Comedy

  • Guy Maddin – The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

    2001-2010CanadaComedyGuy MaddinMusical

    It’s the winter of 1933 in Winnipeg. In honor of Winnipeg being named the sorrow capital of the world for the Depression era for the fourth year running by the London Times, Lady Helen Port-Huntley, the legless owner of Winnipeg’s Port-Huntley Beer, is hosting and judging a contest to see which nation has the saddest music in the world, the winner to take home a $25,000 prize. Seeing as to the current Prohibition in the United States, Lady Port-Huntley has ulterior motives for the contest. Father and son, streetcar conductor Fyodor Kent and New York based musical producer Chester Kent, who both have a past connection to Lady Port-Huntley (Fyodor, a WWI veteran and former doctor, has fashioned for her an unusual pair of artificial legs apropos to her business), want to represent Canada and the United States respectively in the contest.Read More »

  • Jules Dassin – Topkapi (1964)

    1961-1970ComedyCrimeJules DassinTurkeyUSA

    David Cornelius wrote:
    “Nine years after helping define the heist movie with the 1955 masterpiece “Rififi,” director Jules Dassin took another go at the genre, this time with a comedy. “Topkapi” is a lighter, breezier affair than Dassin’s earlier picture, but it’s in no way weaker or less memorable. In fact, it’s this movie that served as the inspiration for the classic TV series “Mission: Impossible,” and yes, it’s this film’s most memorable sequence that was, um, “borrowed” for the most memorable sequence of the 1996 “Impossible” movie.Read More »

  • Claude Lelouch – L’Amour avec des si AKA In the Affirmative (1962)

    1961-1970Claude LelouchComedyCrimeFrance
    L’Amour avec des si (1962)

    Synopsis
    L’Amour avec des si is a road movie that follows a middle aged man who gives a young woman a lift. On the car radio, news bulletins warn the population against a recently escaped sadist who is known to prey on yong women. Lelouch often cuts away from the main story, if only briefly, to parallel events that are not necessarily crucial to the story but illustrate what is suggested by the radio.Read More »

  • Marco Ferreri – La Grande Bouffe [+Extra] (1973)

    1971-1980ArthouseComedyFranceMarco Ferreri

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    Synopsis
    Subversive Italian satirist Marco Ferreri directed and co-wrote (with Rafael Azcona) this grotesquely amusing French black comedy about four men who grow sick of life, and so meet at a remote villa with the goal of literally eating themselves to death. The quartet comes from various walks of life — a pilot (Marcello Mastroianni), a chef (Ugo Tognazzi), a television host (Michel Piccoli), and a judge (Philippe Noiret) — but all are successful men with excessive appetites for life’s pleasures (food is used as mere metaphor here, as graphic as that metaphor becomes).
    ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
    Read More »

  • Marco Ferreri – Touche pas à la femme blanche aka Don’t Touch the White Woman (1974)

    1971-1980ComedyFranceMarco FerreriWar

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    Synopsis
    Marcello Mastroianni stars in this French farce, an absurd “western” set in Paris, with Mastroianni as the incurably vain General George Armstrong Custer. Richard Nixon is the American president, but everyone is costumed appropriately for the previous century. Buffalo Bill (Michel Piccoli), the famous scout, is here portrayed as a limp-wristed bungler. Ugo Tognazzi plays one of Custer’s Native American opponents; he runs a curio shop selling Native artifacts made in sweatshops by white women. The climactic battle is held in a large construction excavation where Les Halles market used to be. The language the two sides use to justify their conflict is lifted from that used in the then-current Vietnam War.
    ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie GuideRead More »

  • Pedro Almodóvar – Laberinto de pasiones aka Labyrinth of Passion (1982)

    1981-1990CampComedyPedro AlmodóvarSpain

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    A camp melodrama/comedy about Sexilia (a nymphomaniac), Sadec (a gay Islamic terrorist), Riza Niro (the son of the emperor of Tiran), and Queti (the daughter of a dry-cleaner). When Riza Niro discovers that Sadec and his colleagues are after him, he disguises himself as a punk rocker, and falls in love with the stunning Sexilia, his first straight relationship. Meanwhile Queti, Sexilia’s “biggest fan”, helps Sexilia come to terms with her new life-style.Read More »

  • Aldo Fabrizi – La famiglia Passaguai AKA The Passaguai Family (1951)

    Comedy1951-1960Aldo FabriziClassicsItaly

    PLOT SYNOPSIS:
    From the comedy “Cabin 27”, by Anton Germano Rossi.
    One Sunday at the beach of Ostia of cavalier Peppe Passaguai with his wife and three children.
    A machine of Roman comicality that has its ascendency in the repertory of dialectal theater, of variety show, and in the humor of the Weekly Travaso of the ’30s, enriched by more cinematic gags and costume notations on the small bourgeoisie. Especially in the first half, there is no lack of good gags and colorful caricatures.
    (Morandini)Read More »

  • Pedro Almodóvar – La Concejala antropófaga aka The Cannibalistic Councilwoman (2009)

    2001-2010ComedyPedro AlmodóvarShort FilmSpain

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    The first short film by Pedro Almodóvar in 30 years. It’s a spin-off of his upcoming film, “Los Abrazos Rotos”. The short film was broadcast on Spanish television Feb 13 2009.

    Quote:

    This short film is part of the film-within-the-film Girls and Suitcases. Chicas y maletas is the film being shot in Los abrazos rotos aka Broken Embraces.
    La concejala antropófaga basically consists of a humorous monologue by Carmen Machi. She snorts a generous amount of coke throughout and continues her lewd observations about men begun in Chicas y maletas.Read More »

  • Yasujiro Ozu – Otona No Miru Ehon – Umarete Wa Mita Keredo AKA I Was Born, But… (1932)

    1931-1940ComedyJapanSilentYasujiro Ozu

    Otona no miru ehon – Umarete wa mita keredo / 大人の見る繪本 生れてはみたけれど

    PLOT: Two young brothers become the leaders of a gang of kids in their neighborhood. Ozu’s charming film is a social satire that draws from the antics of childhood as well as the tragedy of maturity.Read More »

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