Black Bear review - worth going down to the woods theartsdesk.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theartsdesk.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Sun 25 Apr 2021 03.00 EDT
The indie US film-maker Lawrence Michael Levine deploys Aubrey Plaza as both muse and mouthpiece in this tense dramedy about the ethics of the artistic process. If that sounds tedious, itâs not: Levineâs playful deconstruction of tortured genius is a witty and provocative send-up of tyrannical directors, diva-ish actors and over-invested voyeurs alike.
The film is organised in two acts. The first is a play-like three-hander in which minxy actor turned writer-director Allison (Plaza) embarks on a kind of writerâs retreat in upstate New York. She rents a room in a lakeside cabin owned by Gabe and Blair (Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon), a pair of unhappy âcreativesâ whose relationship she mines for material. The second act takes place on the disastrous last day of a film shoot, repurposing the lakeside location but rejigging everyoneâs roles. This time, Gabe is the writer-director, Allison his unhappy wife and the filmâs
Black Bear filmmaker Lawrence Michael Levine felt like he put Aubrey Plaza through 'emotional torture' - The Number One magazine feat. news, reviews, movie trailers, cinema, DVDs, interviews + film & movie gossip UK & worldwide.
Film reviews: Black Bear; Time thetimes.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thetimes.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Aubrey Plaza: the art of making people squirm The queen of cringe comedy on making people squirm, and her new film, Black Bear
about an hour ago
Comedy is a complicated science that has been pondered by everyone from Plato to Freud, without anyone, to date, pinpointing what exactly it requires to make a person laugh. Cringe comedy is even trickier still. Painfully Funny: Cringe Comedy, Benign Masochism, and Not-So-Benign Violations, a 2018 paper by Marc Hye-Knudsen, postulates that contemporary cringe comedies such as The Office and The Inbetweeners “.differ from traditional embarrassment humour by being explicitly aimed at evoking not just the positive emotion of amusement but also the decidedly negative emotion of vicarious embarrassment (ie ‘cringe’) in their audiences.”