King Curling

Cinequest: CHASING BERLUSCONI

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CHASING BERLUSCONI
CHASING BERLUSCONI

In the bawdy Norwegian comedy Chasing Berlusconi, a beleaguered harness racing driver gets into trouble with menacing (and very, very funny) Finnish loan sharks, which precipitates a farce involving two shady dim bulbs and a pair of even dumber cops.  Oh, and then there’s the driver’s nyphomaniacal wife. Did I mention the racetrack owner with a piercing, sudden cackle and a predilection for toupees and cowboy hats?  (The movie’s title comes from a racehorse named for the Italian scoundrel/politician.)

This all makes for very good lowbrow comedy.  And lowbrow it is, featuring jokes based on impotence, penis length, horse poop and the like.  Chasing Berlusconi also features very clever references to Columbo, The Wire and Fifty Shades of Grey.  The characters of the racetrack owner and the lead loan shark are especially funny.

I loved filmmaker Ole Endresen’s hilarious King Curling at the 2012 Cinequest.  That story had a very original hook – to win a curling tournament, the protagonist needs to stop taking his meds, and then tries not to slip into psychosis.  Chasing Berlusconi isn’t the comic masterpiece of King Curling, but it’s worth some guffaws.

Chasing Berlusconi plays again at Cinequest March 1 at the California Theatre and March 3 at Camera 12.

 

2012 at the Movies: biggest disappointments

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DAMSELS IN DISTRESS

1. I haven’t seen Undefeated, the Oscar winning documentary about an underdog high school football team, or the French political thriller The Minister (L’exercice de l’État )   because – as far as I know – they haven’t yet been released in the US.  How can an Oscar winner not get a release?  You can read descriptions and watch trailers of these films as Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

2.  There was also no US release for the hilarious Norwegian curling comedy King Curling or the creepy Slovak voyeur thriller Visible World.  I think that, given a chance, American audiences would have responded to both of them.

3.  Sometimes my favorite filmmakers let me down.  There wasn’t much to Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths, which I had been eagerly awaiting for months.

Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona) hadn’t made a film for thirteen years and then came up with Damsels in Distress. With the tedious Greta Gerwig.  Really, Whit?

And I thought that Aardman Studios’ Pirates! Band of Misfits was a bore.

Note: I don’t have a Worst Ten Movie list because, unlike professional critics, I don’t have to see every movie.  I do see over 100 new movies each year, but I try REALLY, REALLY HARD to avoid the bad movies.  So my worst movie going experience is always either 1)  on an airline flight when I see a movie that I normally wouldn’t; 2) a hyped art film that disastrously falls on its face and/or really pisses me off (The White Ribbon); or 3) something I find on cable TV while channel surfing (Paul Blart: Mall Cop).  But usually, the culprit finds its way aboard a long airline flight.  Not this year.

4.  That being said,  the worst film that I saw was probably Dorfman, which would have derailed if it had started out on the rails.

 

The Norwegians Got Funny This Year

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KING CURLING

This week’s DVD pick, the dark Norwegian comedy thriller Headhunters, has some big laughs. But it’s just one of some very funny Norwegian comedies this year.  I also liked the teen sex comedy Turn Me On, Dammit!.  Who knew that the Norwegians could be so damn funny?

My favorite comedy this year is King Curling, set in a sport that even the Norwegians find to be odd and boring, is HILARIOUS.  The star of a curling team suffers a psychotic breakdown and, after years of treatment, is released from an asylum heavily medicated.  To win money for a friend’s lifesaving operation, the curling team must win a tournament and the star needs to go off his meds to regain his game skills.

It’s a broad comedy, but the key is that the actors aren’t trying to be funny, a la Will Ferrell.  Instead, they play it absolutely straight, relying on the characters, situations and dialogue to generate the laughs.  And laughs, they are aplenty.

The curling star tries to maintain composure despite his recurring hallucinations of floating pink lint.  One of the Norwegian curlers, a womanizer with unusually low standards,  keeps lapsing into American gangsta street talk.  Another has a long-lost father who turns up as, of course, a Rod Stewart impersonator who doesn’t sound remotely like Rod Stewart.  And then there’s the kissing dog.  It’s a top drawer broad comedy.  Here’s the trailer for King Curling.

 

Recapping Cinequest 22

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San Jose’s Cinequest 22 film festival has ended.  For me, Cinequest 22 meant seeing 17 features, a short and several interviews and Q&As with filmmakers – all including several world and US premieres.  I saw my share of American films, but I also saw movies from China, Spain, Belgium, the Slovak Republic, Argentina, Hungary, Russia, Sweden and Norway.

Among the festival crowd, movies about overcoming disability and disease seemed to be the most popular.  I generally preferred the comedies and romances that prove that it is still possible to write a good movie in those genres.

I especially liked two of the biggest movies in the festival:  the zany Chinese action film Let the Bullets Fly and the drama about the American education system Detachment (I’ll be commenting on Detachment on Wednesday before its release this weekend).

There were some smaller films that I hope gain distribution:  King Curling, the Norwegian comedy about a curling star who must go off his psych meds to win the big match; the Argentine modern-day spaghetti western Salt; and the hipster screwball comedy Percival’s Big Night.  If given the chance to see these films, American audiences will love them.

Here’s the trailer for King Curling.

 

 

 

Cinequest – King Curling: surprising hilarity from the Norse ice

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This Norwegian comedy, set in a sport that even the Norwegians find to be odd and boring, is HILARIOUS.  The star of a curling team suffers a psychotic breakdown and, after years of treatment, is released from an asylum heavily medicated.  To win money for a friend’s lifesaving operation, the curling team must win a tournament and the star needs to go off his meds to regain his game skills.

It’s a broad comedy, but the key is that the actors aren’t trying to be funny, a la Jack Black or Will Ferrell.  Instead, they play it absolutely straight, relying on the characters, situations and dialogue to generate the laughs.  And laughs, they are aplenty.

The curling star tries to maintain despite his recurring hallucinations of floating pink lint.  One of the Norwegian curlers, a womanizer with unusually low standards,  keeps lapsing into American gangsta street talk.  Another has a long-lost father who turns up as, of course, a Rod Stewart impersonator who doesn’t sound remotely like Rod Stewart.  And then there’s the kissing dog.  You gotta see this movie – it’s a top drawer broad comedy.

It’s playing again at Cinequest tonight (March 2) and tomorrow (March 3).