new movie review: Misery Loves Comedy

If you go to the IMDb page for Misery Loves Comedy (you can click on the link here) you'll see that Kevin Pollak's documentary about the psychology behind comedy is, quite simply and inarguably, the best and most impressive collection of funny people in a single film since 1963's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. But is it funny?

No. It isn't. And for the most part, host/ director/ editor/ writer Pollak isn't interested in his film being funny. The problem is, while the "comedy is serious business" attitude may indeed be valid -- Pollak and his interviewees certainly make a strong case for that point in this movie -- it doesn't make for a very good film.

Take another look at that cast. It's truly astounding. Now let me add another bit of info: Not a single one of the interviews in this film is disappointing. Every person interviewed is eloquent and insightful, and even when segments require multiple people to reach the same conclusions, they all do so from a different, equally interesting perspective. Any one of these interviews, taken on its own, would be golden.

Put 'em all together, at least the way Pollak does here, and what you have is a surprisingly boring movie. The thing is only about an hour and a half, and I lost track of how many times I checked my watch. I mean, this thing reeeeally dragged.

How can this be? I mean, these are all interesting people, talking about an interesting topic. But it's a "talking heads" picture, and that's it. The hour and a half includes maybe a minute of still photos, and the rest is one person talking, then another, then another, then another, and the result is that even with this much insight and talent on the screen, the whole thing quickly becomes tiresome. Pollak may be a gifted actor, impressionist, and stand-up comedian, but he don't know a thing about filmmaking.

Here's a tip for any potential documentarians out there: You need more than just people talking at the camera. I don't care how great the interviewees are, or what they have to say, it bears repeating, to make a documentary, you need more than just people talking at the camera. Even History Channel documentaries, with nearly every one of their subjects long dead, know to throw in reenactments or, in the case of Ken Burns, at least vintage photos to look at.

And the weird thing is, this is a documentary about showbiz. The wealth of material Pollak could have chosen to add as illustration of his movie's key points is limitless.Was he too cheap or too lazy to include a clip or two of the key moments some of these comedians are talking about? Take Richard Pryor, for example. A few of the comics talk about how particular various moments in Pryor's televised or filmed stand-up performances perfectly illustrate the point they're trying to make, or played a key role in them wanting to be a comedian. Would it have killed Pollak to show us what these people are talking about, by showing at least a brief clip of the Pryor performance everyone keeps mentioning?

Or consider how much of the cast of Misery Loves Comedy is made up of stand-up comedians. Some of these comics discuss their career in only abstract or generalized terms, but others refer to specific performance moments. Doesn't it therefore seem appropriate to maybe show at least a brief clip or two of these performances, so we know what these people are talking about?

Look, there's a lot of valuable material in here. My suggestion is to watch this movie in brief chunks. As I said, each of these interviews are both eloquent and insightful. Watch maybe five minutes here, ten minutes there. It may take you a long time to finish the movie that way, sure. But watching the full  hour and thirty-five minutes nonstop will feel a hell of a lot longer.

retro movie review: The Limey

It's easy to forget how monumentally influential Pulp Fiction was to the movies, especially movies made and released in the late 1990s. People still try to copy Quentin Tarantino, but back in the late 90s, "imitating Tarantino" and "making a movie" were almost synonymous concepts; even otherwise original and talented filmmakers found themselves applying the Tarantino mold to their own movie-dough, and the reason was two-fold: because audiences couldn't get enough of Tarantino's tricks -- whether they were performed by Tarantino himself or any other filmmaker -- and also because critics sometimes took an embarrassingly long time to understand that there is a polar-opposite difference between copying Tarantino's original ideas and actually being sincerely original.

Take, for instance, Steven Soderbergh and The Limey. Soderbergh is a talented filmmaker. He has made some really good, really original movies. But with The Limey, Soderbergh is fixated on Tarantino's idea of telling a story without a chronologically linear narrative (yes, I know Tarantino wasn't the first one to do it, but the whole point is he's the one who made it popular) and the problem is, it worked for Pulp Fiction, but the results are much more mixed with The Limey.

