Tag Archives: Comedy

Comedy, Erotic, Imaginary Japanese Cinema

#191 – Zūmurenzu: Kameraman Bōkō (Zoom Lens: Photographer Assault)

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(1974, Jap, 61 min) Dir Kan Tan. Cast Mitsuo Ibaraki.

In the early Seventies the studios got involved in the formerly independent pinku eiga genre and the films got slicker. As ever Kan Tan was waiting and Zoom Lens saw him attempting to kick-start his own series following the success of the likes of the Apartment Wife series. The idea is simple – Ibaraki (the De Niro to Tan’s Scorsese) is a camera wielding pervert who roams Tokyo hunting for women to photograph. Sick of continuously being thwarted in his lusts he takes to forcing himself on women and photographing the results. More than that, this is a comedy. A curious, queasy mix of sexual assault and slapstick that seems more bizarre and less palatable than Tan’s previous work due to the increased budget on display with its attendant glossy photography and high production values. The series was a modest hit and a further thirteen installments were produced before the series was put out to pasture.

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Comedy, Drama, Imaginary Mexican Cinema

#189 – Puta Enojada (Angry Bitch)

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(1993, Mex, 88 min) Dir Antxón Arango. Cast Sally del Toro, Hector Mendez, Gabriel Quinn.

An Almodóvarian comedy drama. Sally del Toro is Lucia, a downtrodden housewife who dreams of her youth before she married her boorish husband Windsor (Hector Mendez, his huge moustache still present) while she maintains their spotless household. One evening, while Lucia is ironing his shirt for work, Windsor announces that he is leaving her – now that their children have moved out, he says, there is no need for him to continue to live the lie. There is someone else and has been for some time. Lucia, in a fit of fury twenty years in the making, beats Windsor to death with her iron and thus the film comes over all Ms. 45 with Lucia taking to the street with her Windsor’s revolver on a misandrist rampage. How many men will fall to her bullets before the night is out? Will Gabriel Quinn’s dashing detective Alejandro stop her? What will her brat children think? Accusations of chauvanism are steadily avoided with a film very much on Lucia’s side, cheering as she guns down the worst examples of masculinity she can find. Good fun for those with a darker sense of humour.

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Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema

#188 – Current Affairs

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(1986, US, 114 min) Dir Andy Farmer. Cast Dan Aykroyd, Christopher Plummer, Daryl Hannah, Bebe Neuwirth, Dudley Moore

High-pitched farce set in a TV newsroom. The poster, featuring a shrugging Dan Aykroyd with his trousers around his ankles, says everything you need to know about Current Affairs – the satirical potential of the rolling news story of the American intervention into a proxy war in an unnamed Middle Eastern country is lost amidst the film’s focus on the comedic potential of who’s boinking who, where they’re doing it and who’s nearly caught them at it. A roll call will suffice in place of a plot: Aykroyd at his most jabber-mouthed is Sal Danners, the coked-up show runner; Christopher Plummer is Peter Christmas, venerable anchor and voice of steadfast morality; unbeknownst to all he and his co-anchor Felicity Day (Neuwirth) have just ended a clandestine relationship, the rancour of their split simmering on air; Daryl Hannah is Mimsy Butler, the intern that everyone is chasing; Christopher Lloyd is Hal, the narcoleptic cameraman and Dudley Moore is Reginald Blueford, their British correspondent in the Middle East getting into hotter and hotter water as the film goes on. Directed in a slapdash manner by the King of Falling Upwards Andy Farmer, who either throws one hell of a party or has a detailed map of where the bodies are.

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Crime, Imaginary German Cinema

#183 – Schmähung (Abuse)

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(1975, WGer, 99 min) Dir Hans Berg. Cast Wolfgang Feebler, Patti Hess, Maximilian Singerman.

