Hacks Season 1 is the first season of a streaming black comedy drama TV series. The series explores a dark mentorship that forms between Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a legendary Las Vegas comedian, and Ava (Hannah Einbinder), an entitled, outcast 25-year-old writer. Created by Paul W. Downs, Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky, Hacks premiered on May 13, 2021 on HBO Max. Analysis follows …
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The Great is a 10-episode historical drama cum black comedy series loosely based on the life of Catherine the Great, Empress of All Russia from 1762 until 1796. And when we say ‘loosely based’ it’s probably more accurate to state that apart from the names of the characters The Great does not depict any true historical events whatsoever, except superficially.
Promising Young Woman is a 2020 black comedy thriller film directed, written, and produced by Emerald Fennell, in her feature directorial debut. Fennell is perhaps best known as the writer of the second season of the critically acclaimed Killing Eve TV series. Promising Young Woman stars Carey Milligan in the lead role.
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One of the better movies of 2017, Ingrid Goes WestReel is a dark incisive commentary on the millennial obsession with social media.
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Written by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr & Armando Bo.
Starring Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts.
Nominated for a total of nine Oscars, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is surrealist black comedy at its best. Mocking the artifice of celebrity and the entertainment industry, Birdman is a fascinating inside look into the absurd insanity of entertainment world as perceived by its protagonist, Riggan Thomson.
Directed by Lenny Abrahamson
Written by Jon Ronson & Peter Straughan
Starring Domhnall Gleeson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Scott McNairy and Michael Fassbender.
What is music? A business? Yes, certainly but what about art? Of course, but sometimes music is life and there’s nothing more. For Jon (Gleeson), music is the ticket out of his mundanity as he dreams of becoming a professional pop songwriter.
Then rather serendipitously Jon ends up playing keyboards in the experimental outfit Soronprfbs, fronted by the enigmatic Frank (Fassbender) who wears a papier-mâché head 24/7. Despite his seemingly best intentions, Jon attempts to use the Soronprfbs – and especially Frank – to further his own agenda to be a successful musician.
Along the way, manager Don (Scott McNairy) and band colleague Clara (Gyllenhaal) try to dissuade Jon from setting Frank down the road to public acceptance but Jon is undaunted, with predictably disastrous consequences.
Taking inspiration from real life quirky musical geniuses like Captain Beefheart, Daniel Johnston and most of all, Chris Sievey’s Frank Sidebottom persona, Frank is a superbly dark comic take on contemporary pop culture’s need to flatten any unique idiosyncrasy into compliant uniformity.
For everyone who believes that pop music needs to remain strange and magical, this one’s for you.
