Comedy

A Useful Ghost is the best sex-with-a-vacuum-cleaner film I’ve seen in a while – or perhaps ever. It is deeply funny. How could it not be? But it’s also, in its way, deadly serious. A first film from Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, its camp absurdism and high jinks with electric appliances are also a satire on Thailand’s violent recent history. You can see why it won the Critics’ Week prize at Cannes. With most films you know what the film is, and where it’s going, within the first few minutes: ‘Oh, it’s this film.’ Here, you’ll have no idea. We start with a character simply called Ladyboy (Wisarut Homhuan). He lives in an area of Bangkok where the local shops and other buildings are being torn down and replaced by a shopping mall.

If you’ve tended to think Rik Mayall was both very funny and quite annoying, it turns out you’re not alone – because, with varying degrees of tact, that’s what most of the people who knew him suggested in Rik Mayall: Magnificent B’stard. At a time when far too many documentaries about celebrities are celebratory to the point of cloying, this one was, of course, all the better for it. By his own account, Mayall first discovered the joys of showing off in primary school. Instructed to mime in the choir, since his voice was ‘so horrible’, he did so with the wild exaggeration that would remain his speciality. The laughs he got duly turned his boyhood head.

It’s not easy for a drama to be over-cautious and clumsy at the same time. Or to turn a real-life story that shocked (and, let’s face it, titillated) the nation into an oddly flat piece of television. So how did the much-hyped Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards manage to do both? The answer, I’d suggest, is by failing to interrogate – or even engage much – with its own material. Instead, it opted to simply pass on the facts drawn from its own research, making only the most half-hearted and sometimes contradictory attempts to explain them. The programme began with Edwards (Martin Clunes) in his voice-of the-nation pomp, as he announced the Queen’s death.

High Noon, directed by Thea Sharrock, is a perfectly decent version of a trusty western which celebrates its 74th birthday this year. An elderly sheriff, Will Kane, marries a priggish beauty, Amy, on the day of his retirement but his marital plans are overturned by news that a dangerous convict, Frank Miller, has been released from jail and hopes to shoot Will dead. Amy is a devout Quaker and she grumbles bitterly as Will cancels their honeymoon and heads back to town to deal with the evil Frank. But Frank is not the brightest criminal in New Mexico. News of his plans have spread and everyone knows that he’ll show up at midday aboard the express train.

Humor has become serious business. A nation of anxious primates trapped in a silicon casino of likes, retweets and dopamine-soaked drudgery, America is suffering from what the comedian Norm Macdonald called a “crisis of clapter.” Terrified of saying the wrong thing, needing punchlines to be spoon-fed – what was once the funniest place on Earth has become a tight-lipped, tongue-twisted society where jokes are rewarded with polite applause instead of genuine laughter. It’s the old stink of a well-mannered aristocracy, and very un-American indeed. From his beginning, the ugly American – wild-eyed and rabble-rousing – rankled the Old World.

Sitting in the nearly empty movie theater at which I saw Tron: Ares, I found myself swamped by neon. Its hues are unappealing in real life – redolent of dive bars, arcades and other unsavory venues – but neon is downright unbearable when experienced in a movie theater, where you have no choice but to stare at the screen unless you want a perfectly good $21.51 to go to waste.

Da Vinci’s Laundry is based on an art world rumour. In 2017, Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ sold at Christie’s for $450 million but some experts claimed that the attribution was inaccurate. Could the world’s costliest artwork be a fake? Writer, Keelan Kember, considers the provenance of a fictional Leonardo owned by a thuggish oligarch, Boris, who claims to have bought the masterpiece at a flea market. He invites two posh British experts, Christopher and Milly, to authenticate the painting and when Christopher questions its origins he earns Boris’s instant displeasure. Boris threatens to toss Christopher from the roof of his luxury mansion. Enter a brash American, named Tony, who wants to buy the Leonardo on behalf of a rich Saudi clan.