Comedy

Synopsis:
Seven long-time friends get together for a dinner. When they decide to share with each other the content of every text message, email and phone call they receive, many secrets start to unveil and the equilibrium trembles.Read More »

Damon Runyon’s Broadway fable The Lemon Drop Kid was filmed twice by Paramount Pictures, but only the 1934 version with Lee Tracy paid more than lip service to the original Runyon story. The second version, filmed in 1951, was completely retooled to accommodate the talents of Bob Hope. Known far and wide as the Lemon Drop Kid because of his fondness for that particular round, yellow confection, Hope is a bookie who finds himself deeply in debt to Florida gangster Fred Clark. Magnanimously, Clark permits Hope to head to New York to raise the money–but he’d better have the dough ready by Christmas, or else. Read More »

The staff of the Back Bay Mainline, a Boston underground newspaper that rose to prominence in the 1960s, struggles with the shifting social climate of the ’70s amid rumors that the paper is about to be sold to a media giant.Read More »

From Allmovie:
A wildly inventive and entertaining comic nightmare from former Roger Corman prodigy Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), this screwball odyssey is a ride to remember. Jeff Daniels plays clean-cut New York bond trader Charlie Driggs, who accepts a ride home from a strange but attractive lower-class woman named Lulu (Melanie Griffith). The sexy Louise Brooks lookalike doesn’t take him home, but shanghais him for a bizarre roadtrip to Virginia that includes kinky bondage sex, destruction of property, and robbery. Things get stranger when Lulu tells Charlie that her real name is Audrey and takes him home to meet her mother, asking him to pose as her husband.Read More »

Quote:
A trio of teenaged tarts try to earn money through shoplifting and prostitution scams and get into trouble deep. Hilarious scenes where the girls try to pick up gaijin at Osaka’s World Expo 70. A colorful kaleidoscope of nudity, violence, drama, yakuza machinations and music, with cameos by transvestite (transsexual?) singer/actor Ikehata Shinnosuke (aka “Peter”, see here and there), who still acts today and did voiceover for Death Note: The Last Name (!?) and Wada “Akko” Akiko who beats up yakuza thugs and croons the film’s theme song.Read More »

A rebellious stoner named Moondog lives life by his own rules.Read More »

Feeling disenchanted with life after retirement, Mitch, a brassy former surgeon, convinces mild-mannered Colin, his ex-brother-in-law, to holiday with him in Iceland. The pair set off through Reykjavik ice bars, trendy spas, and adventurous restaurants in an attempt to reclaim their youth, but they quickly discover that you can’t escape yourself,… »Read More »

Quote:
One of the best comic shorts (6 minutes) I’ve seen recently — Broken Specs by Ted Fendt, whom many people already know as the great translator of significant French texts by Godard, Straub, Moullet, Daney. It begins with shots like Caroline Champetier-era Godard, cuts to the credits the same way an ’80s Godard might. Haddon Township, New Jersey. Smashed glasses. “Mike,” the protagonist, eats NJ pizza with his family, his father with glasses pristine. Mike’s fall into the pie. A (high-school? home-from-college?) party comes next. The comedy goes far and quick. It’s a cross between the end of Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha and all of Rohmer’s Paris vu par episode Place de l’Étoile.Read More »

A short 7-minute follow-up to Broken Specs by Ted Fendt — this one called Travel Plans. There are no travel plans, per se: the protagonist comes upon a Greyhound bus ticket (spoiler alert) on a sidewalk, which might have been shed by the psyche of a friend-of-a-friend who has previously discussed her own plans to keep on moving in her travel.

When the three convene (in what appears to be the same kitchen as in Broken Specs?), a rapport is not formed, but a miniature-train station becomes the real place where none will bond, and, of course, this platform calls to mind, as a cinephile in-joke, in the same way that Moullet would do it, Gorin’s Routine Pleasures. Use what you have at hand.Read More »