Tag Archives: Comedy

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CAPSULE: THE BLISS OF MRS. BLOSSOM (1968)

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DIRECTED BY: Joseph McGrath

FEATURING: Shirley MacLaine, Richard Attenborough, James Booth

PLOT: Mrs. Blossom, the bored wife of an eccentric and oblivious bra manufacturer, hides her lover in the attic.

Still from The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom (1968)

COMMENTS: Oh joy, a ‘60s European sex comedy! Wait, this can’t be right, where are the boobies? (Checks label.) Oh damn and blast, we brought home a British sex comedy by mistake! That means not even a peep of skin, only coy hints of sex, and a plot that’s rather stingy with the comedy too. Mrs. Blossom is an amusing and light-hearted romp, though, and a quaint period piece for die-hard mondo-60s collectors. Just be advised, even though Shirley MacLaine headlines, her performance here is far from Terms of Endearment caliber—she almost stifles a yawn between lines. As for Attenborough, he does his mutton-chopped best to liven things up a notch. Presumably the paychecks kept the cast in tea and crumpets until they could wend their way to loftier productions.

Meanwhile the sets do most of the acting. Beautifully shot at screwy camera angles in psychedelic Technicolor, the Blossoms’ mansion is decorated like it was intended as a water-colored playhouse for children’s  theater, while outside, London has never looked more swinging. McGrath partitions the pedestrian narrative between slices of abrupt, surreal chaos: gauzy garden-swing dream sequences, Three Musketeers homages, a St. George and dragon fantasy. And just when you’re about to give up on the movie, it pulls a cameo out of its hip pocket (Cleese was paid by the microsecond to portray an unhelpful postal clerk, and then was gone before he could outshine the rest of the production).

While Mr. Blossom (Attenborough) is a workaholic bra magnate, Mrs. Blossom (MacLaine) is a listless trophy wife and part-time portrait artist. When her sewing machine breaks down, the factory sends ‘round the blandly charming repairman Ambrose Tuttle (James Booth), whom Mrs. Blossom undertakes to seduce—but actually adopts, as one would a stray kitten—over an improbable game of pool. She later hides him in her home’s attic, which is spacious enough to furnish as a second home. There the situation stabilizes for years, while Mr. Blossom remains obliviously cuckolded. He is more fixated on his music fetish—not that he plays music, but he air-conducts on the balcony to prerecorded opera. Meanwhile, a sewing machine repairman’s disappearance is apparently noteworthy enough to attract detectives, investigating in a sputtering sidecar of a subplot.

So far this film doesn’t sound very invigorating, but its saving grace is an air of magical realism that feels like it might have been ad-libbed by the crew on the spot. Scotland Yard detective Dylan (UK acting legend ) turns in a campy performance of dogged investigation while remaining just inches shy of exposing the infidelity. But it’s when we meet Mr. Blossom’s shrink, Dr. Hieronimous Taylor (UK game show host Bob Monkhouse) that we get a real glimpse of weirdness. Dr. Taylor’s office interior set, equipped with piles of vaguely-threatening cyberpunk devices and animated neon pub signs twinkling and spinning in the background, would not look out of place in A Clockwork Orange. Mr. Blossom is seeing a shrink because, you see, he keeps hearing strange noises in his home—due to Ambrose, who is as stealthy as a brass band falling down stairs—and noticing that things keep disappearing, so of course he must be going daft.

While The Bliss of Mrs Blossom isn’t going to top anyone’s weird movie list, the surreal bits and whimsical plot threads accumulate to ultimately charm its way into quirky movie territory. Between the fantasy sequences with a romanticized theme and the gadget-filled psychiatrist’s office, you might be tempted to think Terry Gilliam saw this on his way to making Brazil. You can tell that somebody loved this movie and had ambitions for it that it could not deliver, but it’s so sweet and cheery, even to the end, that you can’t stay disappointed in it. Deep and meaningful cinema this isn’t, but it’s an interesting page in 1960s UK mod film history.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Frankly, the whole film was a mess, a colourful mess but all over the place just the same.. The jokes were mild at best, but in the hope that we wouldn’t notice they were placed in a selection of near-psychedelic visuals… Joseph McGrath worked up a selection of visuals which truly took advantage of the Technicolor, and in opening up the play to downright oddness, this was quite something to behold, if not great at all.”–Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image

 

 

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MR. MAGORIUM’S WONDER EMPORIUM (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Zach Helm

FEATURING: Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Jason Bateman, Zach Mills

PLOT: Mr. Magorium, who has run his magical toy store for nearly three centuries, prepares for his imminent departure from the earthly realm, but his plans to hand the reins over to store clerk and aspiring composer Mahoney are endangered by her ambivalence, the suggestions of a straight-laced accountant, and the protests of the store itself.

