Journo pally: “Last night I watched William Wyler‘s final film — The Liberation of L.B. Jones (’70). It’s about a staid, small-town, African-American funeral home owner (Roscoe Lee Browne) who wants to divorce his hot wife (Lola Falana) because she’s having an affair with a white cop (Anthony Zerbe).

“The powers-that-be in the small Southern town want the whole thing to go away, and put pressure on Browne’s character to drop the suit. He refuses, with tragic results.

“It’s hard to imagine what Wyler was thinking when he decided to take on this project, but what emerged was a lurid, violent melodrama that’s somewhere between a blaxploitation film and a civil rights message pic (Yaphet Kotto also pops up as a black avenger). It’s a mess — a fascinating one, the kind you can’t take your eyes off, but still a mess.

“Wyler is one of the great directors of the old Hollywood system, a man who made a number of undying classics, and won a ton of awards. Yet his final film might be the worst movie he ever made. How many other major directors have ended their careers with a stinker?

“Lee Majors and Barbara Hershey play a white couple related to Lee J. Cobb, who’s sort of the film’s super-villain, and they’re supposed to be the white liberal conscience of the film, but are basically given nothing to do. And the film features two stereotypical racist white cops — Zerbe and Arch Johnson — who could have come out of any Fred Williamson flick. The craft is fine, although nothing special. Competent. But far from Wyler’s best.”

Wiki excerpt: “The screenplay by Jesse Hill Ford and Stirling Silliphant is based on Ford’s 1965 novel ‘The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones’. The novel, in turn, was based on events that happened in a Southern town where Ford lived. Post-publication he was verbally attacked for writing about same. The motion picture’s release added to the controversy, especially in Humboldt, Tennessee, where Ford lived.”

It must feel a bit disappointing to Jon Stewart that Irresistible, his second effort as a director-writer hyphenate, will open online because of the pandemic. After all that blood, sweat, passion, refining and tweaking. Pic is an upmarket political satire with a title that doesn’t exactly say “upmarket political satire”. The suggestion is that it’s Welcome to Mooseport meets Primary Colors…maybe. Steve Carell, Rose Byrne, Chris Cooper, Mackenzie Davis, Topher Grace, Natasha Lyonne, Will Sasso.

I love Superbad and Some Like It Hot but otherwise I’ve never been much for “hah-hah” comedies. I like “off” humor, dry comedies, sly comedies, tongue-in-cheek, no-laugh funny, etc. Or, failing all that, truly moronic humor. But let’s examine a “50 greatest comedies of the 21st Century” piece by Rolling Stone staffers, and consider which of these films are actually funny.

Genuinely, Humanly Funny (and Occasionally Even Wise) / 7

Alexander Payne‘s Sideways
Stephen Frears and Nick Hornby‘s High Fidelity
Spike Jonze‘s Adaptation
Greg Mottola and Judd Apatow‘s Superbad
Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder
Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man
Armando Iannucci‘s In The Loop

Mescaline Attitude, Brilliantly Funny In Spurts / 12

Paul Feig‘s Bridesmaids
Mike Judge‘s Idiocracy
David Mamet‘s State and Main
Larry Charles and Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Borat
Terry Zwigoff‘s Ghost World
Terry Zwigoff‘s Bad Santa
David O. Russell‘s I Heart Huckabees
Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Hail Caesar
Wes Anderson‘s The Royal Tenenbaums
Michael Winterbottom‘s The Trip
Amando Iannucci‘s The Death of Stalin
Christopher Guest‘s Best in Show

No-Laugh Funny (Conceptually Amusing But Not Actually “Funny”) / 5

Richard Linklater‘s School of Rock
Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Lobster (but only during the first half)
Adam McKay‘s Anchorman
Adam McKay‘s Step Brothers
Edgar Wright‘s Shaun of the Dead

What is the implication when a rightwing Christian woman like Kayleigh McEnany says that “people should be allowed to pray to their gods“?

This made sense when Peter Ustinov told Jean Simmons to “thank your gods” in Spartacus, because the common Roman belief in pre-Christian times was that several gods held sway. But today even the dumbest evangelical Christian understands that there’s a single unifying cosmic and mathematical order to the universe, and that “Allah” is the same entity as the Biblical King James God or, if you will, the entity whom the ancient Judeans prayed to as “Eli”.

True — there are millions of idiots in this country who believe that “God” is some kind of all-powerful, white-bearded sentient administrator in flowing robes who gets involved in the moral particulars of human behavior on the planet earth…who roots for this or that human to do the right moral thing when push comes to shove, and who gave Moses the Ten Commandments and who wept (but did nothing) during the Holocaust and who is gravely disappointed if humans fail to show proper reverence and respect for His authority, etc.

He doesn’t exist, of course, but if He did he would probably say to little Kayleigh in her sleep, “Do you honestly believe that there are competing Gods in heaven, watching over their respective spiritual flocks? Do you not at least understand that there is only one unifying celestial force, and that whatever term is used by whatever culture it’s the same vibration all over?”

The pandemic is killing (i.e., has probably permanently killed) London’s Old Vic. I’ve only attended one play there — Peter O’Toole‘s Macbeth in December ’80 — and the odds of my attending another are…well, who knows? But it’s been a going concern since the mid 1800s, and there are damn few theatres with this kind of history, and the idea of this hallowed place shuttering for good because of some dead bats in Wuhan, China is…I don’t know what word to use but “infuriating” isn’t strong enough.

I was in a sluggish, downish mood this morning, and I couldn’t get rolling with the column. And then Faye Dunaway rescued me. In the space of two or three minutes I was smiling, happy. I watched it again twice.

How could Dunaway and director Frank Perry have possibly calculated that audiences (gay guys especially) wouldn’t have relished the camp value? How could they have expected otherwise in the face of such intense Kabuki theatre?

My first viewing of Mommie Dearest was in late August 1981, inside an upper-story screening room within the Paramount building at Columbus Circle. I distinctly recall the gaiety in the elevator after it ended; two or three passengers were cooing and squealing with laughter. It took Paramount marketing a while to realize what was happening. Five or six weeks after the 9.18.81 opening the tongue-in-cheek ads appeared– “The biggest mother of them all.”

I know very little about the actual playing of golf but a little something about what makes a good golf swing. And I certainly know a bad swing when I see one. Great golf swings are meant to be things of beauty. Like ballet or playing a violin or Minnesota Fats shooting the eyes off them balls.

Milestone celebration for 100k deaths?pic.twitter.com/KqSIGizg61

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) May 23, 2020