Tag: comedy
Florence Foster Jenkins
Friday, May 6th, 2016 Film Reviews,Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944) entered my consciousness in the early 1990s when I first heard her rendition of the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute. This shrieking, tuneless performance of one of the most challenging pieces in the soprano’s repertoire is the stuff of high comedy. In 2003 Naxos issued an album […]
A Month of Sundays & Pawno
Friday, April 29th, 2016 Film Reviews,‘Fun’ is not a term one associates with contemporary Australian cinema, which has mistaken humourlessness for high seriousness. I’m not pining for slapstick comedy, only for films that can hold an up-tempo mood for more than a minute at a time. The Dressmaker came close last year, while Last Cab to Darwin – a film […]
Eddie the Eagle
Friday, April 29th, 2016 Film Reviews,Eddie the Eagle may be the year’s most shameless piece of feel-good filmmaking. Many viewers, myself included, usually feel pretty bad at the prospect of another feel-good film, but it would take a special kind of wowser to deny the entertainment value of this tale of glorious failure. What do I mean by a “feel-good” […]
The Lady in the Van
Thursday, March 10th, 2016 Film Reviews,Casting Maggie Smith in anything is a reliable way of collecting a few favourable reviews and a tidy sum at the the box office. Make it an Alan Bennett script and the percentages keep improving. And so we have The Lady in the Van, a likeable film with a few fanciful touches that should elicit […]
Alliance Francaise French Film Festival 2016
Friday, March 4th, 2016 Film Reviews,Last year’s French Film Festival reprised three classics, including Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937). This year the retro special is Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris) (1963). By coincidence this is a film I watched again only recently, after reading Alberto Moravia’s A Ghost at Noon (1954) – a book that is chiefly known today […]
Hail, Caesar!
Wednesday, February 24th, 2016 Film Reviews,“Comedy deserves to be taken seriously,” wrote Aldous Huxley, in 1924, before going on to denounce those “lesser exponents” of the genre who specialise in “triviality, ugliness and vulgarity.” Three years later The Jazz Singer ushered in a new era of ‘talkies’ that would change the way Hollywood made comedies, as slapstick and sight gags […]
Anomalisa
Thursday, February 4th, 2016 Film Reviews,It gets progressively harder to argue with Ecclesiastes 1:9: “there is no new thing under the sun”, but Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson have shaken my faith, with Anomalisa. It is the story of a dour, middle-aged Englishman named Michael Stone who has lived in the United States for many years without losing his accent. […]
Looking for Grace
Thursday, January 28th, 2016 Film Reviews,Looking for Grace is yet another Australian feature that makes a virtue out of vagueness. A small, quirky film, it unfolds like a detective story that never builds up dramatic momentum. The script is permeated with deadpan comedy that echoes the disjointed, inarticulate way so many Australians interact, but there are no great insights to […]
The Hateful Eight
Friday, January 22nd, 2016 Film Reviews,Each new film by Quentin Tarantino generates a storm of anticipation. We know what to expect, but initially The Hateful Eight took me by surprise. It is a long movie, divided into chapters, with an old-fashioned intermission. Instead of the usual gore fest the first half is all dialogue and scene-setting. If this appeals more […]
The Bélier Family
Wednesday, January 6th, 2016 Film Reviews,For a people convinced of their intellectual superiority over the rest of the planet, the French have an incurable fondness for low-brow comedy and feel-good stories. Perhaps they’re just like us, after all. This year’s box office smash in France was La Famille Bélier, a comedy, like The Intouchables (2011) that finds humour and inspiration […]