Sight & Sound

[ianthemovie]

Well, if you look at the first S&S poll, one sees that it already started incredibly bad, not a single film from before 1960 was named ...

I'm not sure I follow you here. The first S&S poll happened in 1952 and so was made up entirely of films before 1960, right?

That first list is indeed pretty fascinating to consider. Of the twelve films listed (the result of several ties), more than half were silent classics like Battleship Potemkin and Greed, and of the small handful of sound-era films two were only a five or so years old at the time: Bicycle Thieves, which had the #1 spot, and Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story, a movie that has been all but forgotten about (all the way up at #5, no less). And Citizen Kane hadn't yet secured a place, indicating that it was still something of a cult film at that point (though it did tie for thirteenth place).

[ianthemovie]

Something I always noted was that several comedies, which are very funny (and actually making a really funny film is already a kind of art for itself), are not that interesting in the directing department. And this goes for Chaplin, Marx Bros, De Funes, Mel Brooks, early Woody Allen, Monty Pythons, Zucker/Abrahms/Zucker and others. For this reason alone it is a bit more difficult to compare comedies with all other kind of films.

This is perceptive, and I would mostly agree. The underlying idea here is that most of these film polls are largely auteur-driven, on top of which comedy has almost always been seen as a lowbrow genre. So unless the comedy in question is by an acclaimed auteur like Chaplin, Keaton, Lubitsch, Sturges, et al., it's probably going to be hard for it to achieve canonization, no matter how funny it may be.

[MichaelB]

In what specific way is The General "slapstick"?

[Lighthouse]

Well, if you look at the first S&S poll, one sees that it already started incredibly bad, not a single film from before 1960 was named ...

I'm not sure I follow you here. The first S&S poll happened in 1952 and so was made up entirely of films before 1960, right?

That was a joke of course ...

And The General belongs to this era in a wider sense, actually I see enough slapstick aspects in it. But my remark was a more general one, just replace "great time for slapstick" with "great time for comedy of all sorts".

[Maltic]

I have no idea why a top 10 with only more recent films should be less challenging for your casual movie-goer?

And more conservative, yes, but without these negative connotations.

I was comparing the actual lists (critics and directors, respectively)

Arguably, Taxi Driver and The Godfather are less challenging because the New Hollywood aesthetic is what most of us were brought up with.

The directors' top 10 also has Bicycle Thieves, a film that hasn't really been in fashion since the 1950s, so again, who's more conservative?

[knives]

In what specific way is The General "slapstick"?

How is it not? That’s a really strange claim to me since it is always labeled as slapstick (as is Keaton)

[MichaelB]

Slapstick is a very specific type of physical comedy whose essence is exaggerated physical actions in general and violence in particular. Little or nothing of Keaton's scrupulously realistic approach to The General strikes me as having much to do with slapstick.

For instance, can you imagine it accompanied by a typical bouncy "slapstick" music score, regularly punctuated by swanee-whistle "wheees"? It would be utterly grotesque.

[senseabove]

So you're saying that The General in particular is not slapstick, even if Keaton in general (*badum*) is? Because, um, I'll just point out that Keaton's autobiography is titled My Wonderful World of Slapstick.

[domino harvey]

Slapstick is a very specific type of physical comedy whose essence is exaggerated physical actions in general and violence in particular. Little or nothing of Keaton's scrupulously realistic approach to The General strikes me as having much to do with slapstick.

For instance, can you imagine it accompanied by a typical bouncy "slapstick" music score, regularly punctuated by swanee-whistle "wheees"? It would be utterly grotesque.

Might I interest you in the thousands of Google search results that disagree?

[colinr0380]

but I note that neither you nor anybody else rose to the challenge of naming a post-2000 comedy that unquestionably rivals The General.

He he, yes that's a good one, and not easy to answer.

Other than Roy Andersson, only Freddy Got Fingered comes to mind.

