by Mattie Lucas
Cinema from a Decidedly Queer Perspective
King Lear | 1987
For most of its life, the Cannon Group was a minor studio known for brawny B-movies like Death Wish, Cobra, Missing in Action, and Masters of the Universe. But during the 1980s, under the direction of co-owners Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who bought the company in 1979, Cannon also used some of its profits to take chances on risky auteur-driven projects in an attempt to gain some prestige. One such project was Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, a deal Golan and Globus infamously made with Godard on a napkin at the Cannes Film Festival, where the pair were tenaciously courting filmmakers.
A quick look at post-COVID box office returns might suggest that the R-rated comedy is dead. There have been a couple of exceptions (2023's No Hard Feelings springs to mind ), but it's notable that two of this year's best R-rated comedies, You’re Cordially Invited and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, movies that once upon a time would have been surefire theatrical hits, went straight to streaming in the United States. The days of Wedding Crashers (2005), The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), and Superbad (2007) seem well behind us, not to mention more recent hits like Blockers (2018) and Game Night (2018).