It’s been several hours since I walked out of the theater and I’m still wondering whutinthehighholyhellwuzzat?!? If you’ve seen any of the films that Kaufman wrote previously [Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind], then you know that is the usual state of mind that follows a screening his work. It’s just that Synecdoche, New York takes things to a whole other level.
Kaufman lulls us into a state of false comprehension by opening with the family of small time theatre director Caden Cotard [Philip Seymour Hoffman] as they go about a depressing day – a day that seems to last forever and ends with his artist wife, Adele Lack [Catherine Keener] and daughter, Olive [Sadie Goldstein] leaving for a show in Berlin. The two-week separation becomes seventeen years.
In the meantime, Caden, following on the heels of a Broadway success with Death of a salesman, wins a genius grant of quite possibly billions and mounts a play that he hopes will bold and true and a bunch of other artistic stuff. What he winds up with is a scale version of New York – peopled by actors playing all the people in his life [however slightly or parenthetically]. But that’s all window dressing.
Besides being a pun on Schenectady [the Cotards' hometown], synecdoche is a word that can mean “a part that represents the whole.” In terms of Kaufman’s film, this can mean any number of things – Kaufman himself says that it means what you take out of it. For me, the film is about Life. It grows and shifts in variations on a theme even as members of Caden’s cast quit and are replaced – even though the new actors are doing the same things as their predecessors, they are different because they are different people, much as we are different people at various stages of our lives.
Life, and Death, are both bigger than we are, and smaller. We can be replaced, though never exactly. We can be reproduced, though never exactly, in any number of media. In an odd way, Kaufman seems – to me at least – to be saying that life, the universe and everything is what it is. That can be both a comforting thought and a harrowing one.
Final Grade: A+
Tags:
Catherine Keener,
Charlie Kaufman,
Comedy,
Drama,
Equinoxe Films,
Michelle Williams,
Philip Seymour Hoffman,
Samantha Morton,
Tom Noonan
Confession time. I did not see Madagascar. Nope. The trailer did nothing for me – and I was thoroughly penguined out, in any case. Thus, you can imagine my surprise when the trailer to Escape 2 Africa actually caught my attention. Further, you can probably imagine my surprise when I sat through the film and found myself laughing. Not uproariously, mind you, but laughing.
There’s probably no point in providing a plot description. Other reviewers will have covered that in enough detail that only the ending will be in doubt [though I’m not spoiling anything when I say it’s a happy one].
What you need to know is that Madagascar 2 is funny, frequently very much so. Also that the main characters – Alex the lion [Ben Stiller], Marty the zebra [Chris Rock], Melman the giraffe [David Schwimmer] and Gloria the hippo [Jada Pinkett-Smith] – are only half the story, laugh-wise. The second string – King Julian the lemur [an unrecognizable Sascha Baron Cohen], Mort the squirrel [Andy Richter] and head penguin Skipper [Tom McGrath], among others – more than hold up their end of the comedy tentpole.
There are some scenes that might scare younger kids [a toddler was taken, crying, from the theater when the villainous lion, Alec Baldwin’s Mukunga, was being particularly nasty], but as a whole, this is a film that will thrill kids while not boring parents. Fans of CG animation will also enjoy the film.
Now I’m going to have to rent the first film. Nuts!
Final Grade: B
Tags:
Ben Stiller,
CG Animation,
Chris Rock,
Comedy,
David Schwimmer,
Dreamworks SKG,
Jada Pinkett-Smith,
Paramount Pictures
I remember, with great fondness, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Tom and Dick Smothers started out as a comedy/folk duo, playing clubs like the legendary Purple Onion. When CBS offered them their own TV show, they had no idea what they were letting themselves in for. The Brothers Smothers started fairly innocuously, but as the series progressed it became a bastion of political satire that caused one U.S. president, LBJ [who clearly had a sense of humor], to send the duo a letter of praise – and another [Johnson’s successor, in fact] to ask CBS to take them off the air [making them the second top ten-rated series to be removed from a network’s schedule because a sitting president didn’t like it – the first being The Wild Wild West].
