#seriocomic

[auditionsuggestions]

hi! i’m looking for a slightly comedic dramatic monologue from a published play or musical to audition for sophie in mamma mia! any suggestions? tysm!! 💗

Hi! A seriocomic is definitely an interesting take. Those are definitely good for showing your range.

I think you can pull a good punch with Georgie's monologue from Spike Heels (obv you can cut the f-bombs if you need/want). It lives kind of in the middle.

This one from Hearts Like Fists is a little more dramatic, but definitely has some beats in there that you can play more comedic.

This one is more straight up comedy, but if you play that apology in the beginning then you can get a little more out of it.

Break a leg!

[mumblelard]

{the shadow} (raft-hourglass-3) (i-k-was) or this may sound like gibberish but i think i'm in a seriocomic slipstream space opera without the space

in hundreds of throws, i've never drawn the shadow. i don't think i want to put words to this one. i am just going to let it stew

this week, i bagged my first dead metaphor, cliffhanger. i'm having it mounted at the local taxitropist for eventual display above my mantel

i keep thinking about the seventy-nine cent black pepper noodles i got at dekalb farmers market

i wish i could get video of boba when she decides it is too cold to inspect the porch on any given morning. it's a sniff-squint-headshake gesture that makes me resent all of the words that mug and bog and slurry my thoughts

she is not alone, to be sure, but the exuberant blossoming of my christmas cactus, clarice, does make me feel like i might be an okay person after all

i bought myself early solstice presents last week: a new pink k-42 paint marker, new earbuds, and a grippy new pair of trail shoes to attack the winter

[cantsayidont]

(Edited to reflect the remainder of the season, but still more more haterating than hollerating, TBF.)

SUNNY (2024): Weird, exceptionally abrasive A24/Apple TV+ sci-fi black comedy about an entitled and resentful white American expat in Kyoto, Suzie Sakamoto (Rashida Jones), whose Japanese husband (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and young son have apparently died in a plane crash, leaving Suzie with one of his company's domestic robots (the titular Sunny, voiced by Joanna Sotomura), an irritatingly chipper, reflexively manipulative, passive-aggressive, possibly dangerous device whose cutesy CGI design suffers very serious uncanny valley problems throughout. In between clashes with her disapproving mother-in-law Noriko (Judy Ongg), Suzie stumbles into a mysterious conspiracy involving the Yakuza, accompanied by a blue-haired bartender named Mixxy (singer-songwriter annie the clumsy), who's the closest thing she has to a friend.

Adapted by Katie Robbins from a novel by Colin O'Sullivan, the show does a poor job of establishing its sci-fi conceits (homebots like Sunny are apparently fairly common, but we don't ever see any others for long enough to put Sunny's odd behavior in any perspective); Jones is unbearable in an incredibly unsympathetic lead role; and the convoluted plot (which ends on a very weak cliffhanger) can never make up its mind whether it wants to be taken seriously or not. Even after 10 episodes, it's still unclear what the show is trying to be, except that its determination to sideline its Japanese characters in favor of its grating American protagonist is very off-putting. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Mixxy is gay, although her obvious desire to get in Suzie's pants suggests that she has absolutely terrible taste in women. VERDICT: I was mildly intrigued by the odd seriocomic tone, but the muddled, frequently irritating story goes nowhere, and the focus on Suzie makes it an ordeal.

[allmusic]

AllMusic Staff Pick: Blur Parklife

Modern Life Is Rubbish established Blur as the heir to the archly British pop of the Kinks, the Small Faces, and the Jam, but its follow-up, Parklife, revealed the depth of that transformation. Relying more heavily on Ray Davies' seriocomic social commentary, as well as new wave, Parklife runs through the entire history of post-British Invasion Britpop in the course of 16 songs, touching on psychedelia, synth pop, disco, punk, and music hall along the way.

- Stephen Thomas Erlewine

[thishadoscarbuzz]

276 - Spanglish

This week, we are talking about one of the biggest THOB titles that we haven't yet discussed: 2004's Spanglish. James L. Brooks returned nearly a decade after his Oscar success with As Good As It Gets with this story of two disparate families thrust together: an immigrant single mother and the rich Los Angeles family she works for. With Adam Sandler headlining one year after earning his first bout of buzz for Punch-Drunk Love, this looked to be a chance for the Academy to honor him as a serious performer within the Academy-beloved Brooksian seriocomic glow. But the movie... has some issues!

This episode, we talk about Cloris Leachman's stellar boozy performance and Téa Leoni's work tried to wrangle an impossible character. We also discuss Paz Vega as the film's attempted breakthrough performance to American audiences, Brooks' Oscar history, and the many mystery middle names in Hollywood.

Topics also include Mitski fans, the film's cringe-inducing sex scene, and the history of the Tristar logo.

