The Audience, or, Do you kids like to use the World Wide Interweb?
I just got back from seeing the new Christopher Guest movie For Your Consideration, and just felt this need to vent.
Lest you think I actually hated said movie, you are wrong. I liked the movie fine. It's the audience that has me pissed off.
If it helps, I should at least let you know that I would follow Chris Guest to the ends of the earth. To say that I love his movies is an understatement No. I think he's one of the most accessible, intelligent, brilliantly perverse human beings on this planet. Hell, I even suffered through Heartbeeps.
So, what I had heard about this movie, from every single friend/relative/acquaintance/whoever knows me at all who saw this movie was the same thing, "It was disappointing." You know, as in, "You're not going to like it." I heard that repeatedly. And, let me tell you, if you go into this movie with severely lowered expectations? You will love it. Nobody else in the theatre did, actually, because, I don't know, maybe they thought this was going to be a laff riot. I don't even know what they were thinking (as in, nobody in the audience knew who Ricky Gervais was or recognized him as anything other than "That guy from 'The Office'). Well, I can't believe they hated it as much as they did.
As in, some dipwad actually got up in the theatre and screamed, "THERE WERE NO LIKABLE CHARACTERS IN THAT MOVIE!!!" And I just wanted to get up and scream back at him, "THAT WAS THE FUCKING POINT!!!" Also, the girl next to me left her cell phone on for the entire movie and, right after it ended, complained about getting a very long message on her voicemail. Which, I find odd, since she was texting on a tiny, unnecessarily bright screen for the last hour and a half. These are the people for whom quality forgot. The ones who believe Ian Maxtone-Graham episodes of "The Simpsons" that forget who the characters actually are belong in the all-time echelon of greatness (well, that's what's playing in the background of my computer screen right now, so, it provides an appropriate comparison).
You might be wondering why I'm writing about For Your Consideration on this blog. Well, I'm all about improv comedy, and this film certainly had enough musical theatre veterans to fill a cast of Henry, Sweet, Henry.
Also, it's the same thing with live theatre. Not just the tourists, but the insider-y jackasses who won't stop talking during the show. If they hate it, they won't stop talking loudly. If they love it, they won't stop talking loudly. I had the same problem at Striking 12 and Company, and it seemed like these queens wouldn't stop (for lack of a better term) verbally "beating off" to the show. Can't they just wait until they're around someone who cares after the show ends before they can start name-dropping? Why is it such a big deal for them to be in the same room as these performers, who probably wouldn't give half a shit about what these jerks are yelling and laughing about during the show because they are on a stage performing and have to concentrate all of their mental energy on a show that they can't screw up for the rest of the audience? Ugh!
A question to anyone who understands what I'm getting at: If you really loved theatre, wouldn't you have some semblance of etiquette to go with that? To this day, my parents always stressed my sister and I dressing up for a Broadway show, regardless of whether it was a matinee or not. We always had a strict dress code and knew to be quiet. If we hated a show, we knew to whisper to mom, so no one else would understand what we were getting at. And we still, by force of habit, wear dresses and slacks to whatever live theater we plan on attending. We turn off our cell phones. Sometimes we don't even bring our cell phones if we know our parents are paying for everything. We're the only ones.
I mean, how would you feel if some ATC poster went to your high school production of Joseph and kept screaming, "Oh my God! Katie the head cheerleader! I love her! Oh, THIS NUMBER IS WEAK BUT I'M CLAPPING OUT OF SARCASM AND GLOWERING BECAUSE I WANT TO SPITE THEM!" The sad truth is, I can totally see this happening in real life. I have a morbid fasciation with that site and the people who post on it, although I never really got why these people make it a such a huge point to see theatre in any capacity, wherever it happens, regardless of how much they know it's going to suck, or how much they have to pay for it. These are people who consider Seth Rudetsky a celebrity and who always have to preface why they really love a show with a very long, rambling, Isherwood-esque paragraph on why they also really hate it.
