Okay, The Beaver and Everything Must Go are classified as comedies, but are they really?
The first deals with a depressed man who can barely function until he takes a beaver hand puppet from a Dumpster and uses it to talk. The second is about a man who loses his house, wife, and job and goes back to drinking–he’s an alcoholic–and has to pick himself up after discarding most of his stuff from his previous life.
Aside from a few funny lines or situations here and there, these strike me more as serious dramas than comedies. The fact that the second film features Will Ferrell does not make it a comedy, either.
And then there’s Little Miss Sunshine, which has many funny moments but also a real streak of melancholy; also, a character dies, while others deal with depression, attempted suicide, failure and disappointment. It was marketed as a comedy.
What are some other films that seem to be placed in the wrong category?
Hollywood tends to market anything that can’t be easily categorized as a comedy. This is especially true of films that have both comic and dramatic elements.
Sex and The City (show and movies) are classified as comedies. Even if I’m being generous, those aren’t funny. Even their fans will admit that they aren’t comedies first and foremost, or even 2nd and 3rd most.
Back when video stores abounded o’er the land, I’d always see where the SUPERMAN movie happened to be stacked: sometimes in the Sci-Fi section, sometimes in the Action/Adventure section, sometimes in the Kids section, sometimes in the Drama section; I’m not actually sure there’s a right answer.
It would never occur to me to classify Sex and the City as anything other than a comedy, and I find both the show and the movies very funny.
That said, I recently listened to Ridley Scott’s commentary on his movie Matchstick Men, a story about a con man with OCD and his relationship with his daughter. Scott went on and on about how much he enjoyed directing a comedy, and how hard he worked to bring out the comic elements of the story. I guess it really is in the eye of the beholder.
Muriel’s Wedding was in the comedy section at Blockbuster when we rented it years ago. It was one of the most depressing movies my wife and I had ever seen.
The Science of Sleep was marketed as a whimsical romantic comedy with fantasy elements. It’s actually a very sad examination of a young schizophrenic man’s futile attempts to function in society. The “whimsical fantasy” parts are his delusions - and they’re genuinely funny and charming - but the majority of the movie deals with how his inability to distinguish reality from fantasy is destroying his life, and making him a toxic presence to those around him.
Don’t pay much attention to how things were shelved in video stores – the categorization was decided upon by people who never saw the film and were going by the box blurbs.
Truly, Madly, Deeply. I first saw it in the theater, and wept copiously. I was surprised some years later, when I went to a video store, to find it in comedy. Now I can see the funny parts of it and laugh, but at the time, it expressed every heartbreak I had ever had.
Sideways and About Schmidt were advertised as comedies. I thought Sideways was a pretty good movie, but I did not think it was funny. About Schmidt was neither very good or funny. The only saving grace from About Schmidt was that it was mostly filmed withing walking distance of where I live.
Which is why I love Netfix. Video stores never had shelves just for “Understated Coming-of-age 20th Century Period Pieces” or “Cerebral Whistleblower Documentaries.”
Netflix isn’t perfect. “Creepy '80s Horror Films” showed up as a channel on my account recently. Right in the middle of it? Haunted Honeymoon. Now, it does feature Dom DeLuise in a dress, but I still wouldn’t exactly classify it as a horror film.
Dark, sure, but funny.