The movie stars Terence Stamp as Wilson, a career criminal in England who has just been let out of prison after a long stretch. He has recently learned that his daughter Jenny, who had moved to L.A. just about as soon as she was old enough to do so, has died in a car accident.

Wilson doesn't believe there was anything accidental about it. He has absolutely no reason to reach this conclusion, mind you, save for an instinctual feeling of which he is 100% certain. So he heads off to Los Angeles, to find out who was responsible for his daughter's death.

The chronology of Pulp Fiction may have been nonlinear, but it was at least coherent. In The Limey, it's difficult to follow what's going on. In the first scene, Wilson is on a plane on his way to America. Images of him on the plane are "narrated" by an audio-only flashback of him learning of his daughter's death. Simultaneously, we are treated to flashforwards of Wilson meeting one of his daughter's friends (Luis Guzman). Soderbergh is showing us three different points in time at once here, and the result is a confusing mess.

Wilson's investigation gradually gets him closer and closer to the possible villain of the piece, Terry Valentine, a rich and powerful record producer who was dating Jenny and who is played by Peter Fonda. This movie would have worked just fine if they had made Valentine an all-out villain, but I like how they instead chose to make the character sympathetic. Yes, it's both suspicious and tasteless that he is already in another relationship with another younger woman so soon after Jenny's death, but this isn't the movie archetype of a Hollywood mogul who just likes to bed pretty women; Valentine clearly cares for his girlfriend, and the two of them like to talk more than engage in carnal matters. Also, it's difficult to ignore the psychological implications that this new girlfriend bears such a strong resemblance to the girlfriend who has recently died.

But what of Wilson?  Wilson is busy with his investigation, an investigation which sometimes involves fisticuffs and/or gunplay. In a more standard Hollywood movie, there would be a lot more of those scenes. Here, those scenes are few and far between, and much more of Wilson's story involves him interviewing potential witnesses, such as the friends Jenny made in acting class.

Let me tell you something, some of these "pure talk" non-action scenes are remarkably well performed by Stamp and  remarkably well written by Lem Dobbs. Stamp himself is the best thing about this movie, and there are scenes where we do nothing but stare at Stamp's face as Wilson ponders the implications of the latest clue. It sounds boring, but Stamp is so good, we are entertained.

But there are other scenes where the writer gets distracted by far less interesting supporting characters, whose lives wander off in far less interesting supporting storylines. There's Valentine's crooked but loyal right-hand man Jim Avery, for example, and the hitman Avery hires, played by Nicky Katt. Valentine himself also gets a lot of screen time with his new girlfriend, and although I earlier stated that I liked the three-dimensional aspect of their relationship, there's only so much mundane chit-chat I'd like to listen to in any given film. Yes, that's another way Tarantino radically altered cinematic storytelling, not just in terms of storyline chronology, but also in terms of dialogue. Dialogue was suddenly no longer considered purely functional, and we could hear what characters thought about random, meaningless topics. But what filmmakers tend to forget is, if you can't write this type of material as good as Tarantino does, all you've got are characters rambling about uninteresting topics.

Frankly, the script meanders aimlessly whenever Wilson isn't on screen, in sharp contrast to Wilson's own "out for revenge" storyline. We know that there will eventually be a showdown between Valentine and Wilson, and it's interesting to note that we don't mind the movie taking its time getting there whenever Wilson is actually on screen, whereas whenever the movie wanders off to show what the other people are doing, we want to cry out "just get on with it!"

Critics loved this movie. They seemed to love it for two reasons: the "bravery" of showing the scenes out of order -- an idea which I have already described as neither original nor successful, from a narrative standpoint -- and for Stamp's performance. Yes, Stamp is excellent in this movie. If only the filmmakers had focused more on him and less on the boring supporting players, we might really have had something.

retro movie review: Chinese Coffee

One thing that bugs me is a writer who can't write. The fact that this is one of the themes in Chinese Coffee, written by Ira Lewis and based on his play, is an irony that Lewis himself probably doesn't realize.

