Seven films to find a smile

THE MORNING LIST

Typology of the worst caricatures of the star system, burlesque poetry, pop art jewel or even teen movie in the form of compulsive unpacking, turn to directors Ben Stiller, Jacques Rozier, Vera Chytilova or Greg Mottola, among others, to brighten up this gloomy fall.

“Thunder in the tropics”: Hollywood satire

With Thunder in the tropics, Ben Stiller signed a final satire of Hollywood and its actorat, a great carnival fair with vanities and disproportionate egos. The actor-director, helped by his screenwriter Justin Theroux, has made a specialty of sketching the flaws of a degenerate show business, as before the world of fashion with Zoolander (2001) and his mindless model character. Here, Stiller begins his film with a series of hilarious mock trailers, and composes a typology of the star-system’s worst caricatures: the flatulent comic (Jack Black), the multi-Oscar-winning “performer” (Robert Downey Jr.), the defector from the rap scene covered head to toe in advertising brands (Brandon T. Jackson) and finally the idiotic “muscle man” of action films (Stiller himself).

All these little people are gathered in Vietnam to shoot a war film whose director soon loses control, abandoning his cast in the middle of the jungle. Gleefully parodying the hyperbolic language of big productions, the film draws all its verve from a constant tossing between first and second degrees. His band of celebrities, accustomed above all to managing their own image, find themselves stuck in a field reality that they still take for a film, unable to escape the stereotypical imagination in which they are immersed. This play on forms allows all forms of outrage, especially with the character of Robert Downey Jr. pushing mimicry to the point of “blackface” to embody a junk African-American. The grotesque only makes the unthinkable racism of the dream factory all the more evident. But. Mt.

“SuperGrave”: rawness and tenderness

The American comedy of the 2000s was marked by a small galaxy of talent emerging in the orbit of author-producer Judd Apatow and the furrow of its inaugural series Freaks and Geeks (1999-2000). What this one bequeathed most precious to the history of laughter was undoubtedly an incomparable dosage of rawness and tenderness, where the rediscovery of the elementary bonds of love and friendship did not go without a form. of compulsive unpacking. One of its most beautiful shoots still bears witness to this today: SuperGrave (2007), by Greg Mottola, a director who has been a bit lost since teen movie which presented itself as both a sample and a surpassing of the genre.

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