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Film comedies have always been a problem for me, since for the most part I don’t find ’em “funny.” (Funny: what’s that? When you laugh, I guess, though Rob Zombie movies—or Milla Jovovich in Resident Evil: Extinction … can’t hardly wait for that one!—probably don’t count.) And with the recent canonization of everything Judd Apatow touches, things are looking bleaker all the time, at least from my side of the aisle. Poker-faced through The 40-Year-Old Virgin, poker-faced through Knocked Up, poker-faced through Superbad (I mean, what’s with the decibel count: if the characters don’t immediately turn into screaming, gesticulating ferrets, does it mean the “comedy” has somehow failed?). As desolating as it undoubtedly is, Aki Kaurismaki’s Lights in the Dusk seems more chortlesome (now there’s a word!) than anything Apatow et al have been able to cook up. Maybe it’s the very numbness of it, like a whiff of nitrous oxide in the dentist’s chair: cleaned out and bracing, daring you to find subliminal riffs in an open, airy void—what’s not to like about that?
