Jeremy Hotz
Over fifty very famous American and Canadian funny people (filmmakers, writers, actors and comedians) share life and professional journeys and insights, in an effort to shed light on the thesis: Do you have to be miserable to be funny?
A selection of comics from the Montreal International Comedy Festival
It's a strange movie that you have to watch beginning to end, or you'll find yourself completely lost. Based on the Toronto-made TV series "Newsroom," this made-for-TV movie has many well-recognized Canadian actors and comedians. It's a modest comedy that has its "short chuckle of laughter" moments, but the real highlight is similar to the highlight of 12 Angry Men. They obviously endeavoured to make the acting look as real and natural as possible when making this show, and most of the entertainment comes from listening in on their conversations and being convinced by the good acting. This is the similarity to 12 Angry Men.
Sandra Bullock and Jason Patric star as a young couple whose dream cruise turns to terror when a lunatic computer genius (Willem Dafoe) sets a new course for destruction.
The Newsroom is a Canadian television comedy-drama series which ran on CBC Television in the 1996–97, 2003–04 and 2004–05 seasons. A two-hour television movie, Escape from the Newsroom, was broadcast in 2002. The show is set in the newsroom of a television station which is never officially named, but is generally understood to be based on the CBC itself. Inspired by American series The Larry Sanders Show and similar to such earlier series as the British Drop the Dead Donkey and the Australian Frontline, the series mined a dark vein of comedy from the political machinations and the sheer incompetence of the people involved in producing City Hour, the station's nightly newscast. Although not originally intended as an ongoing series, the initial run of 13 episodes led The Newsroom to become one of the most critically acclaimed programs on Canadian television in the 1990s. Following the end of The Newsroom, Finkleman produced three different short-run series for the CBC, More Tears, Foolish Heart and Foreign Objects, all of which included Findlay as a linking character.
This satiric comedy concerns a documentary filmmaker (Ken Finkleman) who has brought a camera crew into the home of a typical couple (Robert Cait and Karen Hines) to record the drama of their daily lives. However, the filmmaker soon discovers their daily lives aren't especially interesting, and soon he finds himself deliberately throwing chaos into their path in hopes of making for a more exciting movie. Married Life: The Movie was originally produced as a weekly television series, with four episodes re-edited into this feature; the show's director and star, Ken Finkleman, later went on to create the award-winning Canadian sitcom The Newsroom.
World's Greatest Stand-Up - Vol. 1 features a superb compilation of some of the best stand-up comedians in the world, including Dave Chappelle (whose last DVD release in the US sold over 3 million units), a rare performance from David Hyde Pierce (star of Frasier), plus some big names from the UK, such as Lee Evans, Dylan Moran and Dara O'Briain.
