

SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION IMDB MOVIE
The movie only captures the novel in broad strokes. While I see some merit in this movie version, I'd like to see someone have another go at it. Strangelove is the greatest classic black comedy film and still one of the funniest black comedies of all time.I have read Kesey's novel several times over the last 30 years or so. Scott as the trigger-happy General Buck Turgison, Dr. Starring Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley (plus two other hilarious roles) and George C. Strangelove, it all comes off as deeply and darkly funny.

The prevention of worldwide destruction is a frightening topic, but with the way it's depicted in Dr. When a crazed US general sends a nuclear bomb to be dropped on Moscow in a pre-emptive strike, politicians scramble to resolve the situation before the world descends into nuclear war. Which is exactly what Kubrick did when he made Dr. However, in writing it, he realized just how funny it all was.Īnd therein lies the magic of black comedy: when a thing is so serious and so reverential, sometimes you just have to laugh at it. Strangelove is the quintessential black comedy film.ĭirector Stanley Kubrick originally wanted to make a thriller film using the ongoing threat of nuclear war as his subject material. Related: The 15 Best Dystopian Movies of All Time (And Their Meanings) 4. Reilly, and Rachel Weisz, The Lobster was a surprisingly great success for an absurdist black comedy, and it's one of th best black comedy movies of the 2010s. All of this, when presented through the vision of Yorgos Lanthimos, becomes oddly hilarious the more we watch. If they don't? They turn into wild animals.Īs these people teeter on the edge of forced romance, they have no choice but to grapple with their own humanity and mortality. In this film, people who are single are transported to a hotel with other single people and are required to fall in love within 45 days. Hailing from Greece and standing as one of the leading figures of the Greek Weird Wave, his 2009 film Dogtooth was the perfect representation of what his filmmaking career would look like: dark, disturbing, and yet, for some reason, deeply funny. Of all the filmmakers on this list, the one who's made the biggest recent splash in the black comedy genre is Yorgos Lanthimos. Here are my picks for the greatest black comedy movies of all time and why they exemplify the best of the subgenre. The secret sauce to a phenomenal black comedy film is dealing with these serious, touchy subjects as if they were secretly hilarious. Racism, sexism, terrorism, torture, war, and genocide have all been the butts of jokes.

There's a sense of gleefully wicked humor that mocks everything indiscriminately. With black comedy, filmmakers often approach these topics with zero sensitivity, which is what makes them so unique. In cinema, black comedy movies make light of subjects, themes, and topics that are generally considered sensitive or even taboo: death, murder, suicide, crime, and violence. It's challenging and irreverent, but it can also be downright hilarious. Rather, black comedy peers into the darker side of human nature while playing it for laughs. Black comedy has also come to be known as morbid humor, dark humor, or gallows humor.īlack comedy isn't like the comforting humor found in sitcoms and romcoms. We're talking about black comedy, a term coined by the surrealist French author André Breton in 1935.
Everyone loves a hearty laugh, but sometimes our biggest laughters can come from dark subjects that don't seem very funny at all.
