[Weekly Update] January 17, 2022

We are entering the dead month of cinema, when nothing interesting is coming out in the west.

It's also in between New Year and Chinese New Year, so almost everything interesting is coming out in China, soon. Although looking through the movie forecast, it's almost all war movies and cartoons.

Still looking forward to seeing a new Zhang Yimou movie though.

CHANNEL UPDATE

• The new video is currently being edited, running slightly behind schedule. We are still looking for a Thursday release, but we might have to delay it to Friday.
• The script for the video will be uploaded in 24 hours.
• Still have no idea what to do for next month, but I'm thinking of doing another film recommendation video. Let's see how many Malaysian movies I can find.
• Finally, for this month's bonus video, how about some old school special effects movie? The topic of old school movie magic is fascinating. Wizard of Oz? Clash of the Titans? Mighty Joe Young? Or we can go to the oldest of them all, and talk about A Trip to the Moon!

MEDIA TALK

• Last week we talked briefly about rom-coms. This week, how about comedies?
• Comedies is yet another genre that's often looked down upon. But unlike romance movies, comedy wasn't always seen as the low hanging fruit genre.
• Back in the early days of cinema, silent comedy is practically the de facto genre, thanks to titans like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Even if you haven't seen the films, you are still familiar with their work. And you can still feel the influence they left on cinema. Works from Jackie Chan is heavily inspired by silent comedy, with the Project A series of films paying direct homage to it.
• Some of the must watch includes The General, Safety Last, and of course, Modern Times.
• While not as famous these days, screwball comedy was also quite a defining sub-genre. Mostly popular during the Great Depression, it was a comedy genre that satirizes romantic films. It's often about how male characters has their masculinity challenged by a confrontational or troublesome woman. It's the anti-rom-com.
• While these days, the satirical nature of it is not as strong, the bold approach to relationship aged remarkably well. It's easy to forget these films were made in the early 1930s, because elements of it can still be found in modern day rom-coms, from When Harry Met Sally, to Always be My Maybe.
• It Happened One Night, My Man Godfrey are two must watch. While not strictly a screwball comedy (more like an homage to it), Some Like It Hot is also a great movie. It also has Marilyn Monroe.
• Finally, skip ahead a few decades, we have the teen sex comedy. Probably my least favourite comedy cycle, partly because of the terrible name.
• By the time the 80s and 90s rolled around, young adults became the primary target audience in cinema. Naturally, a genre about the sex lives of these people got big.
• It was also around this time when comedy became seen as the lesser genre. I guess it stopped appealing to Martin Scorsese. But to many, movies like American Pie and Super Bad are still fondly remembered. While many of these films aged pretty badly (especially Jonah Hills' plot line in Super Bad), it's not entirely without merit. Michael Cera's plot line in Super Bad is handled remarkably sweet and mature.
• The funny thing is, however, is that teen sex comedy appears to grew older alongside its audience. By the time the 2000s rolled around, teen sex comedy became just regular adult sex comedy. This is when we see movies like The 40 Year Old Virgin, Harold & Kumar, and The Hangover.
• While not all of them are about sex exclusively, you can see how the latter films followed the former ones.
• In fact, the they might have the same audience.

And that's the update! Hope you are having a warm winter! Montreal is experiencing historic cold. And it's snowing like a storm outside right now. Can wait to open my door tomorrow and have all the snow collapses onto me.

See you n our next video!