Still from Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (1993)

COMMENTS: From Dictionary.com:

whim·​sy [ˈ(h)wim-zee] n. 1: capricious humor or disposition; extravagant, fanciful, or excessively playful expression: “a play with lots of whimsy.” 2: an odd or fanciful notion. 3: anything odd or fanciful; a product of playful or capricious fancy: “a whimsy from an otherwise thoughtful writer.”

Zach Helm has an undisguised interest in finding joy amidst the frustrations of life. His screenplay for Stranger Than Fiction focused on a person who has spent his whole life in the grey and comes late to discovering the beauty of leading a more colorful existence. Here, making his directorial debut, he presents a world drenched in color and offers us a character who revels in it, until she doesn’t, and has to find her way back. The former film looked wistfully at the joyful world that was lost. This time around, we need to be right in the heart of that joy, and Helm’s weapon of choice is whimsy. Truckloads of it.

Our setting, identified in the title, is a sort of mad mashup of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes. It’s a hyperactive place, perpetually bustling with children who have somehow pried themselves away from their PlayStations so that they can indulge in the unexpected surprises of the toyshop. The toys come to life. Any plaything you desire can be found in a great big book. Bouncy balls are always on the lookout for an escape opportunity. There is always something going on, so much so that the movie is its own Easter egg generator. It’s the kind of a place where dinosaur skeletons peek out the window, Playmobil figures do actual construction, and Kermit the Frog does his weekly shopping. (That’s Kermit himself, looking strangely embarrassed to be stared at, or maybe just to be in the movie.) It’s fun, and then it’s fun, and ultimately it’s FUN, DAMMIT. 

All this is overseen by an enormously affected Hoffman. With eyebrows to rival Thufir Hawat and an Ed Wynn-style lisp that would be mincing under any other circumstances, he’s carefully constructed to be eccentric. Sometimes that’s refreshing, best exemplified by his equanimous attitude toward the impending end of his life. He’s not at all cynical, but eager to indulge in pleasures large and small right to the very end. On the other hand, he’s liberally draped with quirks: wearing loud patterns, bantering with his zebra roommate, and obsessed with hot dog buns. This can have mixed results: I groaned Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MR. MAGORIUM’S WONDER EMPORIUM (2007) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: LEONOR WILL NEVER DIE (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Martika Ramirez Escobar

FEATURING: Sheila Francisco, Bong Cabrera, Rocky Salumbides, Anthony Falcon

PLOT: After a conk on the noggin, an aging filmmaker finds herself inside her unfinished action movie script.

Still from Leonor Will Never Die (2022)

COMMENTS: Leonor Will Never Die is two movies for the price of one: a gritty revenge-based actioner (Ang Pagbabalik ng Kwago, “The Return of the Owl”) wrapped inside a charming dramedy about an eccentric grandmother. Actually, it may be even more than two movies, because there’s also a ghost running around, a pregnant man, another amateur version of the action movie, and some meta-movie noodling and behind-the-scenes footage of this movie as it’s being made. And a couple random musical numbers thrown in, too. The movie is as overpopulated and ramshackle as the cramped shantytowns where much of Kwago takes place.

With all of that going on, Leonor might be forgiven for confusing audiences accustomed to straightforward fare. The film flirts with a number of reality-collides-with-fiction conceits—including a hint of Author as God, when kindly Leonor apologizes to one of her own creations for the troubled life she gave her and confesses, “I also lost my son.” Leonor sometimes rewrites the movie-within-the-movie as it’s happening, by clacking her fingers on an imaginary typewriter: Renwaldo’s final showdown with the vicious criminal Mayor goes through multiple iterations before reaching its climax. And Leonor has particular trouble figuring out how to end itself; Escobar says that she went through twenty-five edits before finally settling on the version we see today. You could argue that Leonor has too many ideas and strays from narrative and thematic rigor, but the ragged impulses and loose ends are a large part of what makes it a weird, and wonderful, experience.

