SanSebastian's blog

VERY FUNNY THINGS. NEW AMERICAN COMEDY is the title of the thematic retrospective to be dedicated by this year's San Sebastian Festival to new trends in American comedy movies. Comedy, a genre that already had an extremely long-standing Hollywood tradition, has seen a revival in recent decades thanks to a contemporary angle with place for irreverence, non-political correctness and social satire. A new generation of directors, screenwriters, actors and comedians have become today's reference in the genre, a style well on the way to finding followers the world over: Peter Farrelly, Judd Apatow, Todd Phillips, Jared Hess, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Tina Fey, Kristen Wiig, Mike Judge, Trey Parker, Matt Stone... All have increased the possibilities offered by funny films on producing an "auteur comedy" to have earned equally excellent public and critical acclaim.

The cycle will include 30 titles summarising the evolution of this new comedy starting with pioneer films from the 80s, true cult movies that laid the way for the so-called gross-out comedy with its uninhibited, iconoclastic humour making myths of actors like John Belushi and Bill Murray: Animal House (1978), Meatballs (1979), Caddyshack (1980), Porky's (1982)... Films produced in the following decades continued to flog vindication of the social misfit as an emblematic character and vehicle for a peculiar look at contemporary American society with caricaturesque overtones: Dude, Where's My Car? (2000), Zoolander (2001), Napoleon Dynamite (2004), The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005), The Hangover (2009)... There will also be important works by some of today's big-name American moviemakers, authors who have approached comedy in some way or another: Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, 1993), Paul Thomas Anderson (Punch-Drunk Love, 2002), Wes Anderson (Rushmore, 1998), David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express, 2008) and Gregg Araki (Smiley Face, 2007).

The cycle will enjoy the collaboration of the Euskadiko Filmategia/Filmoteca Vasca, of the Instituto Valenciano del Audiovisual y la Cinematografía Ricardo Muñoz Suay and the Filmoteca de Catalunya and will be accompanied by a book coordinated by Violeta Kovacsics

Don´t miss this video about the retrospective

http://youtu.be/WRl32YwiSC8