The 2004 Academy Awards

Vulture Movies Fantasy League

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[weekend-whip]

Jesse: I’d like to describe myself as seriocomic in most situations.

Kai: English please.

Jesse: I’m partial to being both serious and comical in everyday life.

Kai: Dumb it down for me, bro.

Jesse:

Jesse: I’m the living embodiment of /hj

Kai: OH

SERIOCOMIC

[recentlyheardcom]

2024 Zurich Film Festival Awards Winners List

Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl has won top honors at the 20th Zurich Film Festival, winning the Golden Eye for best film. Zurich’s competition jury, led by Lee Daniels, praised the film for its spectacular cinematography, exquisite sound design and breathtaking performances. Nyoni’s follow-up to her breakout debut I Am Not A Witch is a surreal and seriocomic family drama about sexual…

[back-and-totheleft]

The old college triad

Call them city boys. Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Spike Lee are not only NYU film school’s most prominent graduates, they’re provocateurs in the most colorful Gotham sense.

Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of NYU’s Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film & Television (part of the Tisch School of the Arts), asserts the filmmakers reflect the curriculum’s “strong auteur philosophy.”

Stone likes to think they share “a New York state of mind,” or, as he elaborates for Variety, “an irascibility … something energetic, and off-putting sometimes, and it comes out in Spike’s work and in Marty’s, and I think it comes out in mine — but each in different ways.”

All three are experiencing a banner year with big-studio productions featuring strong scripts written by relative novices. And for Stone and Lee, who are coming off what might be termed a baroque period of overly mannered movies that served as fresh meat for their detractors, vindication is sweet.

Newsweek’s David Ansen called Lee’s “The Inside Man” a film that “crackles with the seriocomic tension of thin-skinned New Yorkers thrown together in a crisis,” while the New Yorker’s David Denby says with “World Trade Center,” “Stone bulls his way into our emotions with his usual force but with greater clarity, sanity and measure than in the past, and he is better at violent spectacle and at capturing the stages of dying than any other director.”

Scorsese, whose classes Stone and Lee attended at NYU, has received the most uniform praise with “The Departed,” a crime drama in which his chosen milieu — the mean streets of New York — have been replaced by those of Boston’s South Side. “This is the movie that Scorsese fans have been yearning to see for a very long time,” wrote Joe Morgenstern in his Wall Street Journal review, “and it’s a crowd-pleaser in the bargain.”

In a way, working within the confines of genre — albeit with strong narratives and punchy dialogue — has benefited both Scorsese and Lee. For his part, Stone was dealing with a subject — the terrorist attacks of 9/11 — that required the kind of sensitivity with which he’d appear to be at odds.

“The grandiosity (of recent Stone projects) looked like his self-indulgence knew no bounds,” says author, film scholar and critic Molly Haskell. “With (‘World Trade Center’), he couldn’t dominate the story, so he chose instead just to serve it.”

If Scorsese, Lee and Stone have been shaped by their experience at NYU — which Stone calls “a home of ideas” — they hailed from different backgrounds.

Scorsese, a native of Manhattan’s Little Italy, seriously considered joining the Catholic priesthood before attending film school in the early ’60s.

Stone, the son of a successful Wall Street stockbroker, dropped out of Yale and did a tour of duty in Vietnam (for which he was awarded the Bronze Star for valor and the Purple Heart) before he enrolled at NYU.

And Lee, who spent his formative years in Brooklyn, attended Morehouse College before earning a graduate degree from Tisch.

The three directors have not only given back as instructors (Lee has been teaching at NYU for the past 10 years) and with financial support, the subjects and themes they explored as students remain very much with them today.

Scorsese’s senior class short, “It’s Not Just You, Murray” (1964), centers on an aging mobster who reflects on his life of crime; Stone’s 11-minute student film from 1971 is titled “Last Year in Viet Nam”; and Lee’s controversial NYU short “The Answer” (1980) reimagines a remake of D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” from the perspective of a black screenwriter.

“When you start out young, you’ve got to believe you’re going to change the world,” Haskell says. “They certainly did. And they wanted to change the way movies were made. They all had more of an agenda than most people who come out of film schools, especially West Coast film schools. They weren’t looking to get into the industry to do smooth, polished work. There was something more gritty, more urban, more violent, edgier.”

School for scrappers

Or, as Morgenstern puts it, “They’ve all been infected by the idea of film as more than something that opens on a Friday night, makes a killing over the weekend and disappears.”

That ethos is reflected in NYU’s fostering of individual voices.

Campbell says: “One of the things our faculty says about teaching is, ‘I’m not interested in the film that I want to make, I’m interested in who you are and the film you want to make.’ And everything we do is about finding out what your story is, and then giving you the tools to make that story.”