The film stars Al Pacino and Jerry Orbach as Henry Levin and Jacob "Jake" Manheim. Henry and Jake are struggling artists, and ostensibly best friends, although we can see right away that their friendship is less than healthy, as evidenced by the annoyed look on Jake's face when Henry shows up unannounced at Jake's one-room Greenwich Village apartment toward the beginning of the movie.

Henry has just been fired from his job as a doorman for an upscale French restaurant. Now he's broke and unemployed, and he shows up at Jake's, hoping that Jake will pay him the $500 Henry loaned him several months ago. Unfortunately, Jake is as broke as Henry. The money, which Henry obtained only by maxing out his credit card (a credit card with a $500 limit?), has been spent on equipment Jake needs to support his photography career.

Henry's other agenda is to get Jake's critique of Henry's latest book; Jake, who apparently has a talent for amateur but learned literary criticism, is the only person on earth who has read Henry's manuscript, and Henry is dying to know what Jake thought of it. But Jake, usually the first to voice his opinions about any book, is oddly reluctant to tell Henry how he feels this time -- and that reluctance just might not be for the reason you'd suspect.

Aside from a few flashbacks -- some illustrating the happy beginnings of Henry and Jake's friendship, and some depicting the rise and fall of Henry's relationship with his now ex-girlfriend -- the entire movie consists of the conversation between Henry and Jake in Jake's claustrophobic little apartment. As actors, Orbach and Pacino are up for the challenge. Orbach, despite being best known as Lenny Briscoe on Law and Order, was an accomplished Broadway veteran, while Pacino has previously played the role of Henry in the Broadway version of Chinese Coffee.

But nearly two solid hours of just two guys talking is an ambitious undertaking for any writer. Yes, Orbach and Pacino are worthy of the challenge, but what about writer Ira Lewis? The answer is yes and no.

On the one hand, I highly admire what Lewis does here. The characters of Henry and Jake are thoroughly three-dimensional, and their dialogue never ceases to be engaging as it gradually reveals various aspects of their individual personalities, their pasts, and the nature of their friendship. I am sincere when I say that this is a highly impressive accomplishment on multiple levels of writing.

But there is one level that is of utmost importance, and it is a level where Lewis fails miserably. Chinese Coffee is based on a play, and it constantly feels like a play, in one of the worst ways imaginable: Henry and Jake don't talk like real people. They talk like people in a play, a play written by a man who has obviously studied a great deal of theater, but has, apparently, never studied how people actually speak to one another. It's one thing to decide that your characters are going to be articulate and well-educated, but if your play is so completely dependent on dialogue, the characters should sound like they're having a conversation, not reading a script to one another.

Let me be clear here, the fault does not lie with the performers. They do what they can with the lines as they are written, but when Henry says "would you like to take a walk to Chinatown," and Jake replies "I do not, I decidedly do not," there's not much Orbach can do to make such an odd line sound natural. Honestly, who talks like that? It's great that Lewis is clearly familiar with the works of the Great Writers -- Henry and Jake's intimate familiarity with literature gives Lewis plenty of opportunities to name-drop -- but his movie's about impoverished New Yorkers, and instead sounds like it takes place in a drawing room on a stage populated by actors in a Noel Coward production.  And I'm not just talking about one or two lines here, either; this is an extremely noticeable problem that strains the conversation's credibility from the movie's end to the finish.

Still, if you can get past this jarring weakness in the writing, it is a treat to see Orbach and Pacino in such showcase roles. And one thing I did admire about Lewis's writing is his character development. Henry is argumentative and over-sensitive, Jake is condescending and pretentious, and both are clearly using their "friendship" to get something out of it, and yet, despite their multiple flaws, Lewis still somehow manages to make both characters sympathetic and even (sometimes) likable. These are characters who have insight but not exactly wisdom, and wit but not exactly good humor. These are very, very fine lines to walk when writing a character, and here, Lewis succeeds very well.

So yes, Chinese Coffee is a mixed bag. I for one liked it, and I think you might too. But I'd understand if it drove you crazy instead.