Berg, responsible for cinematic crimes in the form of Little Dieter sequels A Drum for Little Dieter and Little Dieter’s Red Balloon, began his redemption here with an adaptation of Karl Klaus Faber-Hoffer’s play, a political cause celebre at the time. The film, like play, centres on a young group of conceptual agitators who roam Berlin instigating violent arguments with the general populace. Where the play saw the action confined to a prolonged bout of ‘cleansing rage’ in a fancy restaurant where the actors frequently broke the fourth wall to roam the aisles harassing the audience, the film spreads the canvas over the whole city and includes many surreptitiously shot scenes of the actors enraging actual citizens on the street as well as the inevitable fourth wall moments of actors turning to the camera to tell the viewer what they think of them. Where the play eventually ends in an orgy of violence with the restaurants’ high class patrons turning on the group and stabbing two of them to death, the film continues past this point with the group being tracked down by the police and eventually becoming a Baader-Meinhof alike gang of terrorists though with even less of a rational political credo. A defiantly abrasive film very much of it’s time but undoubtedly influential – definite shades of Haneke’s Funny Games and Von Trier’s The Idiots here.

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Comedy, Imaginary French Cinema

#182 – Une Année à Fitou (One Year in Fitou)

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(2010, Fr, 96 min) Dir Roland Sacher. Cast Jean Dujardin, Ludivine Sagnier, Niels Arestrup, Yolande Moreau, Zoé Félix.

A little bit Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, a little bit A Good Year – either way it’s an unusual film for Roland Sacher to have ended his career with, being that he was more readily associated with taut thrillers like Dans le Mur and Operation Reptile. It seems his death – a surprise at a healthy seventy – has set this notion in stone, erasing romantic comedies like Susanne and oddities like The Pass into Heaven’s Arms from the collective memory much like obits for Sidney Lumet spotlit Serpico and forgot about The Wiz. Anyway – city traderDujardin learns of his father’s death and is left in the will a decrepid vineyard in darkest Languedoc-Roussillon run by husband and wife Arestrup and Moreau who take a dim view of this pampered dunce swanning into town with his party time sister Sagnier in tow. Of course he comes to love the place and under his attention the vineyard blossoms and of course he falls in love with feisty local girl Félix to boot. You’ve seen this film a million times already but despite that Une Année à Fitou is still a pleasure. Perhaps it’s the scenery, perhaps it’s the performances, perhaps it was my low expectations going in but it’s a perfectly fine way to spend an hour and a half on a wet Sunday afternoon.

Comedy, Imaginary Irish Cinema

#181 – Noble Journey Home of the Spaniard Francisco, The

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(2013, Sp/Ire, 110 min) Dir Phil Neeson. Cast Antonio Banderas, Domhnall Gleeson, Colm Meaney, Pat Shortt.

Historical black comedy loosely based on the life of Francisco de Cuellar, who survived the sinking of his ship during the Spanish Armada washed ashore on the west of Ireland in County Sligo and had to make his way across the country to get back to Spain. Banderas is Francisco (last name withheld to allow for artistic license), a captain in the Spanish navy who wakes to find himself beached with the wreck of his ship about himself and his compatriots either being eaten by ravens and wild dogs or being looted by the locals. He hides until the cover of night when he can steal out and try to make his way across this unfamiliar land where nobody speaks his language. He is robbed by bandits who steal the only thing he has – his clothes. Naked, he makes his way to a sympathetic farmer’s house – they lend him clothes so that he make his way unnoticed (for they are sympathetic to anyone who would wage war on the English). Upon making his way he is set upon once more by bandits – once again his clothes are lost. Such is his ‘Noble Journey Home’. A further step up in budget and ambition from director Neeson following the impressive Ti Fac and Father Faith. Banderas is excellent also, displaying once again his seldom deployed comedic talent, and the decision to retain the language barrier leads to some fantastic comedy moments.

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Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema

#180 – #DESTROY!!

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(2013, US, 93 min) Dir Jay White. Cast Daryl Sabara, Linda Hamilton, Jason Hampton, Kevin Smith.

Comedy techno-horror. Gifted young hacker Jimmy Staedtler (Sabara) spends most of his time in his bedroom with the curtains drawn, desperately trying to think of a scheme that will put him on the map and avoiding his nerdly neighbour Hal (Hampton) when he notices that his Twitter account has been updating itself with sinister messages. This is when he discovers, along with the rest of the world, the worst news possible – so much information has been pumped into Twitter that it has achieved sentience and it is now reaching out across the web to take control of anything it can. Staedtler gathers a loose confederation of fellow hackers on 4chan but will they be able to achieve what the authorities haven’t and defeat the ultimate web-spanning intelligence while the world burns outside their windows? White’s foray into technological amusements is more fantastical than Los Data but it’s an inventive if super low budgeted comedy. It’s not above a little stunt casting either – Hamilton, as Staedtler’s mother, knows a thing or two about rogue computer intelligence from the Terminator series and noted blogger and sometime director Kevin Smith gamely cameos as himself before, perhaps inevitably, being murdered by his own Twitter feed.