Wait. Is this anorexic chick on my T.V. right now butchering Eva Cassidy OFF-KEY with inspirational music blasting in the background supposed to be good? A-ha. I get it now. You know, my voice teacher always tells me: "Stop riffing. You know you can hit that note in the sheet music. Don't try so hard." As in, people who aren't real singers tend to add other notes that aren't in the song before the note they're supposed to hit, so it makes it look like they can hit the note without actually hitting it on the first try? Why is that girl adding a different note to every damn note in the song? Why are you people applauding this crap!? That means she's not a real singer!
Side note: After my voice teacher pointed this out to me, I was particularly annoyed with Kelly Clarkson's "singing" the National Anthem on the playoffs this Thanksgiving. My whole family thought she was brilliant, but you'd think they'd be smart enough to know that half of the notes she sang aren't even in the National Anthem. She added another note before every damn note just to ease the transition, which technically makes it half of them. If it had been any other song, I wouldn't have been so pissed off by it. Although, my family was probably more taken with, "Wow, Kelly Clarkson lost a lot of weight!" than "Wow, Kelly Clarkson is really singing!"
But I digress. When I was a kid, I always thought I would be living in New York City, and my family and I could see more Broadway shows and movies than we ever dreamed of. Who would have thought that the ticket prices would get so abnormally huge on both ends, I'd be lucky to even get out and see one movie per year without waiting for the lowered rental fees when it came out on DVD?
Anyway, I'd just like to thank Loews Kips Bay for being one of the few movie theatres in NYC that lets you bring in outside food. I am not one for junk food, but I had such a wicked craving for my coconut coffee and Boston kreme, I was actually worried on how I could have brought it into the theatre without being like Kramer with the coffee in his pants. I also counted a bag of nuts, two Starbucks gingerbread lattes, and two boxes of buffalo wings in the theatre.
Appropriately caffeinated and sugar-rushed, with a new Christopher Guest movie in tow and me front-row center, I was like a kid on Christmas day. The one thing that ruined it was that I was also sitting right in front of these two yuppie couples who wouldn't stop talking about corporate stocks. By the way, these kinds of couples are the exact reason I hate living in Murray Hill.
Anyway, one thing that people don't understand about this movie is that it's not supposed to be a mockumentary. It does away with the "unseen camera crew" device, and, instead of cutting away from the staggering humiliations the characters put up with to have the characters explain, in interviews, why they're humiliating themselves for us, they linger on the humiliations for some time longer. It's not like Waiting for Guffman or Best In Show: It's more like an unofficial sequel (an unintentional redo?) of The Big Picture, only on Christopher Guest's own terms. And what people fail to realize is, before Christopher Guest had Castle Rock and the creative leeway to actually make movies on his own terms, Christopher Guest used to make movies like For Your Consideration, but the studios thought they were too weird.
For Your Consideration is, by far, Christopher Guest's most inorganic movie to date. It's not that a lot of the gags feel forced (one audience member loudly filled in a punchline before Eugene Levy even got to a much funnier one). What separates For Your Consideration is that it deals with a more fantastic world than Guffman or Best in Show: one where people walk around studio lots in space suits and get their lunch at craft services, let alone one outside of where the audience is. The presence of anyone from "Mad TV" also confirms this.
One couple in the back row also got up and yelled, "This isn't Hollywood. This is New York. What makes them think we would find this funny here?"
We can all relate to the humor in community theatre, pets, and heavy metal music, because we know them, and we've been there. It's not that the world of For Your Consideration isn't around us. The problem is that this world is, strictly, around us. We don't know whether these characters are weird people Guest, Levy, and co. deal with on a daily basis, or some heightened exaggeration of them, because we've never seen them outside of wacky comedies like The Big Picture. Although, to me, the fact that when I walked out of the theatre, I was surrounded by posters that were only for remakes or sequels pretty much confirmed that these idiots do exist. After all, this is why there are no original ideas left in Hollywood.
So, when an original idea like For Your Consideration comes along, people are too stupid to realize how true the comedy is, and how gags that are both totally real and fakely exaggerated tend to work. Perhaps that's why the laughs were more few and far between than in any other Guest movie I've ever seen in a movie house. With Best in Show, the audience was laughing, because they knew who these people were in the Midwest and South. People in Murray Hill, likewise, only laughed at the overtly Jewish references.
