since the better known great movies of this year will be covered by others, I'll make the case for some great and underseen recent-ish international comedies.
one of my favs from this year was easily Marguerite, a hilarious and weirdly poignant film about a terrible, just frigging awful aspiring opera singer. But since she's rich and actually a pretty swell lady she's insulated from her failures by her enabling staff, family, and friends. Its also a film that has some positive messages and argues for bad art, or at least for bad artists. Compounding the weirdness, Meryl Streep made essentially the same movie this year as well, this is the much richer film though (although Streep did her own singing, they had to use some very severe sound editing to get the dissolving-rhesus-monkey sounds right). (Netflix Streaming)
Wild Tales is explicitly a contemporary satire of present day Argentinian culture, but really its also just a funny-as-hell anthology film about people taking things waaaaaaaaay too far. The five blackly comic vignettes that make up the film tell a variety of stories, from an orderly life that spirals out of control over an unjust parking violation, to a set of mounting coincidences among a set of strangers. The stories take surprising and inventive directions, usually in the bleakest and most hilarious way possible. One of the stories being one of my favorite ever anthology film segments (Highway to Hell), which managed to constantly induce disbelieving and suspenseful gasps of laughter from me.
and speaking of black comedy, nobody does bleak humor quite like the Koreans, as A Hard Day proves. A dirty cop accidentally kills a guy in the opening minutes of the film, and his situation somehow continues to deteriorate from there. This film has all the traditional elements of a crime thriller (and in fact works sorta well as such), but all of those are just really there so the jokes have a recognizable plot to hang from. Its really about putting some poor schmuck through the wringer and watching as he barely stays ahead of his misdeeds, but its not just clever plotting and great performances, the direction is razor sharp as well. Its an awfully well composed film, especially for one that kills a major character just like a scene from a Road Runner cartoon. (Netflix Streaming)
