8/6 Viewing Journal (reviews of "A Taste of Cherry" and "Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy")

Since writer-director Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, an insightful gem from earlier this year, skillfully married a high-concept premise with a series of adult, leisurely philosophical back-and-forths, I was delighted to discover that his Cannes Film Festival prize-winner A Taste of Cherry (1998, Abbas Kiarostami), the first of his older films I've caught up with, pulls off an identical balancing act. Now here's another auteur who will lead me to raise my eyebrow in anticipation when future work from him is announced in film-festival line-ups. (As can be expected, my eyebrow doctor loves it when festival line-ups are unveiled.)

The high concept is this: Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi), a man who hasn't yet reached old age, drives around the outskirts of Tehran asking various strangers if they will help him commit suicide. He has dug a grave for himself out in the wilderness, and he plans to swallow a large amount of sleeping pills and climb into the grave at nightfall. His instructions to every prospective assistant are as follows: the following morning, throw a rock at his body, and if he turns out to be alive, pull him out of the grave, but if he's dead, cover the grave with dirt.

Heavy stuff, to be sure, but also powerfully wise and moving due to Kiarostami's profound powers of perception. The filmmaker makes a passionate plea for the value of every human life on Earth, and Ershadi's performance adds welcome complication. He makes Mr. Badii hard-edged and stubborn, a real, flesh-and-blood creation who must earn the audience's interest in his survival instead of lazily inviting it right off the bat.

Kiarostami only errs in the film's wildly self-indulgent final moments, but he also seems to realize that the only right ending to the film is one that realizes that the multiple, eloquent arguments for embracing life that Mr. Badii encounters are far richer than any traditional narrative payoff ever could be. Grade: A-

Comedy is subjective, and I recall one critic I greatly admire who gave the anarchic Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996, Kelly Makin) (umpteenth viewing, second on the big screen) a damning "F" grade. (He smeared my favorite film of 2000, the Coen Brothers comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, with the same grade. Grrr. Believe it or not, he's made some great calls too over the years.). But under Makin's inventive direction, Brain Candy stands in my mind as one of the flat-out funniest sketch-comedy extensions ever made, and by far the most visually sophisticated.

So, if you haven't seen it and wonder if you'll love or hate it, what should you expect from it going in? Well, a healthy amount of Dr. Strangelove's biting satire, a dose of mainstream-jostling, John Waters-style queer-positive subversion, and more than a few drops of the formal daring of film-comedy wizards such as the Coens and Wes Anderson. (I'd say the Coen film it most resembles is The Hudsucker Proxy, especially in the beautifully shot and cut, corporate-spoofing "red socks" sequence.) (Also, if you haven't seen it, it's about a pharmaceutical corporation, thus my oh-so-clever doctoral wording above.) More than anything, though, it reflects the very Canadian absurdity of sketch-comedy giants the Kids in the Hall. They specialize in the kind of gags that get funnier the more you think about them, which is rare to find these days. For example, when Dr. Chris Cooper (Kevin McDonald) checks in on batty, old patient Mrs. Hurdicure (Scott Thompson), who has taken an anti-depressant that is still in trials, she's being subjected to a test that requires her to swirl around in a zero-gravity, Lawnmower Man-type rig. What's most hilarious is reflecting on how nonsensical the touch is: how does the zero-gravity rig affect the anti-depressant's effects in any way, shape, or form? What did Cooper and his associates tell their superiors in order to secure funding for the rig? And so on.

Being in the minority that adores this comedy, I remember looking forward like few others were to Makin's follow-up, the Hugh Grant/James Caan vehicle Mickey Blue Eyes. Unfortunately, it turned out to be exactly the kind of dud that usually gets dumped into an end-of-summer release-date slot. But even if Makin turns out to end her career as a one-hit wonder, I would still say: what a hit! Grade: A