Cunk on Cinema
Philomena Cunk is flying close to the sun. The obstinately disinterested host of such Charlie Brooker-created educational programming as Cunk on Britain, Cunk on Earth and Cunk on Life is turning her misdirected fascination at least partially inward to tackle the entertainment industry in the appropriately titled Netflix miniseries Cunk on Cinema.
Star: Diane Morgan
Creator: Charlie Brooker
This means baiting critics, who have a greater knowledge of and investment in the topic that’s under Cunk’s withering gaze, and baiting the experts whose increasingly implausible flummoxitude—not a real word—in the face of Cunk’s probingly incurious curiosity is the comedy franchise’s bread and butter.
Surely Brooker and writer-star Diane Morgan know that Cunk and her gimmick won’t play forever, so Cunk on Cinema may mean they’ve decided to take the premise about as far as it can go without becoming a parody of a thing that’s already a parody.
The seams are certainly showing in the delicately threaded tapestry that is Cunk in this series. At six episodes of under 15 minutes apiece, Cunk on Cinema doesn’t overstay its welcome or entirely strain the credulity of viewers who are more in on the joke than her interview subjects. But the ratio of punchlines that fizzle to punchlines that hit is probably closer to even than at any previous point in the franchise.
Still, Cunk on Cinema offers more laughs than just about anything else you’re likely to watch this month, and I’m prepared to follow the miseducation of Philomena Cunk until the wheels entirely come off.
Cunk on Cinema is structurally simple, as television presenter Cunk (Morgan) takes viewers on a history of filmic media going all the way back to, well, the absence of movies.
“Movies haven’t always been with us. In fact, for centuries Earth was a barren wasteland devoid of entertainment content,” she observes, walking through a sea of classic paintings and noting, “For centuries, eyes were literally useless, because there was nothing worth looking at.”
She traces the advent of photography and then moving pictures, touching on landmarks like The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (“It’s almost as boring as Ben Affleck,” she notes), The Birth of a Nation (“A typically woke Hollywood fantasy”), and into the comedies of Charlie Chaplin (“To this day, the only homeless person it’s okay to openly laugh at”) and Buster Keaton.
I don’t want to accuse Cunk on Cinema of being intellectually nourishing by any stretch of the imagination, but as bite-sized introductions to film studies go, it has some validity. Working her way through her usual assortment of photogenic backdrops, from film studios to the base of the Hollywood sign to various libraries and repositories, Cunk touches at least briefly on a range of noteworthy, properly contextualized bits of history—from an acceptable definition of the Kuleshov effect to a rudimentary explanation of the Hays Code to an acknowledgement of the impact of TV on the films of the 1950s and 1960s.
Cunk’s droll approach to classic films and the medium’s evolution alternates between willfully ignorant and perceptively counter-logical, going amusingly deep on E.T. as a grooming narrative and resorting to social media-friendly one-liners like, “Do you have to have seen the first 2000 films in the series in order to understand 2001?” It’s possible that some parts of Cunk on Cinema benefit from knowing about the films and industry conventions she’s lampooning. But I’m not sure how knowledgable one need be to find it funny to keep referring to Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin as “Batshit Pumpkin” over and over. I found it funny over and over.
As always, Cunk can’t do it alone and she’s assembled a group of experts, from the usual dry British intellectuals to a scattering of film critics to an amusing range of cinematic craftsmen (mostly men) to actual A-listers including Michael Bay and Benedict Cumberbatch.