Four socialites unexpectedly clash: heiress Brooke Carter runs into gambler Johnny Spanish at the race track while playboy Michael O. Pritchard nearly runs into stage star Kitty O’Kelly with his car. Backstage at Kitty’s show, it turns out she and Brooke are old friends who attended public school together. The foursome do the town, accompanied by Brooke’s companion Elizabeth, who throws herself at Michael’s butler and chauffeur Rodney James.
Category: Comedy
Jean-Claude Lauzon’s highly praised film tells the strange story of Léolo, a young boy from Montréal. Told from Léolo’s point-of-view, the film depicts his family of lunatics and Léolo’s attempts to deal with them. Not one individual in the boy’s life is well adjusted. His brother, after being beaten up, spends the film bulking up on growth protein. The grandfather hires half-naked girls to bite off his toenails and, in a brutal rage, almost kills Léolo. As he witnesses his family decay around him, Léolo retreats into himself and the fantasy world he has constructed. In response to the weirdness of his daily life, Léolo creates a little mental mayhem of his own which Lauzon renders in an amazing series of free-form, surreal images.
Mamá Cora is about 80 years old and she has three sons and a daughter. Mamá lives with one of them, unfortunately, the one who is in the worst economic position. One day, all the members of the family have a reunion to celebrate an anniversary. In the middle of the whole thing, an awkward question appears out of nowhere: Who’s going to be Mamá Cora’s heir? Who is going to take care of her during her last days in this world?. The answer is not easy and it doesn’t take too long for the members of this bizarre family to start a terrible and yet hilarious fight. However, in the middle of the whole thing, they’re interrupted by some disturbing breaking news.
An English professor interested in photography is given a pair of special sunglasses by an Austrian colleague. To his surprise and boyish delight, he discovers they’re X-ray specs, which allow him to see through people’s clothes! As he ventures across Europe, he is pursued by spies who’re after the glasses. He eventually manages to elude them, and settles down to a life of ease, ogling naked women on beaches.
Danny, onto his 49th share house and in his mid 30s is probably ready for some privacy and independence but is still attracted to the friends and oddball characters that makes sharing a house so attractively horrible. We travel with Danny as he moves through shared houses in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Danny’s life is further complicated by the presence of rental goons despatched by landlords in search of unpaid rent and the police chasing him in relation to a credit card debt thanks to a dodgy housemate. Proving he is not responsible is harder than lying about his identity.
In April, 1975, civil war breaks out; Beirut is partitioned along a Moslem-Christian line. Tarek is in high school, making Super 8 movies with his friend, Omar. At first the war is a lark: school has closed, the violence is fascinating, getting from West to East is a game. His mother wants to leave; his father refuses. Tarek spends time with May, a Christian, orphaned and living in his building. By accident, Tarek goes to an infamous brothel in the war-torn Olive Quarter, meeting its legendary madam, Oum Walid. He then takes Omar and May there using her underwear as a white flag for safe passage. Family tensions rise. As he comes of age, the war moves inexorably from adventure to tragedy.
In this extremely funny satire on Soviet bureaucracy, the protagonist, a hapless author, attempts again and again to get his editors to accept his manuscript — a novel with the title “Blue Mountains or Tieshan.” The story unfolds with the inevitability of a fairy tale in which a naive hero is painfully being initiated into the ways of the world, and while the would-be author wanders through the hallways of his publishers, we in turn learn a lot about the crumbling Soviet system and the inactivity of its bureaucratic functionaries. By Hollywood standards, the film may be slow and repetitive, but it is precisely the repetition of tragicomic situations that bring the film to the heights of a Beckettian absurdity.
When a naïve young man and his lazy best friend attempt to rob a bank, they find another robber has beaten them to the punch. After the original robber and the best friend are killed, the young man serendipitously gets the 80 million yen. But when he accidentally stabs an innocent hairdresser, a cause-and-effect situation quickly spirals out of control. Meanwhile, a trio of yakuzas mistakenly kills a powerful mob boss. As their paths continue to cross, the story displays some interesting parallels about just-out-of-reach redemption and the unlikelihood of atoning for one’s sins, all delivered in a black comedy package.