Tag Archives: Black Comedy

Capsules

CAPSULE: STREET TRASH (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Ryan Kruger

FEATURING: , Donna Cormack-Thomson, Joe Vaz, Warrick Grier,

PLOT: The year is 2050, in the city of Cape Town, and it’s up to Ronald and his posse of paupers to thwart the mayor’s evil plan to liquidate the homeless.

Still from Street Trash (2024)
Street Trash (2024)

COMMENTS: You can’t choose your own dystopian-bum name, but I reckon I’d go by “Cardigan.” I might rub elbows with the likes of Chef, Wors, Pap, or Two-Bit, and meet up with Society whenever I wanted to score some designer drugs. Yessir, a whimsical existence of survival interspersed with skirmishes with police and memorial services for fallen comrades goo-ified by a deadly chemical administered by government drones.

So goes this re-imagining of 1987’s Street Trash, wherein our casually-charismatic heroes do their best amidst poverty and the threat of annihilation, preserving through brotherhood and cunning japes against the well-heeled. In the movie’s world, the middle classes (and, indeed, the working classes) have been eliminated—economically, mind you. You’ve either got more money than you could possibly know what to do with ( I’ve heard good things about “SoyCoin”, the first vegan cryptocurrency), or no money at all. The message sent, again, and again, is that wealth disparity is a grim and growing issue.

Commendably, though, Street Trash doesn’t come across as sermonizing despite its inherent preachiness. The characters are fun—particularly Chef, with his dissections of age-old children’s classics as creepy sex parables. For those hungry for practical effects, they burst from nearly every pore. Some dozen or more characters ooze DayGlo™ liquids, slough skin from hands and head, grow pustulant goiters which pop, and much more. Also to Street Trash ’24’s credit is the presence of Gary Green, unearthly star from Kruger’s feature debut Fried Barry. Green is a fascination in every shot, coming across as half a wavelength removed from his surroundings. Appropriately, Green’s character has an imaginary friend (voiced by Kruger) who is altogether blue and bizarre.

As remakes go, this isn’t quite one. Kruger’s sophomore feature belongs to a genre I’m stumbling across more often these days, in perhaps a sign of the times: a hybrid of post-apocalyptic and cutesy playfulness, taking the edges off the grim reality descending upon humanity like a sack of awful. Or, maybe a sack of offal—considering the vast quantities of sludge to be found in Street Trash.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: “

“It’s a cacophony of fever-dream nonsense that comes together without reason beyond Mayor Mostert’s hatred of the underprivileged. Kruger’s illustrating Cape Town as Tromaville, but even then, obscenities and oddball goofiness are scattershot head-scratchers… It wants to be a pure midnight movie like Mutant Blast, a government-dragging mutation comedy where anything can and does happen, but lacks consistency and command.”–Matt Donato, Daily Dead

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: HAPPY END (1967)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Vladimír Menšík, Jaroslava Obermaierová, Josef Abrhám

PLOT: Chronicling the life of one Bedřich Frydrych (Menšík), a butcher and wife-murderer, from birth to death; in this cas, everything is reversed: his “birth” starts at his execution and his “happy end” comes at infancy.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: While it’s all light and very funny, deeper and darker meanings lurk under the surface; the hero found guilty and sentenced to life—literally, in this case.

COMMENTS: “You lie down in the bed you make.” This famous epigram opens the film after the credits, all superimposed over the opening image, a close-up of our lead character, seemingly sleeping. Then a pair of hands grasps the head and what we thought was a sleeping man turns out to be a decapitated head, fresh from the guillotine. But far from being the end of the story, this turns out to be the beginning. Frydrych narrates, in the fashion of David Copperfield, his “birth,” as his head is joined to his body, now intact as the guillotine blade moves up, and he is welcomed into the world.

The central gimmick of Happy End—a narrative where the action is reversed—is more commonplace to audiences now than at the time of its production. We’ve seen works such as ‘s Memento and Tenet, Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” Gaspar Noé‘s Irréversible, and Martin Amis’ novel “Time’s Arrow,” to name a few. But just because a gimmick is familiar doesn’t guarantee that it’s executed skillfully.

Happy End benefits from several assets: a short running time (barely over 70 minutes); a clever script by Lipsky and his collaborator Miloš Macourek, and a talented pool of actors, especially Vladimír Menšík in a rare leading role 1, and he’s perfect as a murderer who is also a sort of low-rent Candide navigating his way through life.

Considered conventionally, the story is a melodrama set in the early 1900s telling the sordid tale of Bedřich Frydrych meeting young Julia (Obermaierová), whom he’ll eventually marry and eventually murder, along with her adulterous lover, Jenick (Abrhám), leading to his execution. But in this iteration, with things reversed, Frydrych is birthed and “schooled,” whereupon he enters society and is provided with a wife whom he assembles from parts stashed in a suitcase. Marital life starts out rocky when an ambulance deposits Jenick on the street, whereupon he flies up to the apartment through the window (leading to Frydrych’s nickname for him, “Mr. Birdy”). From that point on, it’s a hard life as Frydrych attempts to rid himself of Julia and Jenick to get to his own happy end.

