‘Cunk on Cinema’ Review: Philomena Cunk’s Funny Hollywood Story

Philomena Cunk flies close to the sun.

The stubbornly selfless host of educational programs created by Charlie Brooker like Cunk on Britain, Asshole on Earth And Cunk about life turns his misdirected fascination at least partially inward to take on the entertainment industry in the appropriately titled Netflix miniseries Cnk at the cinema.

This means baiting the critics, who have greater knowledge and investment in the subject matter that is under Cunk’s withering gaze, and baiting the pundits whose increasingly implausible flummoxitude – not a real word – in the face of Cunk’s careless curiosity is the bread and butter of the comedy franchise.

Brooker and writer-star Diane Morgan surely know that Cunk and his gimmick won’t play around forever, so Cunk at the cinema This may mean that they decided to go as far as possible without becoming a parody of something that is already a parody.

The seams are certainly visible in the delicately threaded tapestry that is Cunk in this series. Over six episodes of less than 15 minutes each, Cunk at the cinema doesn’t overstay its welcome and doesn’t completely strain the credulity of viewers who are more in on the joke than its interview subjects. But the ratio of punchlines that fizz to punchlines that punch is probably closer than at any previous point in the franchise.

Always, Cunk at the cinema delivers more laughs than anything you’re likely to watch this month, and I’m willing to follow Philomena Cunk’s miseducation until the wheels completely come off.

Cunk at the cinema is structurally simple, as TV presenter Cunk (Morgan) takes viewers on a history of cinematic media going all the way back to the absence of films.

“Cinema hasn’t always been with us. In fact, for centuries the Earth was a barren wasteland, devoid of entertainment content,” she observes, looking through a sea of ​​classical paintings and noting: “For centuries, the eyes were literally useless, because there was nothing worth looking at.”

It traces the advent of photography and then the animated image, addressing landmarks such as The arrival of a train at La Ciotat (“He’s almost as boring as Ben Affleck,” she notes), The birth of a nation (“A typically woke Hollywood fantasy”), and in the comedies of Charlie Chaplin (“To this day, the only homeless person you can openly laugh at”) and Buster Keaton.

I don’t want to accuse Cunk at the cinema to be intellectually nourishing by any stretch of the imagination, but as small introductions to film studies it has some validity. Walking through his usual assortment of photogenic settings, from movie studios to the base of the Hollywood sign to various libraries and repositories, Cunk at least briefly touches on a series of notable, properly contextualized bits of history—from an acceptable definition of the Kuleshov effect to a rudimentary explanation of the Hays Code to an acknowledgment of television’s impact on films of the 1950s and ’60s.

Cunk’s droll approach to classic films and the evolution of the medium alternates between deliberately ignorant and perceptibly counter-logical, digging deeper in amusing ways AND as a grooming story and the use of social media-friendly lines like: “You have to have seen the first 2000 films in the series to understand 2001” It is possible that some parts of Cunk at the cinema benefit from the knowledge of the films and industry conventions she mocks. But I’m not sure you have to be well informed to find it funny to continue to refer to Eisenstein’s book. Battleship Potemkin like “Batshit Pumpkin” over and over again. I found it funny again and again.

As always, Cunk can’t do it alone and she’s assembled a group of experts, from the usual British intellectuals to a handful of film critics to a fun array of (mostly male) film artisans and bona fide stars, including Michael Bay and Benedict Cumberbatch.

A key part of Cunk’s appeal has been showing how realistic it is for her subjects to not know what she’s doing as she peppers them with questions like “What happened?” The sperm launcher?” or, regarding the behavior of Taxi driver Antihero Travis Bickle remarks that “If they did it again today, it would be violating Uber’s code of conduct, right?”

I guess the selection process for Cunk at the cinema had to be different from his previous series and that more people probably had to be voted out for being overly in on the joke. Additionally, it’s easy to notice that Cunk had to change his investigative style in an interesting, but increasingly repetitive way.

If your interview subject is in on the joke, the worst thing you can do is ask a long, ridiculous question based on an absurd premise – the meat and potatoes of their finest moments, previously – because if they laugh or, perish the thought, attempt to counter with a joke of their own, you’ve wasted a lot of rope just to hang yourself. But if you ask a simple question based on a malapropism or a misheard or misread title or concept, you’ll get at least several seconds of well-deserved confusion and then several more seconds of confusion while the person being asked tries to come up with a sincere answer or a joke. This confusion is gold, or as much gold as you find in jokes like “The Jizz Slinger.”

With most scholars and scribes, Cunk at the cinema settles for “confusion,” as opposed to the delicious stupidity that previous seasons produced. It’s good for a laugh, but it deprives viewers of those moments of genius from previous series, where Philomena Cunk would actually intrigue an expert with a bizarre guess or half-joking theory.

It’s pretty reasonable to believe that a serious historian or zoologist might not be familiar with Philomena Cunk and her stuff, but it’s harder to imagine an entertainment journalist or film critic without any knowledge of this increasingly long-running franchise. But not impossible!

Some of these interview subjects are artists, or at least people with years of experience in the press or public, forcing viewers to engage in guesswork.

So…Benedict Cumberbatch? Quite clearly in on the joke and intentionally giving Cunk nothing but stone-faced bewilderment. Die hard scribe Steven E. de Souza? It’s clear he’s not in on the joke and is sincere in not understanding what he’s in the middle of.

And Michael Bay? This could be one of the great debates of the year, as the television equivalent of You can see everything. Michael Bay has a team. They must have briefed him and advised him on how to respond to some obvious bait. At the same time, Michael Bay has an ego, and it’s possible that he went in with one goal – without looking like a total idiot – and that goal went out the window, or almost, in the face of a disjointed history of the Cunk family. This places Bay in a liminal space halfway between professional and cool (as his team must have wanted him to appear) and completely ridiculous (as schadenfreude-hungry audiences may dream).

(Disclaimer: My guesses could all be wrong! Cumberbatch might have been genuinely perplexed, de Souza might have played Cunk like a fiddle, and Michael Bay? Well, I should know that rather than thinking I know what’s on Michael Bay’s mind.)

Morgan remains a funny genius, never better than in the walk and talk monologue on a studio lot in the final episode. The material is so perfectly suited to her voice that she can laugh even over flaccid punchlines that sound like excerpts from Brooker’s angry political comedy (see her To wipe shows) rather than Cunk, who doesn’t feel like the kind of character who would bother with a JD Vance joke out of nowhere. Now, Cunk’s obsession with AI and Brooker’s disdain for it? These fit together admirably.

Simply put, the Cunk formula always works, but it probably can’t work forever. Now bring Cunk on TV. I’m available for talking head segments and promise to look confused when she mispronounces “Quibi.”