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Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema

#179 – Mr Kill Man

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(2011, US, 106 min) Dir Jay White. Cast Michael Keaton, Justin Long, Elizabeth Shue.

A pre-Birdman rejuvenation Keaton starred in this, Mr Kill Man, in another role that riffs on his vigilante past. Mild mannered office drone Hamilton Brody is knocked on the head during what he believes to be an attempted robbery (but was, in fact, an attempt to save him from a worse fate from a falling brick) and when he wakes up in hospital he finds himself reborn as a Death Wish style vigilante, the self-styled Mr Kill Man. So, once he’s tricked the hospital staff into believing that he’s fine, he begins patrolling the night, looking for crimes to stop and wrongs to right. The only problem with this is that he doesn’t have a gun like he thinks he does – no, he’s actually facing down hardened criminals armed with nothing more than a scowl, a trench coat and a banana held like a revolver. It’s up to Brody’s wife and son (Shue and Long) following in the family car to stop him from getting hurt and protect him from the attentions of the law. A fun little film with a great central trio all perfectly shot in a sea of drenched neons, Dutch tilts and darkened alleys.

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Black and White, Comedy, Imaginary French Cinema

#175 – Taisez-vous! (Shut Your Face!)

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(1950, Fr, 61 min, b/w) Dir Albert. Cast Albert, Romy Pice, Oscar de la Vana, Jacques Jacques.

The first full length feature from future French film luminary Albert, of Le Roi du Canard and Monsieur B dans l’Univers fame. As such Taisez-vous! is an altogether more small-scale an enterprise, set entirely within one room in a library though since said room is the vast glass and iron reading room in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris the smallness of the scale is entirely relative. Albert plays a novice librarian on his first day on the job, desperate to not let a single noise disrupt the silence but inevitably mere shushing soon isn’t enough and before long he’s bursting bubbles of gum before they pop, making everyone remove their shoes (if by force if necessary) and trying to baffle the sound of books being set down with a well aimed catapult and a pile of small cushions. It all gets out of hand, of course, culminating in the bookshelves toppling like dominoes and Albert diving madly to bodily interrupt their crashing end. The whole enterprise rests on Albert and his performance and as such the film is a success – his whole body is a wonder of physical comedy and his facial expressions alone are worth the price of admission.

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Comedy, Imaginary British Cinema

#172 – Daniel, the Fart Catcher

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(1998, GB, 93 min) Dir Alastair Hirst. Cast David Thewlis, Clive Owen, Jane Horrocks, Kevin McKidd, Ewan Bremner.

Period comedy. Apparently a fart catcher was the derogatory term for a footman or valet in the 18th and 19th century and, in this, David Thewlis is Daniel, the fart catcher for the bastardly Lord Everdice (Owen). Everdice, having lost his family’s fortunes on the baccarat tables of Europe, now desires to wed Lady Balthirst (Horrocks), the only child of the fantastically wealthy Balthirst family who remains unwed due to the fact that she’s a kleptomaniac with Tourette’s. Daniel, on the other hand, has been taken in the employ of Balthirst père to make sure this doesn’t happen and must now try his damnedest to sabotage his masters amorous advances without raising suspicion. Further complicating matters are Brush and Wash (McKidd and Bremner, reunited from Trainspotting) who, in the service of Balthirst mère who just wants her daughter wed no matter the cost, are trying valiantly (if ineptly) to sabotage Daniel’s sabotagings. To the film’s advantage it’s directed by Alastair Hirst, costume drama veteran of 1985’s Buried Hearts and the 1992 TV adaptation of J. Langdon Beetleman’s Staedtler Quartet so the form of the film is very much in keeping with the genre being mocked. The film’s disadvantages are chiefly two – one is that it’s directed by Alastair Hirst, who may have directed a good few costume dramas but hasn’t directed a comedy, and the other is that one is constantly reminded in the watching of the film of how much better Blackadder would have handled the same material.