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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Good comedians can be excused for going bad.
I love the Daily Show and I wanted to like "40 Year Old Virgin." My teenage nephew's euphoric recap of the movie was far more entertaining than sitting through the movie itself, which was another overlong example of one-skit material stretched to the point of breakage (and boredom) in its film-length version. If this is the 21st century artistic baseline for a successful comedy, how does anyone, even a "good" comedian, know what to do? Apparently anything passes for wit and timing, and scripts apparently are optional for financially successful "laffers." Why would "good" comedians bother?
Could be the malls packed with Bushworld exacerbating the colossal dumb-down, sucking in Steve, Woody et al. Maybe Dave Chappelle is safe!
An aging Steve Martin retreading the work of Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards in their glory days is in the same league as cranky old Pete Townshend selling his heartfelt teen rock anthems to auto corps, Disney and the phone company.
Gack.
I haven't seen the new Pink Panther and rather imagine I will not, having seen the promos (not to mention the utterly execrable pre-show short at Clearview cinemas).
I can't help but think what this movie could have been had they just swapped roles: imagine Kevin Klein as Clouseau and Martin as the bureaucrat. Klein, doing a mix of his characters from A Fish Called Wanda and French Kiss, but contained by the straitjacket of Clouseau's incompetence, and Martin as, essentially, Herbert Lom (whose slow burns, manic twitches and self destructive psychotic breaks were, for me, often the best part of the Panther films).
The problem with the new Panther is that Sellers was a subtle comic while Martin works broadly (Little Shop of Horrors contains one of my favorite Martin characters, and Martin's broad humor was a perfect foil for Michael Caine's more subtle comic turn in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels).
Sellers' Clouseau derived his humor from the character's utterly unjustified self confidence while, really, the actor played it straight. Martin doesn't do straight, and thus his Clouseau doesn't work; he's just kind of annoying.
But oh, what it might have been.
I always thought the Inspector Clouseau thing was just a lot of anti-French hostility disguised as comedy. We thought Peter Sellers was funny for the same reason the French think Jerry Lewis is funny: It's always a howl to make fun of furriners.
We've seen it before: they're long past their best creative days in the studio but for live performances they're still the standard.
Take Robin Williams (please!) Every one of is movies is a good arguement for cancelling my cable subscription, but when he plugs them on Leno or Letterman he always has the audience laughing. At the 2005 Indie Awards he killed everyone with his 5-minute improv bit centered around the presentation of one of the trophies, capping off with "I'm going to leave this here and fuck off."
And therein may lay the solution: instead of hosting the Oscars, we should see more comedians hosting pretentiously non-pretentious showbiz award shows. They'd get the hi-celeb-profile without the need-to-prove-anything getting in the way of what they do best: being funny.
I mostly agree with this, but think Stephanie is conveniently forgetful when it comes to Woody Allen's career. Woody has always been wildly inconsistent, and to say he's "gone bad" is to give in to the temptation of placing too much emphasis on late career works (each of which is met as the major new work of a rare American icon). Does everyone remember Sleepers? Released in 1973, it's harmless slapstick, not inspired or particularly funny despite the Huxley-type themes. And such spotty moments have appeared off and on throughout Woody's career. This goes for the dramas as well, which vary wildly from Husbands and Wives to the unwatchable September. I think Match Point, with its excellent, nuanced characters deserves its due as a great film, and it simply shows Woody is as inconsistent as ever.
Also, apart from being inconsistent, his films are often driven along by singlular themes and are usually wrapped up quite meticulously around these themes at the end. This doesn't diminish the nuances of the characters or their interactions.
In the 1930's movies drew on the talent of dancers like Cagney, who made the switch to dramatic acting. By the 80's film was drawing on the talent of comedians, the clubs became places where up and coming young actors could work on their timing. Television forced the comic into static routines. Zero Mostel did a week as guest host on Carson, and it was a disaster because the old vaudvillian could not stay inside the frame, even though his hyperfrenetic bombast was more than funny enough for the movies. Comedians like Martin, had some nice moves early in their career, King Tut, and Woody Allen was doing Buster Keaton in Sleeper. I have never seen a more elegant runner than Woody in full stride in the streets of Manhattan. The older comics don't have the moves, the younger comics never learned them, because TV didn't require a lot of gestures. The young comedians are unprepared, and the directors compensate by closing in the edges of the frame. When you compare their work to Keaton or Chaplain you immediately sense the disparity, and the audience feels a little cheated.
The recycling of old material is partly a creative torpor, but the remake also serves to reinforce the notion that the filmgoer is watching a moving picture.
a live audience. A comedy in a movie theatre can seem much funnier when other people are laughing, same for stand-up. When you watch a comic on television performing in front of a live audience, you'll notice the audience is laughing a lot - but you - maybe not so much. If you're alone you may not laugh much at all, but add a few friends, you'll start laughing more. I saw Robert Klein many years ago live, with friends, and we laughed almost non-stop for two hours. If I had watched the same performance on TV, by myself, I wouldn't have been laughing so hard. Nowadays, we tend to watch our movies in our own living rooms, where there's no audience to laugh along with us.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
