August 1962, and one day is much like the next. La Dolce Vita starring Anita Ekberg is playing in cinemas and apartment block janitor uncle Simon hosts the in-house morning radio show with news, advice and music. The Communist Youth League is organizing a competition. The winning team of the Talent Show can take part in the World Youth Meeting far away in Helsinki. Naturally, the winners have already been decided. This musical satire built on reworked hits and gags parodies both the Kádár system and those who look back on it with nostalgia.
Category: Comedy
An aging beauty queen reluctantly escorts her daughter and friends back to Paris, Texas — her home, which she mysteriously fled a decade earlier — to oversee a beauty pageant in this campy road dramedy.
Actually the comedy of unemployment, which is defined as possibly the worst, or maybe the best, thing that ever happened to this film’s group of protagonists: a middle-aged loan officer, his successful wife, a champion of professional joblessness (and mountain-climbing enthusiast), and the employment agency professional who falls passionately in love with him. This film’s honest work involves potatoes, ditch-diggers, a wheelbarrow, doomed love, jam in bed, and gunfire involving dueling employment agencies.
Four Canadian girls skip off university to get to the wedding of one of their number’s relatives across the border in Portland. After the event one stays on with a guy she’s met, one returns home to get ready for her own wedding, and the other two head off for San Diego in a newly acquired Cadillac in search of the usual things.
Vickie Adderly is an enterprising young newspaper reporter looking for that big story to boost her career. A chance encounter with an adventurous drifter leads her into a world she never imagined… on the streets of L.A. Suddenly, her days are filled with a cast of colorful characters, including Marilyn, an eccentric femme fatale, and a bewildered Russian. Add the attentions of a handsome admirer and it’s easy to see how Vickie gets her story and a whole lot more in this charming romantic fable.
Race with the Devil director Starrett’s crime-comedy pairs Stacy Keach and Frederic Forrest as working-class West Virginia good ol’ boy brothers who impulsively decide to leave behind their lives of hard labor, relocate to Washington, D.C., and try to get-rich-quick by teaming up with some local stick-up men, with the dream of opening a seafood restaurant called The Blue Grotto. Keach and Forrest, eventually joined by a charming Margot Kidder, exude hillbilly charisma; Starrett gives us a finale for the ages with a shoot-out set in a building undergoing demolition; and the screenplay is co-written by none other than a pseudonymous Terrence Malick, who here anticipates the ”Take this job and shove it” opening of his Days of Heaven.
Within a few years, Chiu, a small-time crook, has become a gang leader. But his professional ambitions are actually quite different: he wants to leave illegality behind and make a career for himself and his lover in Canada – as a chef. However, this craft must first be learned and Chiu’s talent in the field of cooking leaves much to be desired.
Set during the first period of independence for Latvia (1918–1940), the film’s plot revolves around a shrewd business man Edgars Ceplis, who establishes a clay brick business with the aim of exporting and building on his already considerable wealth. At first a fantastic success he soon becomes aware that his empire is crumbling beneath him due to a contamination of the clay, which makes the bricks unstable. He narrowly escapes defeat, however, by manipulating those around him, successfully extracting himself from the business before anyone discovers that there is anything wrong and the company collapses under a new director.