Tomorrow Night
Consider it a
crime against audiences everywhere that this film wasn't picked up by a major
distributor after screening at Sundance in 1998. Written and directed by
stand-up comic Louis C.K. and funded by comedic brethren including Jon Stewart
and Conan O'Brien (who makes a hilarious cameo as himself), Tomorrow Night
may be too weird for the corporate suits at Miramax, but it should find its
audience among those who enjoy the surreal humor of O'Brien, The Kids in the
Hall, and so forth. Chuck Sklar, a
writer-producer for The Chris Rock Show, plays Charles, a bitter
photo-shop clerk with a fetish for rubbing his naked rear end in ice cream.
Inundated with old photo orders that have never been picked up, he decides to
track down the individual customers, and eventually crosses paths with Florence
(Martha Greenhouse, Bananas), an elderly lady married to a maniacal
gibbering sadist who resembles a demented Ernest Borgnine
and acts like O'Brien's recurring character Carl "Oldie" Olson. An
unlikely love blooms between young nerd and motherly oldster based on their
mutual love of fastidious cleanliness, so when the crazy husband gets torn
apart by wild dogs, the two get married. There's much more to the film than
that, including another old woman who's played by a young man in drag (whether
he/she's supposed to be a drag queen or just a really bad onscreen
representation of an old woman is never discussed), Florence's dumb brick of a
son who's been in the army for 20 years and is still a private, and a
flamboyant slut named Lola Vagina. The whole thing is artfully shot in black
and white, and there's even an effectively creepy subplot about an anonymous
set of photos that leads up to a climax straight out of