Because this is a movie that deals with a highly fantastical/fictional prospect: In today's Hollywood, or in any Hollywood, for that matter, a movie like Home for Purim would never get made. Hollywood is still scared of making movies that deal with Jewish concerns and history (let alone Southern Jews), which makes the situation both squickingly weird, and abnormally funny in a Naked Gun sort of way (and not a Best in Show sort of way). Only once in a blue moon will there be a Schindler's List or a Munich (which, even rarer, deals directly with the Israel-Palestine conflict). I actually consider A Mighty Wind to be a more Jewish movie than what Hollywood tends to consider "Jewish." And if there is ever going to be a movie like Home for Purim, rest assured, George Clooney will play the Jew. And then it will become Home for Thanksgiving.
I know from which I speak, because I took classes in Film and Jewish Studies in college, and saw all of the "Jewish event movies" ever made. They were not only more rare than any genre film, but they reminded me why, exactly, Hollywood is so scared of the audience (i.e. people who aren't them). I really had to suspend my disbelief that a movie like Home for Purim could ever be taken seriously (the fact that Yentl actually exists really helped). And why would a Jewish filmmaker name the family in the movie Pisher?! Wouldn't he know what that word really means?!?
Do you want to know why Hollywood hates musicals, too? Because there was no singing or dancing in the Dreamgirls preview that preceded this movie.
Here's what made For Your Consideration work for me (and what probably tainted it for the rest of the audience): Any of the previews before it could have been for one of the movie spoofs here. I think the Don Lake character summed it up nicely when he said, "It's about time in a film nothing happened!"
Besides being as geeish as the wacky Plymouth Rock spoof, at no point in any of these five or six movie previews before For Your Consideration did I ever get a sense of what the fucking movie was about. For Your Consideration knew this, and the fact that the joke established itself well before the actual movie started was truly a joy to behold.
Here's what I did see: No less than eight or nine reminders that all of the "____ Award _____" people involved with each of these movies were nominated and/or won Oscars, Golden Globes, People's Choices, Grammies, Tonies, and Blockbuster Awards. Seriously. Grammies.
First of all, the trailer for the new (ACADEMY AWARD WINNER!) Steven Soderbergh movie is designed to look like a preview for a movie based on a graphic novel. Hey, movie trailer douchebags, you don't need to remind me that George Clooney and Cate Blanchett won Oscars. Christ on a cracker, that was less than a year ago.
I'm starting to care about Beau Bridges in this movie. Why? Because I know he hasn't even been nominated for a Blockbuster Award.
I wouldn't have cared otherwise, but the damn movie trailers beat me into oblivion with these factoids to the point where every single preview looked like it was for the exact same movie.
And then there was that generic "chick flick" with Diane Keaton as a woman of a certain age trying to keep up with her three sexy daughters? The one that would have had "This will be an everlasting love for me" or whatever playing in the background? The movie with a requisite scene in Bloomingdales and a token well-dressed character who's a caterer that just seemed designed to be some parody of another movie that I swear would have already come out five years ago? It took me a while to recognize Rebecca Romijn. I thought her one line in X-Men was pretty much confirmation that she couldn't act, but I guess I was wrong.
By the way, the yuppies couldn't stop laughing during this preview. Because Reverend Camden played the age-appropriate gray(ish) fox love interest for Keaton, one of the guys yelled, "It looks like a really long TV show! 'Eighth Heaven!'" Die, yuppie scum. Die.
At some point in the fifteen or so minutes before the actual movie started, I was thinking, "You know, I would kill to see the trailer for Balls of Fury right now." Except that movie features Oscar winner Christopher Walken, coupled with the fact that the actual Balls of Fury guy won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical pretty much legitimizes that one.
Okay, Dreamgirls looks kind of cool. Finally, one of the "American Idols" gets to sing something other than Manilow! God, I wish this was 1981, and I could afford a Broadway ticket to see the real show instead...