[Matt]

Well, if you look at the first S&S poll, one sees that it already started incredibly bad, not a single film from before 1960 was named ...

I'm not sure I follow you here. The first S&S poll happened in 1952 and so was made up entirely of films before 1960, right?

That was a joke of course ...

Not sure I would trust any explanation of comedy coming from someone who fumbled their own punch line this badly.

Anyway, as we are careening off topic, I want to get pedantic and state that "slapstick" is actually named after a device used in commedia dell'arte to imitate a violent slapping sound. So the exaggerated and bumbling violence of slapstick is exactly what defines it. I would say Keaton's film work is more a commentary on or subversion of slapstick as he so often sets up a complicated physical situation that should result in extreme or exaggerated violence but then evades it in a deadpan, unexpected way that elicits the laughter of surprise and of expectations being upended. I'm thinking of the various gags involving the train in The General or the famous collapsing house in Steamboat Bill, Jr. But I'm not versed enough in his work to comment much further on it than that. His having grown up in vaudeville and worked in films with Fatty Arbuckle, though, Ieads me to be certain he was well-trained in slapstick. The autobiography referenced above is a good deal about his vaudeville upbringing.

And because I can't mention commedia dell'arte without thinking of this Onion infographic, I'm inflicting it on all of you as well:

[swo17]

but I note that neither you nor anybody else rose to the challenge of naming a post-2000 comedy that unquestionably rivals The General.

He he, yes that's a good one, and not easy to answer.

Other than Roy Andersson, only Freddy Got Fingered comes to mind.

Strangely enough, FGF did cross my mind when I made the post mentioning Andersson!

[colinr0380]

I absolutely hated Freddy Got Fingered when I first saw it, for its general revelling in finding new heights of grossness, but it somehow achieves a kind of perpetual motion machine-esque self sustaining mania by the end. And I still find the film really hard to watch for the despairing father-completely useless son relationship that hits far too close to home! You could superficially put this in a group with later, much safer yet far more problematic in message films like Failure To Launch, Step Brothers, etc, but doing so shows how Freddy Got Fingered towers above them.

If any film needs twenty years to come to terms with after a quick dismissal, that might be the one for me!

[senseabove]

Anyway, as we are careening off topic, I want to get pedantic and state that "slapstick" is actually named after a device used in commedia dell'arte to imitate a violent slapping sound. So the exaggerated and bumbling violence of slapstick is exactly what defines it. I would say Keaton's film work is more a commentary on or subversion of slapstick as he so often sets up a complicated physical situation that should result in extreme or exaggerated violence but then evades it in a deadpan, unexpected way that elicits the laughter of surprise and of expectations being upended.

I thought of this as the most generous possible way to interpret an argument that Keaton, broadly, isn't slapstick, because he is so frequently under threat of violence without actually receiving it, but it still feels like the hair-splittingest technicality. The threat of physical harm, however narrowly escaped, is the most famous and frequent source of comedy for Keaton. (What is the house frame falling but the visual equivalent of a supersized, literal slapstick?)

[Michael Kerpan]

Well, as I recall Keaton treats killing Union soldiers in various ways in The General as "hilarious".

[Lemmy Caution]

Expanding slightly to the last 25 years, I'd go with:
Men in Black (1997); The Big Lebowski (1998); Being John Malkovich (1999) & O Brother Where are Thou (2000). Guess I really liked late 90's humor.
I'm also not that big on The General and generally prefer Chaplin.

[Maltic]

Kung Fu Hustle, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, Love & Friendship, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, various Hong and Johnnie To films.

They're not The General, though.

[MichaelB]

Being John Malkovich was wrecked for me by having to share a row with a couple with just about the most irritating laughs I've ever heard (imagine the people in Monty Python's "Upper-Class Twit of the Year" sketch given hideously tangible form), and I couldn't move seats because it was a sold-out LFF premiere. Even that would be just about bearable if they hadn't found every single thing pant-wettingly hilarious, even if there was no obvious comedic intention behind it.