I shouldn’t overstress how supposedly confusing Leonor is, however; it’s more joyously jumbled. At its core, the movie tells the story of how Leonor’s experiences shape the script that she writes as a way to redeem her own personal history. The movie’s surrealistic intrusions are gentle and don’t undermine its crowd-pleasing aspects. Shelia Francisco, frumping around in a floral muumuu with a kindly smile, holds it all together as the title character. In reality, she’s a pathetic, fading has-been on her way out; in the world of her screenplay, on the other hand, she’s an omniscient (but still troubled) entity. The movie-within-the-movie is the real wonder here: it’s an affectionate tribute and parody of the action films that dominated the Philippines’ domestic cinema during the Marcos regime. You’ve probably never seen one of these (though if you’re lucky you’ve caught a Weng Weng movie), but you’ll immediately recognize the tropes from revenge-minded B-movies everywhere: melodramatic acting, intense closeups, overdramatic lighting, eye-candy leading ladies, men’s shirts unbuttoned to their navels, energetic but incoherent editing, and sadistic violence (it’s good thing for Leonor’s script that Filipinos traditionally have hammers and nails hanging on their living room walls). The fight scenes are brutal, but fun: the kind where every thug knows a little kung fu, and you can’t fling a combatant five feet without them shattering the breakaway furniture. Leonor’s troubled relations with her own family highlight the appeal of this morally uncomplicated fantasy world where good guys protect the weak from predators and inevitably triumph over evil, and deaths are never in vain. In this way, Leonor settles into its main themes: the way stories inform our understanding of the world; the genuine value of escapism, both personal and communal; and, finally, how we all are like film editors, cutting and pasting and recasting our memories to fit the story we want to tell about ourselves.

Spoiler: Leonor will actually die. But Leonor Will Never Die will exist as long as Blu-rays are sold or movies are streamed. It has already joined the immortals in the eternal world of cinema.

The packed Blu-ray contains trailers for this and other Music Box releases, an Escobar commentary, a “making of” interview with the filmmaker, a video diary about the film’s festival run, three stills galleries, and the director’s 2014 short “Pusong Bato,” which references a lot of the same strands of Filipino cinema nostalgia that will appear in Leonor, but adds a woman falling in love with a rock.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Packed with self-reflexive humor and a deep reverence for the art of filmmaking, ‘Leonor Will Never Die’ establishes writer/director Martika Ramirez Escobar as an artist with a singular voice and bright future in halls of weird cinema.”–Marya E. Gates, RogerEbert.com, (festival screening)

Capsules

CAPSULE: FP 4EVZ (2023)

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FP 4EVZ is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

Recommended*

*: Frrlz

DIRECTED BY: Jason Trost

FEATURING: Jason Trost, , , Leigh Myles, Mike O’Gorman

PLOT: The wet shit threatens to 187 the FP, and so JTRO and CHAI-T must B.E.A.T. into the futuredoo with their daughter to save the nowsies.

COMMENTS: Let me be abundantly clear: there is no reason for this movie to be this good. No, we are not talking love-child of and Harron—that’d be a real masterpiece. FP 4EVZ, a passion-continuation of Jason Trost’s lifelong FP passion-project, is not high cinema, or even middle cinema. But it’s a refreshing blast to the face, made in the difficult style of haute stupidité. The premise is idiotic—as it has been, it seems, for over a decade now; for those of you not in the knowsies, Trost has been exploring the intersectionality of dystopian living and DDR (re-named in this universe “BEAT”, probably for legal reasons, but also because “Balance/Expeditiousness/Aggression/Tempo” is a delightfully silly sum-up of that whole arrow-stomp-dance nonsense) for his entire professional career.

I have not seen the first three parts of the FP franchise, but that’s okay: this chapter begins with a thorough recap of the machinations so far. Space Ducks once lorded over humanity, which was saved by a visitation from a cosmic entity who brought with it a comet-ful of booze. Civilizations have risen, and fallen. Humanity—or at least, sober humanity—is hanging on by its finger-nails. JTRO, the scion of a BEAT bloodline, is married to the warrior queen CHAI-T, and their daughter CHAI-LATTAY is the chosen one. Chosen to what? Dance. Dance at the direction of flying neon arrows.

There are many flying neon arrows. And countless examples of dum-dum “modern” speak rips and dialogues. No other framework could allow a destiny child be praised as having “the body of a mortal—but the blood and soul of a duck.” Or for a long-dormant thinking machine to not only insist on being referred to by name (“Monsieur Computer”), but sport a stupid beret on its Frenchie AI head graphic.