Anyway, back to Chris Guest and his repertory company of actors (especially the sorely underused Jim Piddock, who was great). I was thinking, the only time this movie hit the delirious heights of hilarity the other Guest movies did, was right at the end. When they showed the montage of publicity appearances covering everything from Opie & Anthony to Leno to BET to Charlie Rose (Bless you, Mark Harelik, for making that genius). And the so-funny-because-it's true habit of "Entertainment Tonight" asking stupid questions to actors (i.e. "Who was your favorite member of the Brady Bunch?"), and then only interviewing them when they don't get nominated for awards? Brilliant!
That being said, however, they finally let a black person in a Christopher Guest movie. Predictably, he served no purpose other than to point out how stupid and ignorant the white people were. At least this movie, like all other Guest movies, dealt with openly Jewish characters. How sad is it that I actually have to use the phrase "openly Jewish"?
Just so you know, Jim Piddock also wrote The Man.
Since this has been an uncharacteristically ranty entry, I'll leave you now with some things that are guaranteed to make me laugh at the moment:
The chapter in Not Since Carrie that seems to pose the improbable question: "Wait...There was a Broadway musical based on Exodus?"
Harpo Marx.
That whole sequence in the movie American Dreamz with the longhaired Southern guy going "Oh yeaaah, I'm a rocker!"
The two newest "recurring" sketches on "Mad TV," one of which is a lot like "Kidz News with Smapdi" from the old "Daily Show," featuring a "kid" drawing and commenting on current events; and the other of which proves that "Mad TV"'s latest precaution in trying to not achieve the level of "suck" "SNL" has in recent years is making the last 5 minutes of the show as fucking funny as humanly possible by having the cast members portray fake "musical guests" who parody a different style of music each week.
The exceedingly fucked-up commercials for the new musical Grey Gardens, which would actually get me to see that show if I wasn't so sure that the whole audience was made up of those crazy insider jackasses I already mentioned earlier in this entry. Those jackasses are also why I found Ed Begley's character in For Your Consideration the best one, by the way.
"Is it Italian...or maybe Frittalian?"
In conclusion to this entry, I just want to say that I don't ask anyone to make me laugh or think. I just hope those people are much smarter than they appear to be when they're in the audience.
Lest you think I actually hated said movie, you are wrong. I liked the movie fine. It's the audience that has me pissed off.
If it helps, I should at least let you know that I would follow Chris Guest to the ends of the earth. To say that I love his movies is an understatement No. I think he's one of the most accessible, intelligent, brilliantly perverse human beings on this planet. Hell, I even suffered through Heartbeeps.
So, what I had heard about this movie, from every single friend/relative/acquaintance/whoever knows me at all who saw this movie was the same thing, "It was disappointing." You know, as in, "You're not going to like it." I heard that repeatedly. And, let me tell you, if you go into this movie with severely lowered expectations? You will love it. Nobody else in the theatre did, actually, because, I don't know, maybe they thought this was going to be a laff riot. I don't even know what they were thinking (as in, nobody in the audience knew who Ricky Gervais was or recognized him as anything other than "That guy from 'The Office'). Well, I can't believe they hated it as much as they did.
As in, some dipwad actually got up in the theatre and screamed, "THERE WERE NO LIKABLE CHARACTERS IN THAT MOVIE!!!" And I just wanted to get up and scream back at him, "THAT WAS THE FUCKING POINT!!!" Also, the girl next to me left her cell phone on for the entire movie and, right after it ended, complained about getting a very long message on her voicemail. Which, I find odd, since she was texting on a tiny, unnecessarily bright screen for the last hour and a half. These are the people for whom quality forgot. The ones who believe Ian Maxtone-Graham episodes of "The Simpsons" that forget who the characters actually are belong in the all-time echelon of greatness (well, that's what's playing in the background of my computer screen right now, so, it provides an appropriate comparison).
You might be wondering why I'm writing about For Your Consideration on this blog. Well, I'm all about improv comedy, and this film certainly had enough musical theatre veterans to fill a cast of Henry, Sweet, Henry.