I really should give it a fairer hearing 23 years on, as it's obviously not the film's fault, but memories of that screening are still all too hideously vivid.

Of course, one of the problems with giving comedy a fair hearing is that you really do ideally need to watch them as intended, surrounded by a large and enthusiastic audience. I took my wife to see one of her favourite films, Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, when it had a rare rep screening in London, and she said that the timing of the gags finally made sense to her - the pauses that had slightly bemused her when watching it at home now worked because the audience was filling them with laughter, as intended. (A famous example of that is in Annie Hall, where editor Ralph Rosenblum had to extend the start of the scene immediately following the cocaine gag, because the audience was laughing so much that they were routinely missing the next line.)

I always have to be very conscious that I've seen all of Buster Keaton's features and a fair number of the shorts on the big screen with an audience, but all of Chaplin's stuff at home on my own, because this unavoidably does affect my attitude towards them.

[colinr0380]

I was thinking overnight that there could be a good case to be made in terms of post-2000s comedies being 'list worthy' for Hot Fuzz and Four Lions as well. Rewatching it when it had a television screening over Christmas showed how Hot Fuzz keeps revealing more facets over time. It also has a rather pertinent (and pre-Brexit) comment on 'prim and proper traditionalists versus scarily uncouth newcomers' (though the antipathy does not extend to the supermarket getting parachuted into the area!) that swaps around who is more at fault even whilst it is cheekily suggesting that all the murders were probably understandable in some fashion! It does a nice homage to classic 70s horror, particularly The Wicker Man, yet also does a just as loving parody of Point Break (and every other overblown early 90s direct to video American action film. Plus Bond ) that is comic simply by setting it inside a seemingly quaint English town!

And it is only becoming clearer with time how valuable that film is for providing a whole host of older actors who had somewhat been out of the limelight another chance to hold the screen (or wield that submachine gun!). Especially as a number of the older actors have passed on since the film was made, it turns Hot Fuzz into a wonderful last hurrah for many of them. It's no wonder that Tarantino liked it enough to join in on commentary track for the film.

Four Lions is valuable for emphasising that no subject should be off limits for comedy. The only reservation I have there is that it has been a while since I last saw it and inevitably a fictional feature is still somewhat in the shadow of Chris Morris' towering television series The Day Today and Brasseye, two series that are both deeply rooted in their time and yet still remain terrifyingly relevant in their media satire with every news cycle that passes.

Perhaps that itself gets to the issue with cinematic comedy: that the fast paced, gag-a-minute, freeform barrage of jokes makes more sense for television (or radio, and now internet) structures, and inevitably when such material has to be 'shaped' into a feature, that form brings in lulls that come with how stories are structured in that medium (how many comedians have been yoked under the weight of helming a film and the maybe crushing realisation that they are just the figureheads for the same old song? Or the dawning horror that their already stretched 5 minute SNL skit doesn't work at a PG-13 rated 100 minutes without adding in all the standard plot beats?). There are of course glorious exceptions such as Airplane! and The Naked Gun films, or Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Monty Python's Life of Brian, which are both cinematic in a way that fully utilises the medium yet maintain the comedy at full force rather than being 'tamed' into acting like a 'proper movie' (and in fact make the moments that they do ape the traits of a 'proper movie' part of the joke). But it may also be telling that Monty Python's The Meaning of Life reverted to that more sketch-like structure, even though that film is still able to do things in the cinematic medium (the scale of the musical numbers for example) that it wouldn't have been able to have done on the small screen. Mr Creosote comes to mind, which itself sort of anticipates the way that it seems that many films (especially in the post 2000s Jackass and Scary Movie era) have used transgressive grossness of the "You can't do that on television!" element to somehow prove that they deserve to be on the big screen rather than, you know, being all that funny.