I eventually gave up on scribbling down the saga-style exposition, the pun-soaked quips, and the genuinely heartfelt speeches, all of which were crafted in an hilarious pastiche of idiotic slang from the past decade. It was all delivered ably—and delivered in all seriousness. And that is the main reason why FP 4EVZ works as well as it does: it never winks at the audience. All the DDR combat, the plot-twists, the CGI desolation: never once did I disbelieve. So take my recommendation with a few grains of salt, perhaps, but Trost’s latest outing is something to revel in—preferably, as they themselves advise before the feature, with at least a few drinks in you.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Z grade in the best of ways. Damn near every shot takes place in front of a green screen, with some cheap After Effects to populate the space. But it’s clear they’re going for a certain aesthetic. It’s all cheese, all the time. There are never any weird elements fading in and out; the effects are well-executed, just a little strange and cheap.”–Tyler Nichols, JoBlo (contemporaneous)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, Shorts

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ONE SOLDIER (1999)

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DIRECTED BY: Steven Wright

FEATURING: Steven Wright, Sandi Carroll

PLOT: A Civil War soldier looks back upon his life and contemplates the nature of human existence in the days leading up to his execution for murder.

Still from One Soldier (1999)

COMMENTS: For years, Steven Wright built his comedy empire on peerless one-liners that required 5 seconds to fully sink in and another 30 to stop laughing. Long before successors like Mitch Hedberg and Demetri Martin picked up the torch, Wright was unspooling hour-long sets built out of dozens upon dozens of jokes that lay like unexploded mines waiting to go off. It’s frankly all I can do to resist the temptation to just spend the whole review quoting him. (I’ll allow myself this one famous joke for the unacquainted: “I spilled spot remover on my dog… and now he’s gone.”) This earned him many opportunities to apply his hangdog stare and drier-than-the-Sahara monotone to a variety of projects as a supporting actor and voice artist, but there have been fewer opportunities to try to translate his voice as a writer to the screen. In 1988, he wrote, produced, and starred in “The Appointments of Dennis Jennings,” the tale of a hapless psychiatric patient that earned Wright that year’s Academy Award for live-action short. That success under his belt, he then waited 11 years to make another short, this time assuming the director’s mantle as well.

The initial joke is that, even though his milieu is now the American Civil War, Steven Wright in a Union uniform is still Steven Wright. The elements are in place for a “Drunk History”-style collision of history and comedy, as mournful violins accompany Wright’s walks through an empty New England landscape. But when he launches into his narration in his classic disaffected drone, the subject matter is immediately more philosophical, touching on the inscrutability of life and the inevitability of death. Soon enough, his wife Becky joins in with her own reflection, and each hints that his fate may already be sealed. Essentially, “One Soldier” is like if “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” were a comedy sketch.

Of course, Steven Wright can’t not be funny, or at least not indulge his quirkier side. Particularly as regards his fate, which he anticipates by plucking petals off a flower. Even his deepest musings are tinged with silliness, like his recollections of his job in the war, playing the concertina to soothe the nerves of the top brass. A heartwarming reunion with his wife is tempered somewhat by his insistence on wearing a harmonica, even during intimate moments. And there’s a comedian’s love of the absurd, best typified by this line of dialogue which is no less bizarre when heard in context: “When she said the number 25 in German, it drove me wild.”

Wright’s soldier is a philosopher who hasn’t done the work and doesn’t have the language to describe the uncertainties he feels. That makes “One Soldier” a most unusual vanity project: it can’t carry the burden of the weighty issues it confronts, so it leans into that weakness. But there’s still something haunting that comes through, perhaps best exemplified by the film’s final thoughts: “First you don’t exist, then you exist, then you don’t exist. So this whole thing is just an interruption from not existing.” Steven Wright finds the comedy in the tragic notion that a person’s last thought on this earth is that he’s been thinking too much about the meaning of life.

“One Soldier” is available as a bonus feature on “When the Leaves Blow Away,” a recording of a one-hour Wright stand-up set from 2007.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is a fine blend of deep theological ponderings, modern Zen koans, and comic schtick. Like Wright’s live stand-up, the film’s slow pace and ponderous subject matter have a rather hypnotic effect, drawing one into the skewed reality of Wright’s brilliant mind.” – J. C. Shakespeare, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by RobinHoodsun, who mused “it was very very weird and it left me with a starnge feeling lol.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)