Also, it's the same thing with live theatre. Not just the tourists, but the insider-y jackasses who won't stop talking during the show. If they hate it, they won't stop talking loudly. If they love it, they won't stop talking loudly. I had the same problem at Striking 12 and Company, and it seemed like these queens wouldn't stop (for lack of a better term) verbally "beating off" to the show. Can't they just wait until they're around someone who cares after the show ends before they can start name-dropping? Why is it such a big deal for them to be in the same room as these performers, who probably wouldn't give half a shit about what these jerks are yelling and laughing about during the show because they are on a stage performing and have to concentrate all of their mental energy on a show that they can't screw up for the rest of the audience? Ugh!
A question to anyone who understands what I'm getting at: If you really loved theatre, wouldn't you have some semblance of etiquette to go with that? To this day, my parents always stressed my sister and I dressing up for a Broadway show, regardless of whether it was a matinee or not. We always had a strict dress code and knew to be quiet. If we hated a show, we knew to whisper to mom, so no one else would understand what we were getting at. And we still, by force of habit, wear dresses and slacks to whatever live theater we plan on attending. We turn off our cell phones. Sometimes we don't even bring our cell phones if we know our parents are paying for everything. We're the only ones.
I mean, how would you feel if some ATC poster went to your high school production of Joseph and kept screaming, "Oh my God! Katie the head cheerleader! I love her! Oh, THIS NUMBER IS WEAK BUT I'M CLAPPING OUT OF SARCASM AND GLOWERING BECAUSE I WANT TO SPITE THEM!" The sad truth is, I can totally see this happening in real life. I have a morbid fasciation with that site and the people who post on it, although I never really got why these people make it a such a huge point to see theatre in any capacity, wherever it happens, regardless of how much they know it's going to suck, or how much they have to pay for it. These are people who consider Seth Rudetsky a celebrity and who always have to preface why they really love a show with a very long, rambling, Isherwood-esque paragraph on why they also really hate it.
Wait. Is this anorexic chick on my T.V. right now butchering Eva Cassidy OFF-KEY with inspirational music blasting in the background supposed to be good? A-ha. I get it now. You know, my voice teacher always tells me: "Stop riffing. You know you can hit that note in the sheet music. Don't try so hard." As in, people who aren't real singers tend to add other notes that aren't in the song before the note they're supposed to hit, so it makes it look like they can hit the note without actually hitting it on the first try? Why is that girl adding a different note to every damn note in the song? Why are you people applauding this crap!? That means she's not a real singer!
Side note: After my voice teacher pointed this out to me, I was particularly annoyed with Kelly Clarkson's "singing" the National Anthem on the playoffs this Thanksgiving. My whole family thought she was brilliant, but you'd think they'd be smart enough to know that half of the notes she sang aren't even in the National Anthem. She added another note before every damn note just to ease the transition, which technically makes it half of them. If it had been any other song, I wouldn't have been so pissed off by it. Although, my family was probably more taken with, "Wow, Kelly Clarkson lost a lot of weight!" than "Wow, Kelly Clarkson is really singing!"
But I digress. When I was a kid, I always thought I would be living in New York City, and my family and I could see more Broadway shows and movies than we ever dreamed of. Who would have thought that the ticket prices would get so abnormally huge on both ends, I'd be lucky to even get out and see one movie per year without waiting for the lowered rental fees when it came out on DVD?
Anyway, I'd just like to thank Loews Kips Bay for being one of the few movie theatres in NYC that lets you bring in outside food. I am not one for junk food, but I had such a wicked craving for my coconut coffee and Boston kreme, I was actually worried on how I could have brought it into the theatre without being like Kramer with the coffee in his pants. I also counted a bag of nuts, two Starbucks gingerbread lattes, and two boxes of buffalo wings in the theatre.
Appropriately caffeinated and sugar-rushed, with a new Christopher Guest movie in tow and me front-row center, I was like a kid on Christmas day. The one thing that ruined it was that I was also sitting right in front of these two yuppie couples who wouldn't stop talking about corporate stocks. By the way, these kinds of couples are the exact reason I hate living in Murray Hill.