[MichaelB]

Perhaps that itself gets to the issue with cinematic comedy: that the fast paced, gag-a-minute, freeform barrage of jokes makes more sense for television (or radio, and now internet) structures, and inevitably when such material has to be 'shaped' into a feature, that form brings in lulls that come with how stories are structured in that medium (how many comedians have been yoked under the weight of helming a film and the maybe crushing realisation that they are just the figureheads for the same old song? Or the dawning horror that their already stretched 5 minute SNL skit doesn't work at a PG-13 rated 100 minutes without adding in all the standard plot beats?). There are of course glorious exceptions such as Airplane! and The Naked Gun films, or Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Monty Python's Life of Brian, which are both cinematic in a way that fully utilises the medium yet maintain the comedy at full force rather than being 'tamed' into acting like a 'proper movie' (and in fact make the moments that they do ape the traits of a 'proper movie' part of the joke). But it may also be telling that Monty Python's The Meaning of Life reverted to that more sketch-like structure, even though that film is still able to do things in the cinematic medium (the scale of the musical numbers for example) that it wouldn't have been able to have done on the small screen. Mr Creosote comes to mind, which itself sort of anticipates the way that it seems that many films (especially in the post 2000s Jackass and Scary Movie era) have used transgressive grossness of the "You can't do that on television!" element to somehow prove that they deserve to be on the big screen rather than, you know, being all that funny.

For the same reason, most 1970s British sitcom spin-offs simply didn't work (except in terms of helping keeping a badly flagging industry financially afloat), as their creators often privately acknowledged at the time.

A significant exception is the surprisingly good Porridge (1979), and I suspect a major reason for this is that Dick Clement (who also directed) and Ian La Frenais had previous big-screen experience and knew how to construct and pace longer-form narratives. I don't imagine most British sitcom spin-offs were releasable in the US, but Porridge actually was (retitled Doing Time), as it worked perfectly well as a feature in its own right.

[colinr0380]

I would certainly agree on Porridge, mostly because being a theatrical feature let it take its action outside of the claustrophobic prison environment and off into the wintery wilds!:

Probably the best of the 1970s BBC television sitcoms that had a feature film spin-off, this keeps the core of the humour and the performances but gets out of the rather claustrophobic sets to provide a more expansive view of the prison, especially in the final section of Fletcher and Godber being pressured into a (successful) prison escape and then having to break their way back *into* prison!

I quite like that we get the world introduced again through a pair of new inmates, one who gets shown how the prison works and how things are run both officially and unofficially, and by the end has settled into the routine to the extent of just being another one of the extras in the background of a scene; and the other being the character who will make the escape attempt and similarly disappear from the foreground of events by the end as he just drives out of the film. (Plus the new guard)

Speaking of which, I really like that Oakes' fate after he drives off is left in the air (a more 'moral' film would have made sure to show our villains not getting away with it just as a form of closure), and is really an irrelevance set against the points that the film is really interested in with that whole prison escape subplot: that Oakes might be captured or escape but he'll always be on the run, especially if he ever gets homesick and returns to the UK; whilst Fletcher and Godber (especially Godber because he is still young and has his life ahead of him, which of course adds an extra awful melancholy resonance with Richard Beckinsale's early death only a year or so after this film) just need to serve out the last few months of their sentence and then they will be back out in society as free men who have paid their debts and will not have to live in constant state of tension.

(That of course also contrasts against that brief and poorly received spin-off show from Porridge, Going Straight, that showed that even when you are a free man, you are still an ex-con and have all new hurdles to face reintegrating into society as Fletcher, the master of handling prison politics, finds himself upsettingly adrift back in the much harsher real world)

But the real reason that this feature version of the series is worth seeing along with the move to being shot on film and the way that it can be (relatively) more explicit about some of the nastier aspects of prison life (the topic of potential sexual violence gets broached briefly a few times, which was much more underplayed in the BBC series. Its not Scum of course, but its still a bit eye-opening at times in the casual way that it gets brought up), is particularly the way that there are a lot of great outdoor settings for the action with many shots of barren country landscapes emphasising how isolated from the world that the prison is. I particularly love that the film is set in mid-Winter, with the ever present layer of snow over everything making it in a strange way one of the best seasonal films for capturing that sense of a crisp, cold winter's day!

