Ironic takes on our campy, cheesy, American pop culture (everything from B-Movies to Infomercials) have been done to death a million times over, but Amazon Women on the Moon did it best, way back in 1987. Basically a collection of comedy sketches woven together through the conceit of a late night UHF television broadcast, we're … Continue reading Amazon Women on the Moon
Tag: satire
A Wedding
Robert Altman developed a unique, instantly recognizable style that no one has ever come close to imitating well, with his enormous ensemble casts, consciously sloppy camera work and fly-on-the-wall sound design. Sometimes, that organized chaos ends up in a mess of a film Altman himself can't save, like Prêt-à-Porter, and sometimes it ends up as … Continue reading A Wedding
Pretty Village, Pretty Flame
It's hard to make a great war movie. Most of them fall into melodramatic clichés as they try to capture the suffering of men on the battlefield- a doomed proposition to begin with. How can a 2 hour movie ever hope to compare with that kind of reality? The smart ones take alternate routes- like … Continue reading Pretty Village, Pretty Flame
Allegro Non Troppo
Debussy, Dvorak, Ravel, Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Vivaldi all get to see their masterpieces turned into bawdy, earthy satire in Allegro Non Troppo, Brono Bozzetto's very Italian sendup of Fantasia. That pretty much says it all; the great Maurizio Nichetti plays "the Animator" to a pretentious Conductor, a hack Producer and an orchestra full of Old … Continue reading Allegro Non Troppo
Bernie
If Takeshi Miike, young Peter Jackson, and John Waters all had a baby together, Bernie would be the result. A satirical and cartoonishly violent film about a mentally disturbed man raised in an orphanage in search of his parents, Albert Dupontel's debut feature pushes the boundaries of good taste way past any of the safe … Continue reading Bernie