Anyway, one thing that people don't understand about this movie is that it's not supposed to be a mockumentary. It does away with the "unseen camera crew" device, and, instead of cutting away from the staggering humiliations the characters put up with to have the characters explain, in interviews, why they're humiliating themselves for us, they linger on the humiliations for some time longer. It's not like Waiting for Guffman or Best In Show: It's more like an unofficial sequel (an unintentional redo?) of The Big Picture, only on Christopher Guest's own terms. And what people fail to realize is, before Christopher Guest had Castle Rock and the creative leeway to actually make movies on his own terms, Christopher Guest used to make movies like For Your Consideration, but the studios thought they were too weird.
For Your Consideration is, by far, Christopher Guest's most inorganic movie to date. It's not that a lot of the gags feel forced (one audience member loudly filled in a punchline before Eugene Levy even got to a much funnier one). What separates For Your Consideration is that it deals with a more fantastic world than Guffman or Best in Show: one where people walk around studio lots in space suits and get their lunch at craft services, let alone one outside of where the audience is. The presence of anyone from "Mad TV" also confirms this.
One couple in the back row also got up and yelled, "This isn't Hollywood. This is New York. What makes them think we would find this funny here?"
We can all relate to the humor in community theatre, pets, and heavy metal music, because we know them, and we've been there. It's not that the world of For Your Consideration isn't around us. The problem is that this world is, strictly, around us. We don't know whether these characters are weird people Guest, Levy, and co. deal with on a daily basis, or some heightened exaggeration of them, because we've never seen them outside of wacky comedies like The Big Picture. Although, to me, the fact that when I walked out of the theatre, I was surrounded by posters that were only for remakes or sequels pretty much confirmed that these idiots do exist. After all, this is why there are no original ideas left in Hollywood.
So, when an original idea like For Your Consideration comes along, people are too stupid to realize how true the comedy is, and how gags that are both totally real and fakely exaggerated tend to work. Perhaps that's why the laughs were more few and far between than in any other Guest movie I've ever seen in a movie house. With Best in Show, the audience was laughing, because they knew who these people were in the Midwest and South. People in Murray Hill, likewise, only laughed at the overtly Jewish references.
Because this is a movie that deals with a highly fantastical/fictional prospect: In today's Hollywood, or in any Hollywood, for that matter, a movie like Home for Purim would never get made. Hollywood is still scared of making movies that deal with Jewish concerns and history (let alone Southern Jews), which makes the situation both squickingly weird, and abnormally funny in a Naked Gun sort of way (and not a Best in Show sort of way). Only once in a blue moon will there be a Schindler's List or a Munich (which, even rarer, deals directly with the Israel-Palestine conflict). I actually consider A Mighty Wind to be a more Jewish movie than what Hollywood tends to consider "Jewish." And if there is ever going to be a movie like Home for Purim, rest assured, George Clooney will play the Jew. And then it will become Home for Thanksgiving.
I know from which I speak, because I took classes in Film and Jewish Studies in college, and saw all of the "Jewish event movies" ever made. They were not only more rare than any genre film, but they reminded me why, exactly, Hollywood is so scared of the audience (i.e. people who aren't them). I really had to suspend my disbelief that a movie like Home for Purim could ever be taken seriously (the fact that Yentl actually exists really helped). And why would a Jewish filmmaker name the family in the movie Pisher?! Wouldn't he know what that word really means?!?
Do you want to know why Hollywood hates musicals, too? Because there was no singing or dancing in the Dreamgirls preview that preceded this movie.
Here's what made For Your Consideration work for me (and what probably tainted it for the rest of the audience): Any of the previews before it could have been for one of the movie spoofs here. I think the Don Lake character summed it up nicely when he said, "It's about time in a film nothing happened!"
Besides being as geeish as the wacky Plymouth Rock spoof, at no point in any of these five or six movie previews before For Your Consideration did I ever get a sense of what the fucking movie was about. For Your Consideration knew this, and the fact that the joke established itself well before the actual movie started was truly a joy to behold.
Here's what I did see: No less than eight or nine reminders that all of the "____ Award _____" people involved with each of these movies were nominated and/or won Oscars, Golden Globes, People's Choices, Grammies, Tonies, and Blockbuster Awards. Seriously. Grammies.