Stone recalls NYU as offering “a certain degree of independence. We were all on our own, there was no money, it was like a rat’s nest of competing ideologies. We’d have to fight for our budgets, our scripts. I remember every film was a struggle. So it was a scrappy way of learning.”

This struggle has remained with Scorsese, Stone and Lee throughout their careers. Even in the wake of such career high points as “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas,” Scorsese has always harbored the fear that every film could be his last, that whatever suit was signing his checks could pull the plug at any moment.

“At least until recently, (Scorsese, Stone and Lee) have represented a sort of urban New York counterpart to the industry,” Haskell explains. “They’re sort of anti-industry, and maybe that’s one of the reasons they’ve had such a hard time in terms of Academy Awards.”

Between the three of them, they have earned 20 Oscar nominations, but only Stone has won, thrice: for directing “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July” and for writing “Midnight Express.”

The year Lee received a screenplay nom for “Do the Right Thing” — his incendiary drama about racial tension in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood — presenter Kim Basinger famously departed from the script on Oscar night when she said: “We have five great films here and they are great for one reason — they tell the truth. But there is one film missing from the list that deserves to be honored because, ironically, it might tell the biggest truth of all. And that’s ‘Do the Right Thing.’ ”

“I think there was always that (sentiment),” recalls Haskell of Basinger’s extemporaneous remarks, “especially with (Lee), because there was this sort of desperate desire for some black filmmakers to make good. I think he’s very talented, but I think people put up with a lot from him, too, just because they wanted him to succeed, and they wanted that voice in movies, that vision.”

That vision still abounds in “The Inside Man.”

In the guise of a bank-heist movie, Lee injects the narrative — from a script by Russell Gewirtz — with a melting pot of ethnic flavors and post-9/11 paranoia that’s at once tense and funny.

Veneration gap

“He brought all that New York energy to the film,” Morgenstern says. “The movie is really densely populated, and it’s fascinating to me that after all these worthy attempts at small, personal films that haven’t really connected with an audience — black or white — here Spike Lee was brought in as a director for hire, and he’s obviously had his way with the script, and his imprint is on the material.”

If Lee has felt shortchanged by the Academy, he’s not saying. Multiple calls and emails to his handlers went unanswered. But, like Scorsese, who also is not talking to the press, he seems to have made peace with an industry that has given him multiple platforms and opportunities as a filmmaker.

“I think they sort of exorcized some of their personal demons,” says Haskell of NYU’s power trio. “And once you become accepted, or even venerated, you don’t make the same films anymore. And there would be something faux about it if they did. They have grown, they’ve matured.”

Stone, who now makes his home in Los Angeles, puts it another way. “Hollywood — it’s a muse, and also a bitch goddess, but it’s made a good life for me. In the end, I can’t complain, because I do think she gave me some good breaks. And I couldn’t get those in New York, which is why I had to leave.”

-Steve Chagollan, "The old college triad," Variety, Oct 25 2006

[havewereadthis]

"Set in a time-bending, seriocomically imagined world between Heaven and Hell, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is a philosophical meditation on the conflict between divine mercy and human free will that takes a close look at the eternal damnation of the Bible's most notorious sinner. This latest work from the author of Our Lady of 121st Street "shares many of the traits that have made Mr. Guirgis a playwright to reckon with in recent years: a fierce and questing mind that refuses to settle for glib answers, a gift for identifying with life's losers and an unforced eloquence that finds the poetry in lowdown street talk."

[abriefingwithmichael]

“Benson” s1e21 (1980)

Average.

Fairly typical of the seriocomic stories this show delivers in terms of content. It's about a militant environmentalist who has concerns about a new power plant. Sadly, good gags are thin on the ground.

6/10

[cantsayidont]

MONA LISA AND THE BLOOD MOON (2021): This heady, disjointed supernatural drama-thriller is I guess Ana Lily Amirpour's take on the YA modern fantasy genre: A previously near-catatonic young woman called Mona Lisa Lee (Jun Jong-Seo), imprisoned for 12 years in a New Orleans asylum, escapes after discovering that she has the power to psychically control the minds of others. Lost in a world she barely understands, Mona falls in with a hard-bitten stripper named Bonnie (Kate Hudson), who immediately realizes she can use Mona's power for scamming and petty crime, and befriends Bonnie's 10-year-old metalhead son Charlie (Evan Whitten) while being pursued by a cop named Harold (Craig Robinson), who knows what Mona can do because she previously forced him to shoot himself in the leg.

Less deliberately sketchy than Amirpour's previous features (characters even have names most of the time!), MONA LISA is still awfully thin on plot, relying more on mood, atmosphere, and the protagonist's longing to be somewhere other than she's been; its vivid strangeness is kind of compelling, although at points the lack of direction leaves it feeling threadbare.

