Category Archive: Comedy Film
Sorry to Bother You
(Directed by Boots Riley) (2018) “Sorry to Bother You.” The lying phrase for the Age, expressed in a myriad settings, via a hundred platforms. Here it is the foot-in-the-door tool for telemarketer Cassius Green (played by Lakeith Stanfield, last seen by TVC as the weirdly gentrified young buck in Get Out), a down-and-out (he can only buy 40 cents’ worth of petrol for his heap of a car) who acquires a selling role and a honky patois to match, refined under the guidance of avuncular co-worker (Danny Glover) who teaches him to tele-market in a “white voice.” Soon that (nasally,…
Continue Reading →Adelaide (Short) Film Festival Thoughts
GU Film House, Hindley St. Adelaide, 15 October 2018 It’s hard to tell a story. It is an Art. And part of the art is in selection and concision. That said, there are several feature films that run for a couple of hours which we never want to end. P feels this way, for example, about Accident, and Vertigo. Others, like Picnic at Hanging Rock, seem to begin and end at exactly the right time…and place. But others are quite long enough, thank you – think Lawrence of Arabia, which L wishes would terminate early, when Lawrence’s motorcycle goes off…
Continue Reading →The Party
(Directed by Sally Potter) (2017) Contrivance is self-evident in this short, slight, by-the-numbers retro film, a kind of cross between Albee, O’Neil and The Strange Death of Liberal England, looking almost as if staged during the Thatcher years. Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) is Labor’s new Shadow Minister for Health, and pads about her inner London kitchen, preparing party snacks and smugly taking celebratory calls. Why this poisoned chalice without power is a cause for celebration is not clear. Certainly Janet’s cynical pal, April (Patricia Clarkson) doesn’t get it, but she keeps busy spraying about witless witticisms that prompt the odd nasty snicker…
Continue Reading →James Coco
Born March 21 1930 James has a fairly ho-hum ‘hagiography’ but he was sensational in A New Leaf as Henry Graham’s Uncle Harry, who regards his late brother’s appointment of him, as Henry’s guardian, to be an act of spite. Whilst TVC‘s favourite moment in the film comes when Henry (Walter Matthau) is having ‘capital’ (and ‘income’) explained to him by his attorney, Mr Beckett (William Redfield), Coco, as Uncle Harry, is priceless when Henry calls, in order to negotiate a tide-over loan till he can marry a rich heiress. You can put the link below into your search engine…
Continue Reading →Swinging Safari
(Directed by Stephan Elliott) (2018) We at TVC stand up for the 1970s but this coming-of-age-weren’t-mum-and-dad-shockers film sums up the shakiness of such a gesture. Lurching from the 1960s Eden to the next decade’s Gethsemane, this Australian comedy tries to be an amusing take on the generational poison encapsulated in Philip Larkin’s This Be The Verse. Instead, it serves up a meaningless pastiche of Don’s Party, Puberty Blues, Porky’s and The Ice Storm. Whilst the parents (Guy Pierce, Kylie Minogue, Asher Keddie, Julian McMahon and Jeremy Sims among them) seem to be living it up, most of the comedy is so broad as…
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