It’s a neat trick, but even more impressive when considering that the narrative works in either direction; as told here, Happy End subverts what would be a tale of tragedy into a tale of triumph. Frydrych is still a murderer, of sorts. His “final” meeting with Jenick is taking him into the water and leaving him there, thereby getting him out of his and Julia’s lives. In conventional time, this is their first meeting; Frydrych saves him from drowning, and thereafter Jenick develops an interest in Julia. Similarly, Frydrych and Julia’s ‘first’ meeting turns into an act of creation, rather than the grisly destructive dismemberment it would normally be. Even the wordplay is subverted, as exchanges take on different meanings: “Only those who repent can enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” “That would take a very long time…”; “You’ll meet your Lord soon.” “That’s disgusting!”

The UK label Second Run premiered Happy End as an all-region Blu-ray in 2024, after its 4K restoration from the Czech National Film Archive. Along with a booklet essay by film researcher Jonathan Owen, the release includes a 30 minute video essay by film critic Cerise Howard and an episode of The Projection Booth Podcast with Mike White, Kat Ellinger and Ben Buckingham serves as commentary.

Happy End

Happy End
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WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…as conceptually and formally radical, and virtuosic, as any helmed by the New Wave’s celebrated, most outré directors – your Chytilovás, Němeces, Jakubiskos, Juráčeks, et al.”–Cerise Howard, Senses of Cinema

  1. Menšík is a recurring face in Czech cinema of the 1960s, a Czech “that guy” character actor glimpsed in The Cassandra Cat, The Cremator, and Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up And Scald Myself With Tea, among others. ↩︎

Apocryphally Weird

49*. BEAU IS AFRAID (2023)

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Recommended

“It’s like a Jewish ‘Lord of the Rings,’ but he’s just going to his mom’s house.”― Ari Aster

DIRECTED BY: Ari Aster

FEATURING: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Parker Posey, Armen Nahapetian

PLOT: On the anniversary of his father’s death, Beau Wasserman misses his flight to visit his mother; his guilt is magnified by his mother’s surprise death by falling chandelier. He attempts to attend the funeral (to be held immediately in accordance with Jewish tradition), but he is waylaid crime in his anarchic neighborhood, an accident that leaves him in the care of a couple who seem to be using him to replace their dead son, and a wandering theater troupe that spurs thoughts of another possible life. When he finally arrives at his mother’s house, he is surprised by both the appearance of a lost flame from his youth and by a revelation about his mother’s fate that calls into question every aspect of his existence.

Still from beau is afriad (2023)

BACKGROUND:

  • Following his successes in the horror genre with Hereditary and Midsommar, Aster determined that his next project would be a comedy. This is that film.
  • The feature is massively expanded from a short Aster made in 2011.
  • Among Aster’s descriptions of the picture: a “nightmare comedy,” a “Freudian Odyssey,” and “if you pumped a 10-year-old full of Zoloft, and [had] him get your groceries.” Co-star Lane called it “the Jewish Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
  • The animation was created by Cristobal Leon and Joaquin Cociña, whose work Aster discovered in their Apocryphally-enshrined film The Wolf House.
  • The logo for Mona’s corporation appears among the vanity production cards at the start of the movie. Some have suggested this means she is controlling the very film you are watching.
  • Winner of two 2023 Weirdcademy Awards, including Weirdest Picture and Weirdest Scene for what we chose to call “Phallic Attic.” Phoenix also grabbed a nomination for Weirdest Actor.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Well, this site’s readers didn’t declare it the year’s weirdest movie for nothing. When Beau’s mother coerces him into her attic, he is confronted with three terrifying visions: an emaciated creature chained in the dark who might be a lost twin or an alternate version of himself, the homicidal mercenary who has been chasing him across the country, and (most shockingly) enormous, grotesque monolithic male genitals that throb and scream and kill like the brain bug in Starship Troopers. Beau has been emotionally neutered his whole life, and this is the moment that suggests where his lost manhood may have been this whole time.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Crossing Hell Street; phallic attic

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Beau’s very existence is a nightmare, from the moment that he is born with a wail-inducing smack, and even dating back to the moment of conception that stopped his father’s weak heart. What unspools here is three hours of the intense and unrelenting discomfort that Beau endures just by virtue of being alive. He manages to be both the most luckless man who ever lived and a person who is thoroughly incapable of coping with misfortune. Aster concocts the most elaborate Jewish-mother joke ever told, and he never relents in demonstrating just how awful things can get, and how they can still manage to get worse.

Original trailer for Beau is Afraid (2023)

COMMENTS: Beau Wasserman’s life is governed by a few simple Continue reading 49*. BEAU IS AFRAID (2023) →