously. No, he didn’t want to go to the critics, he wanted the critics to come to him. Hence Fresh Raspberries – surely a spoof of Bergman’s films would puncture their pomposity, reveal to the world at large the ridiculousness of the man’s self-seriousness? Alas, it did not work. Borg’s film of a clumsy priest’s spasms of doubt being met by increasingly absurd interruptions – starting with long forgotten uncles, graduating to a troupe of mean-spirited clowns and finishing with a wise talking death – was coldly received by not just the critics but by audiences too, evidently alienated by his previous film’s good cheer having curdled so badly. Within the year the beaten Borg was back to basics with Accidental Postman Grun.

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Comedy, Imaginary British Cinema

#118 – Let’s Go Crazy

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(1962, GB, 91 min) Dir Aldous Oxbury. Cast Kenny Hettie, Charles Falder, Betty Beauchamp, Netty Potts.

In 1962 Amiable Films set up what was to be their rival to (and sponging off of) the popular Carry On series with their own shameless Let’s Go cycle of facsimile features of which Let’s Go Crazy was the first. Seeing how the Barnview “loony house” is staffed by “a right load of top totty”, local lads Marvin and Pete (Hettie and Falder) fake themselves mental to get in there with Marvin pretending that he thinks that he’s Napoleon and Pete just barking like a dog. Once inside all sorts of hilarity ensues that includes being hosed down, being given therapeutic enemas, sessions with German-accented psychologists and, eventually, electroshock therapy – all very much like if, for whatever reason, they had decided to play Shock Corridor or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for lowbrow smutty yuks. Despite the tastelessness, inept direction and, worst of all, criminal lack of jokes, Let’s Go Crazy was enough of a mid-level success for a further two films to be squeezed out before the wheels came off the whole thing for good.

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Comedy, Imaginary Polish Cinema

#105 – Poor Frankie

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(2002, Pol, 98 min) Dir Jan Krzysztof Brodzki. Cast Michael Richards, Ava Brodzki, Piotr Kot.

One of the more unusual post-Seinfeld efforts from its cast, Poor Frankie finds Michael Richards’ New York bookmaker Frankie lost in rural Poland, waking up at a bus stop coated in snow with no idea how he got there. The night before he was at a boxing match in the city but got on the wrong bus while, in his own words, “I was outta my mind of that vodka they got here.” The rest of the film follows him as he tries to get himself back to Warsaw while speaking no Polish. There’s a whole lot of Richards’ patented slapstick here but the camera doesn’t follow or move with it, choosing instead to watch from a distance, and there’s no accentuation of the action with heightened sound or music so the effect is very odd and impassive, staying with a pratfall off an icy road until he’s climbed back out of the snow stuffed ditch, checked and corrected himself and then panning to follow him as he carries on his way up the road. It’s completely deadpan and it gets funnier and funnier as Richards gets angrier and angrier at the similarly unflappable locals throughout the film.

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Comedy, Imaginary Irish Cinema

#95 – Father Faith

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(2011, Ire, 109 min) Dir Phil Neeson. Cast Pat Shortt, Phil Neeson, Isaach de Bankolé.

Fathers Jimmy Faith (Shortt) and Mickey Batt (Neeson) are new arrivals from Ireland in the fictional African country of Chango-Monin (which is, geographically, “out the west, like Galway.”), both there for reasons hinted at but not specified during the film. While Batt is perfectly content to stay there, Father Faith is desperate to get back to his home country to the point where he greets every new convert by running from the building and back to his lodgings where he can call ‘The Head Office’ and ask whether, since he’s found another new soul for the Lord, he can come back. The answer is always no. Will he ever find a reason to stay? Will he ever come to love the locals, who he hates without pretending otherwise? A pretty scabrous film with no love in evidence for the institution of the church – it makes Father Ted look like The Fluffy Bunny Show. Good performances from Shortt and Neeson (here also directing his second feature) can’t disguise the awfulness of the characters and your feeling for the film will depend on you ability to spend close to two hours in the company of such a pair of corrupt, racist clergymen. Special mention must go to de Bankolé who is hilarious as their local colleague who spends the film pretending to like them through gritted teeth.

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Black and White, Comedy, Imaginary Dutch Cinema, Silent

#94 – Zwarte Piet (Black Peter)

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(1921, Neth, 27 mins, b/w) Dir Dick Binger. Cast Annie Dommelen, Oscar van Victor, B. A. van der Veer.

Not so much a film as an extended skit, pretty much, this silent comedy film about the then fine and now controversial Dutch Christmas character Black Peter was a great success at the time of it’s release and until very recently was a TV seasonal fixture. To the uninitiated Black Peter is the companion to Saint Nicholas (or Sinterklaas in the Netherlands) who doles out sweets to the good children and, to the bad, a whipping with a bundle of birch twigs. The controversy? Well, Black Peter is a moor you see, who is traditionally played by a blackfaced actor in a curly wig with big red lips. In addition to this he is played in this film by Annie Dommelen who is, as her name might suggest, a woman. Needless to say debate about the suitability of this character continuing to play a part of the celebrations of Sinterklassavond on December  5th each year continues to rage. But anyway – now that the layers of cultural context are peeled back, what of the film? Well Black Peter is hopping from rooftop to rooftop as the film begins, consulting his list and tossing sweets down the chimneys of the  good. Before long he happens upon the house of a bad child and, birch bundle in hand, climbs down with great enthusiasm to beat him. A frantic chase about the house commences with Black Peter eventually coming out on top. A strange little film with more about it to frighten than amuse for this viewer but were I a Netherlander of a century ago would my opinion be different?

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Comedy, Imaginary Japanese Cinema, Imaginary US Cinema

#93 – I Love Japanese Punks

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(1984, US/Jap, 104 min) Dir Rachael Gaudi. Cast Rosanna Arquette, Lea Thompson, Miyuki Ono, Kō Machida, Cobra.

The first film from video artist Rachael Gaudi, inspired by her time in Japan in residence at the Tokyo ‘Shoebox’ and the punk scene there. Arquette and Thompson are Split and Max, a pair of New York new wave punks bored with life in the USA and whose only idea for getting by in the world involves hanging around the punk scene until something happens. Split is obsessed with Japan and, in particular, with Japanese punks and misappropriates Max’s winnings from a daytime quiz show to invest in a pair of one way airplane tickets to the land of the rising sun. From there it’s culture shock comedy all the way but at the same time acting as a document of the punk music scene in Japan at the time, the only such window onto that world for Western viewers. Before long though Split and Max’s dreams have come true – by hanging around the punk scene in Japan they get noticed and are soon making a living as crazy American punk girls advertising cola and deodorant and the like. But have they sold out? A sweet, silly film and not at all as you would expect from Gaudi, whose internationally renowned gallery pieces are of an altogether more eye-watering cast.

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