I keep revisiting this film every so often less for the football match turned prison break turned prison break back in plot (echoing The Wooden Horse, which is called out at one point in the film, and this is really a much better prison football match film than Escape To Victory would be a couple of years later!), but more just to watch those snowy landscapes all over again!

I note that Indicator has released two of Dick Clement's earlier films on Blu-ray - Otley and A Severed Head - recently. It might seem strange to lobby for them to release the feature film version of Porridge as well at some point but I would certainly not be complaining if they could!

[MichaelB]

With regard to that last comment, I don't imagine Indicator would have been at all averse to releasing a special edition of Porridge (as you say, they've rehabilitated Dick Clement's early films as director and developed an excellent working relationship with him when doing so), but sadly it's owned by ITV and therefore off limits to any boutique label bar Network.

(As far as I'm aware, and I've heard nothing that suggests they've changed their minds since I last dealt directly with them, ITV is only interested in bulk deals of a size completely beyond the finances and manpower of a small boutique label to manage, unless they turn the majority of their output over to ITV-owned material. Network's prepared to do this, of course, because they're primarily a British TV label.)

[Noiretirc]

I enjoy the animated banter about the merits and political leanings of this upcoming list, but in the end, it is simply a list that we can admire or not. Perhaps we can make a list of the best and worst lists. Then maybe we can rate those lists of lists.

It's all just filmlovers having fun!

Carry on.

[movielocke]

And then their is the fact that in such lists there is an incredible preference for very old films ...

Of course I can easily understand that new films need their time to make such kind of list, but for me the conservatism of these lists is a bit disappointing.
The most recent film in the latest top 10 is from 1968, and 3 of the films are even from before 1930. I view this as odd, considering how far film has developed and renewed itself since then.

If you read through the previous thread, social disapprobation (mocking) of choices and also the choosers was mostly reserved for new films (Avatar) or recent films (The Goonies). Making public choices invites this critique, and some choosers relish it but there IS probably a chilling effect for most voters because everyone voting knows that only the new and the recent choices will be universally frowned upon. (props to Roger Ebert btw for publicly always emphasizing he selected one film from the most recent decade.

In terms of 3 films before 1930, one third of all films made were made before 1930, so this 3 of the top ten is statistically on point.

However, there is another advantage for films before 1930 that would cause any list to sort these films up. Fewer films from this era survived (survivors filter up), fewer films from this era are widely available (available filters up), Fewer films from this era are celebrated (canon filters up) and fewer films from this era are seen.

So let us invent nonsense numbers to make a comparison with no validity nor value: while your general expert voter has probably seen 300-600 films from the 1960s they could theoretically choose from, they've probably only seen 30-60 films from before the 1930s they could theoretically choose from.

If many expert voters feel the need to include one silent film, that makes it extremely likely that the relative handful of films that benefit from all that filtering will have a strong advantage in accruing votes and moving up the overall ranking.

[TMDaines]

Also, the easy availability of films always influences lists like this. So no one under 50 is going to vote for La maman et la putain because no one in the last 30 years has been able to see it.

I don't think that is quite true. You'd be surprised by both the number of high profile filmmakers and writers who frequent the backchannels and what is available there, most of it ends up on the more public web too. La maman et la putain can easily be watched in 1080p, even without ever having had a bonafide Blu-ray release.

I think new availability can help lesser know works become part of the canon, but the canon itself is far more stubborn to shift even if it isn't as accessible as it could be. I wouldn't have known much about Marketa Lazarová until its restoration and Blu-ray releases to push me into seeking it out, but people will generally hunt down highly regarded, canonical titles, even if they have to do some work to view them.