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

Read more

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.”

Read more

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

Jordan Ruimy’s latest critic and filmmaker poll focuses on the best of the aughts. The top ten are (1) Mulholland Drive (David Lynch), (2) There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson), (3) Zodiac (David Fincher), (4) In the Mood For Love (Wong Kar-Wai), (5) No Country For Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen), (6) Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron), (7) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry), (8) Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki), (9) Yi Yi: A One and A Two (Edward Yang) and (10) Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola)

HE’s Best of the First Decade (’00 to ’09 — 44 in all): Zodiac, Memento, Traffic, Amores perros, United 93, Children of Men, Adaptation, City of God, The Pianist, The Lives of Others, Brokeback Mountain, Sexy Beast, Avatar, There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, Almost Famous (the “Untitled” DVD director’s cut), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Collateral, Dancer in the Dark, A Serious Man, Girlfight, The Departed, Babel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Ghost World, In the Bedroom, Talk to Her, Bloody Sunday, No Country For Old Men, The Quiet American, Whale Rider, Road to Perdition, Open Range, Touching the Void, Maria Full of Grace, Up In The Air, The Hurt Locker, Million Dollar Baby, The Motorcycle Diaries, An Education, Man on Wire, Revolutionary Road, Che and Volver. (44)

All the best directors are nervy. If you don’t take risks, you can’t be great, and hedging your bets is what mediocrity is all about. Spike Lee rolled the dice in this scene from Summer of Sam, and the all-media crowd I saw it with was all but rolling in the aisles.

It’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback, but I would have chucked the dialogue and implied that some kind of demonic vibration was coming from the black labrador. Using CG to turn his eyes yellow or something in that realm.

I never knew, by the way, that the dog’s voice belongs to John Turturro.

I wasn’t especially interested in seeing Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan‘s Hollywood miniseries (Netflix, currently streaming) as it sounded, to go by reviews, like another exercise in woke historical revisionism.

The series reimagines late ’40s and ’50s Hollywood by eliminating musty taboos and prejudices that were in force 60 or 70 years ago. Hollywood on the planet Tralfamadore. Powerful women players (directors, agents, casting directors), gay guys and people of color occupying significant slots in the power structure plus a Scotty Bowers-like gas station offering sexual services.

Recreating and re-inventing America’s ethnic and sexual history has been in fashion since Hamilton, I reasoned, or over the last five years. Hardly a radical or even interesting idea today. Or so I thought.

Last night I finally watched the first two episodes, and guess what? Hollywood is engrossing, well-written, briskly paced, not predictable and most of the actors get it right. (I was particularly taken with David Corenswet, the lead character.) The wokester fantasyland thing, it turns out, is dramatically liberating. Or it felt that way to me. I intend to watch the remaining five episodes.

The actor playing Rock Hudson, Jake Picking, still isn’t right. (Murphy couldn’t find a so-so actor who at least half-resembles young Hudson?) But the guy playing agent Henry Willson, Jim Parsons, is exactly right in every department. Samara Weaving as extra-ambitious actress Claire Wood has a special blonde spitfire thing going on. This is partly because she’s actually attractive in a 20th Century sense, which is somewhat unusual in this day and age.

Joe Biden has apologized for mouthing a variation on Billy Bob Thornton‘s line from Primary Colors: “I’m blacker than you are. I got some slave in me. I can feel it.”

In a sense Biden was sharing a confident jest about African American identity, as in “c’mon, seriously?” He was also saying with absolute sincerity, “People of color who are on the fence about whether or not to vote for Donald Trump are perhaps a tad whiter than me, not to mention a couple of cards short of a full deck.”

Blackness, he meant, is about more than a matter of skin shade or tribal identity. It’s about absolute gut recognition of The Beast. It means “never ever Trump” because you’re an idiot if you think that America’s Oval Office sociopath is driven by anything deeper than his own narcissistic self-regard.

In a general sense it means knowing in your bones the difference between (a) your real deep-down friends and allies and (b) the posturing phonies who are only interested in using your friendship or political support in order to benefit themselves.

Oh, wait, I forgot…lefties are just as racist as the worst tobacco-chewin’ storefront crackers. Right, Jordan Peele and Bob Strauss? Trumpies, at least, are honest about their racism — you know where they stand — while good liberals hide behind their gates. Or something like that.

Some people are so far down their own rabbit hole that there’s no reaching them.