Of the central characters, Charlie is well-drawn, a latchkey kid who's had to develop his own strategies for giving himself the emotional regulation his mother doesn't provide, but Mona's idiot savant blankness is sometimes uncomfortable (although Jun does as well as she can with a difficult part), and the story is meaner about Bonnie than I think was really called for. Even more than in the 2016 THE BAD BATCH, I was uneasy with the film's treatment of its Black characters — none of them are killed this time, but most get battered and humiliated for comic relief — which is starting to seem like a problem for Amirpour. CONTAINS LESBIANS? After seeing Bonnie dance, Mona says she's pretty, but it's otherwise pretty hetero. VERDICT: If you catch it in the right mood, you may dig its seriocomic fever-dream vibe, but its scattershot story and uncomfortable character choices sometimes frustrate.

[qudachuk]

There is something of In Bruges about this Belgium-set tale of whistleblowers in hiding, with a little bit of David BrentNeil Maskell is the charismatic British actor known for his complex, seriocomic tough-guy performances in the movies of Ben...

[movienation]

Netflixable? SerioComic Hijinx among three Mexico City Makeup Artists -- "Making it Up?

Well-cast and acted with sympathic warmth and wit, “Making it Up” is an object lesson in the shortcomings of relying on voice-over narration to tell your story on screen. It’s a dark, maddeningly-manic and almost cute dip into loving someone whose mental illness renders them toxic to be around. And writer-director Guillermo Calderón (“Neurda”) makes the infuriating decision to talk the damned…

[byneddiedingo]

.Mathilde Nielsen, Johannes Meyer, and Karin Nellemose in Master of the House (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1925)

Cast: Johannes Meyer, Astrid Holm, Karin Nellemose, Mathilde Nielsen, Petrine Sonne, Clara Schønfeld, Johannes Nielsen, Aage Hoffman. Screenplay: Carl Theodor Dreyer, based on a play by Svend Rindom. Cinematography: George Schnéevoigt. Art direction: Carl Theodor Dreyer. Film editing: Carl Theodor Dreyer.

iMaster of the House, Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent comedy-drama, is an ironic title, one attached to the film for its release in English-speaking countries. The original Danish title translates as Thou Shalt Honor Thy Wife, and the play by Sven Rindom on which it was based was called Tyrannens fald -- The Tyrant's Fall. It's also misleading to call it a comedy-drama, although it has moments of mild humor and a happy ending. The tone is seriocomic, or as the original title -- which is echoed in the film's concluding intertitle -- suggests, it's a moral fable. Viktor Frandsen (Johannes Meyer), the master of the house, is an ill-tempered bully, constantly berating his wife, Ida (Astrid Holm), who does everything she can to placate him. For example, she asks him whether he wants the meat she will serve him for lunch to be cold or warm. He answers, as usual irritably, as if he can't be bothered with such mundane matters, that he wants it cold. And then, later, when it's served, he snaps, "Couldn't you have found time to warm it up?" Life for Ida is constant drudgery, taking care of routine household chores, as well as looking after three children, the oldest of which is the pre-teen Karen (Karin Nellemose), whom Ida tries to spare from any of the harder chores that might roughen her hands. What little help Ida gets comes from Viktor's old nanny, known to the family as Mads (Mathilde Nielsen), who drops in to help Ida with the mending -- and to cast a disapproving eye on Viktor's bullying. Eventually, Mads arranges with Ida's mother (Clara Schønfeld) for Ida to escape from the household and rest. More worn out than she knew, Ida has a breakdown, and during her prolonged absence Mads takes over the household and whips Viktor into shape. The story arc is a familiar one -- we've seen it done on TV sitcoms and in Hollywood family comedies -- but it gains strength from the performances and from Dreyer's masterly control of the story and use of the camera. Although Viktor looks like a sheer monster at first, we gain understanding of him when we learn, well into the film, that he is out of work: His business has failed. His absence from the house during the day goes unexplained to his family, although we see him walking the streets and dropping into a neighborhood bar. Nielsen, who had also played the role of Mads on stage, is a marvelous presence in the film, although Dreyer never questions whether, as a nanny who used to administer whippings to Viktor, she might not bear some responsibility for the way he turned out as a man. Best of all, the film gives us a semi-documentary glimpse of what daily life was like for a lower-middle-class family in 1920s Denmark (and presumably elsewhere that modern home appliances hadn't yet taken up some of the burden of housework). Dreyer's meticulous attention to detail -- he served as his own art director and set decorator -- extended to the construction of a four-walled set (walls could be removed to provide camera angles) with working plumbing and electricity and a functioning stove, and he makes the most of it. Master of the House is not quite the pioneering feminist film some would have it be: Ida is a little too sweetly passive even after Viktor reforms. But it's an important step in the growth of Dreyer's moral aesthetic and of his artistry as a filmmaker.