First of all, the trailer for the new (ACADEMY AWARD WINNER!) Steven Soderbergh movie is designed to look like a preview for a movie based on a graphic novel. Hey, movie trailer douchebags, you don't need to remind me that George Clooney and Cate Blanchett won Oscars. Christ on a cracker, that was less than a year ago.
I'm starting to care about Beau Bridges in this movie. Why? Because I know he hasn't even been nominated for a Blockbuster Award.
I wouldn't have cared otherwise, but the damn movie trailers beat me into oblivion with these factoids to the point where every single preview looked like it was for the exact same movie.
And then there was that generic "chick flick" with Diane Keaton as a woman of a certain age trying to keep up with her three sexy daughters? The one that would have had "This will be an everlasting love for me" or whatever playing in the background? The movie with a requisite scene in Bloomingdales and a token well-dressed character who's a caterer that just seemed designed to be some parody of another movie that I swear would have already come out five years ago? It took me a while to recognize Rebecca Romijn. I thought her one line in X-Men was pretty much confirmation that she couldn't act, but I guess I was wrong.
By the way, the yuppies couldn't stop laughing during this preview. Because Reverend Camden played the age-appropriate gray(ish) fox love interest for Keaton, one of the guys yelled, "It looks like a really long TV show! 'Eighth Heaven!'" Die, yuppie scum. Die.
At some point in the fifteen or so minutes before the actual movie started, I was thinking, "You know, I would kill to see the trailer for Balls of Fury right now." Except that movie features Oscar winner Christopher Walken, coupled with the fact that the actual Balls of Fury guy won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical pretty much legitimizes that one.
Okay, Dreamgirls looks kind of cool. Finally, one of the "American Idols" gets to sing something other than Manilow! God, I wish this was 1981, and I could afford a Broadway ticket to see the real show instead...
Anyway, back to Chris Guest and his repertory company of actors (especially the sorely underused Jim Piddock, who was great). I was thinking, the only time this movie hit the delirious heights of hilarity the other Guest movies did, was right at the end. When they showed the montage of publicity appearances covering everything from Opie & Anthony to Leno to BET to Charlie Rose (Bless you, Mark Harelik, for making that genius). And the so-funny-because-it's true habit of "Entertainment Tonight" asking stupid questions to actors (i.e. "Who was your favorite member of the Brady Bunch?"), and then only interviewing them when they don't get nominated for awards? Brilliant!
That being said, however, they finally let a black person in a Christopher Guest movie. Predictably, he served no purpose other than to point out how stupid and ignorant the white people were. At least this movie, like all other Guest movies, dealt with openly Jewish characters. How sad is it that I actually have to use the phrase "openly Jewish"?
Just so you know, Jim Piddock also wrote The Man.
Since this has been an uncharacteristically ranty entry, I'll leave you now with some things that are guaranteed to make me laugh at the moment:
The chapter in Not Since Carrie that seems to pose the improbable question: "Wait...There was a Broadway musical based on Exodus?"
Harpo Marx.
That whole sequence in the movie American Dreamz with the longhaired Southern guy going "Oh yeaaah, I'm a rocker!"
The two newest "recurring" sketches on "Mad TV," one of which is a lot like "Kidz News with Smapdi" from the old "Daily Show," featuring a "kid" drawing and commenting on current events; and the other of which proves that "Mad TV"'s latest precaution in trying to not achieve the level of "suck" "SNL" has in recent years is making the last 5 minutes of the show as fucking funny as humanly possible by having the cast members portray fake "musical guests" who parody a different style of music each week.
The exceedingly fucked-up commercials for the new musical Grey Gardens, which would actually get me to see that show if I wasn't so sure that the whole audience was made up of those crazy insider jackasses I already mentioned earlier in this entry. Those jackasses are also why I found Ed Begley's character in For Your Consideration the best one, by the way.
"Is it Italian...or maybe Frittalian?"
In conclusion to this entry, I just want to say that I don't ask anyone to make me laugh or think. I just hope those people are much smarter than they appear to be when they're in the audience.
posted by Gypsy at 6:59 PM
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