I have to write a paper about an American comedy and write about its American character and social commentary. Could someone please recommend a movie about which much could be written on these subjects, or, preferably, a review or an essay I could steal from?
Modern Times, Chaplin. Writes itself. 
I can’t pick that one because we spoke about it in class.
The Graduate. Quintessentially American and absolutely loaded with social commentary. (And a great movie in its own right.)
Bananas
My fav scene.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a3mk9sp0oE[/youtube]
South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut
Idiocracy
That’s two. I might suggest that Idiocracy would be the better of the two to use, except it is really only centered on one piece of social commentary which is the dumbing down of America. I suppose it touches on Corporate takeover of life, but only briefly.
“Welcome to CostCo, I love you.”
Good call! Or Little Miss Sunshine.
I think “The Royal Tennenbaums” captures the post-Clinton/early-Bush American zeitgeist pretty well. What it decides to comment on and how it goes about it is pretty spot-on.
But I’ll also second Bananas, great movie.
Heh, the Graduate and Miss Sunshine are also not eligible.
I’m not faimiliar with any of the other movies mentioned but I will check it out.
If anyone else makes any suggestions, I’d appreciate it if you could point out the pieces of commentary I could write about in that movie, as I’m not very smart and particularly not good at that kinda analysis.
If you are ESL and this is for an English class, “Duck Soup” is another good suggestion. The comparison of nationalism to a minstrel show is pretty freakin’ clear but it also provides a very America-specific angle to the farce/commentary. So, the paper writes itself. And most of the humor is zany, physical slapstick which is funny in any language There is nothing less funny that a comedy that requires a dictionary.
San, you’ve made me feel stupid for not thinking of that one. It’s quite possibly the perfect American comedy.
Except for maybe this one.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHuyjYJCCOA[/youtube]
Gotta love those Coens.
Now I can’t get that bowling ball polishing technique out of my head. Thanks, rainey.
I neglected this with my first suggestion as well, but think about it. Would those movies translate well? Basically, the more you quote it with your friends and the less you can describe it to people who haven’t seen the movie, the worse it translates. There is a truism that states that the last thing to translate is humor. I’ll go ahead and agree with that. I’m a funny guy. It is a big part of my identity. In a foreign country, it takes me at least a year to reclaim that aspect of my personality. And that is a year of living-and-breathing the culture and language, and me just managing to get the basics of the humor down. I’m the Carlos Mencia of the area. I can hit all the low notes, but that is it.
I dunno… I learnt Dutch as an adult, and from the beginning I could make wordplays. Some worked, some didn’t, and that was also a useful insight into the language.
Observational comedy takes a lot longer, though, as you have a huge cast of personalities and stereotypes to get to grips with. And the difficult part is wit - if you’re at the stage that you’re translating what you hear into English, thinking about it and translating it back again, by the time your quip is ready people are talking about other things. Even after 12 years of learning (and 7 living here) I’m funnier in English.
Back to the OP - how about MAS*H?
Xunzian, that’s very interesting.
You become a different person. You’re not a funny guy there. Your fitness (biologically speaking, of course) goes down (or up, depending on what kinda funny you are).
I have some experience with being a different person… actually I have considerable experience.
Did you feel your persona (meaning how people perceived you, not how you behaved) was different there? Did it bother you? Did you find other aspects of yourself changing because of it (like, say if someone is very pretty and is used to getting social power (being respected and found attractive) that way and than they’re no longer pretty so they make adjustments, they become funny or charming or something)? Did your selfimage change?
You often hear actors talk about becoming the character for a brief moments or longer and how they fell the characters coming out of them after the movie or play is done, and I’ve had some such experiences, did you have anything like that (if you did indeed find yourself being another person, at all)?
These are things that are very interesting to me. I’ve seen a video with Julianne Moore where she said how she noticed that a lot of actors come form families that move around a lot and that she figures the reason for that is that you’re constantly meeting people for the first time and you’ll make, purely by chance, different impressions on different people, and because of this you will realize how you can be different people and make people see you in different ways.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this and for a long time and I think that the way we perceive people is very different than what we tend to think it is. Like with quantum physics it is counterintuitive.
There are many examples of this some obvious that almost every person figures out if not on the rational level than on the intuitive, and some very subtle.
One example is beauty and how we think physical beauty is just the way your face is and you will always have that level of beauty, but what you show in terms of behavior impacts how people interpret your face and what their face looks like to you PHYSICALY. Meaning if someone’s behavior suggest toughness, you’ll think their face is such that they look though when maybe if you just saw their picture (so you wouldn’t see their manner and behaviour) you’d think the person looks soft).
We think of appearance in these rigid terms but what it is is sending of signals. Like when animals get into those displays to settle conflicts, you know the pigeons flapping their wings at eachother, or whatever it is they do. What they are doing is exchanging signals to determine who’s tougher so that they wouldn’t have to fight it out. That’s what we do with faces (and everything else). A face is a collection of signals… the whole body is, but behavior sends signals also. The way a person is perceived is determined by the sum total of signals they send, so obviously, behavior can radically change the way you are perceived, but what I’m saying is that people will physically see you differently. Variations in your behavior people will see (sometimes) as variations in your physical appearance.
I am a different people when I speak different languages. But that makes sense, the persona that I inhabit and is “me” is dependent on the situation that I am in. And I associate different situations with different languages, so the modes of behavior I manifest are bound to be different.
It is neat to see it in action, though.
Saw Once recently. Cool flick. A bit slow at times, but has some magical moments.