My favorite moment of the series came as the teaser for one episode that found Tom and Dick noting that CBS had been getting a lot flack because of the show, and that henceforth the audience wouldn’t hear “anything you wouldn’t hear in your own home…” followed by the sound of a toilet flushing. The Best of Season 3 has moments that match that hilarious moment [the opening song of the season premiere, We’re Still Here, for example notes that they’ve survived, among other things, the network’s censors]. And presented some of the most memorable musical performances of sixties television – as when Jim Morrison of The Doors blanked on the words for Touch Me, or when Donovan turned the show into a love-in/sing-along for Happiness Runs. And where else would you find George Harrison stopping by just for a couple minutes to urge the brothers to keep on keeping on? [click to continue…]
Tags:
1968-69,
CBS,
Censorship,
Comedy,
Controversy,
David Frye,
David Steinberg,
Dick Smothers,
Donovan,
Jennifer Warnes,
Pat Paulsen,
Satire,
The Committee,
The Doors,
Time-Life,
Tom Smothers
In May, 1977, NBC premiered a [very] short-lived satirical science fiction series created by Buck Henry – one of the duo behind Get Smart. The series was called Quark and it ran for seven weeks before it was unceremoniously cancelled. The series was based around a United Galactic Sanitation Patrol vessel captained by Adam Quark [Richard Benjamin].
Most of the components of the series were based on Star Trek – particularly the relationship between Quark and his Vegeton science officer, Ficus [Vegetons, being plants have no emotions] – The Captain’s “Space Notes;” the transporter [or at least its sound effects], and even one episode, Goodbye Polumbus, which was a send up of the classic Trek ep, Shore Leave.
Henry took the Get Smart template [smart stories about less than brilliant characters in important positions] and transferred it to Quark. The crew of the USGP ship included Gene/Jean [Tim Thomerson], a “transmute” who exhibited both male and female behaviors; Ficus [Richard Kelton], the aforementioned Vegeton; Bettys I & II [Trish and Cybill Barnstable], a human and her clone, both of them second in command [and both of them crazy about their captain], and Andy [Bobby Porter], a cowardly android/robot that Quark built from spare parts. They received their missions from Otto Palindrome [Conrad Janis], commander of Perma Station 1 and The Head [Alan Caillou], a disembodied giant head seen only on a video screen.
Besides the show’s riffs on Star Trek, it also poked fun at all manner of SF and space opera conventions. The episode, May the Source Be With You, had a pretty obvious target [and skewered it pretty thoroughly] and set the tone for the series. But the show was just hitting it stride with the two-part Flash Gordon spoof, All The Emperor’s Quasi-Norms, when it was taken from NBC’s schedule.
Much of the series has held up pretty well, but there are instances where the silliness doesn’t quite make it. Overall, though, even some of the effects hold up – the transporter is more colorful than Trek’s and the series did show a fair number of actual alien lifeforms [some of which changed shapes disconcertingly – check out Captain Walker who is radically different in each of two eps].
Final Grade: B+
Tags:
Alan Caillou,
Bobby Porter,
Buck Henry,
Comedy,
Conrad Janis,
Cybill Barnstable,
Richard Benjamin,
Richard Kelton,
Satire,
Sci-Fi,
Tim Thomerson,
Trish Barnstable
Last season’s addition of two new couples [one gay] to the inhabitants of Wisteria Lane sparked a season of television that ranked right up with the first season’s deliriously/deliciously funny first year. Of course, one member of one couple was a former resident of Wisteria Lane who was returning after a dozen years. Katherine [Dana Delaney] and Adam [Nathan Fillion] Mayfair and her daughter, Dylan Davis [Lyndsy Fonseca] brought one of the season’s darkest secrets with them, while the gay couple, Bob Hunter [Tuc Watkins] and Lee McDermott [Kevin Rahm] brought the world’s ugliest lawn ornament.
Katherine brought one other thing to the show – competition for Bree in the Make-Martha-Stewart-Look-Like-a-Piker Sweepstakes and Adam’s profession [gynecologist] led to some unusual [and unusually funny scenes early in the season. Meanwhile, Lynette [Felicity Huffman] and Tom Scavo [Doug Savant] had to deal with Tom’s daughter from his first marriage, Kayla [Rachel Fox] – a true demon seed if ever there was one. Add to that the Carlos-Gaby-Victor triangle; prospective in-laws; Edie’s usual machinations and the drama of a gay wedding… sorry, commitment ceremony… and that would do for an entire season on any other show. Then, there was the tornado…
The balance between the dramatic and comedic aspects of the series has never been better and the cast really tore into the material. Season four even spawned an episode that could contend for FX and set design Emmys with the tornado and aftermath episodes. If Marc Cherry decided to end the series tomorrow, it could have no better send-off.
Continuing his innovations, Marc Cherry came up with a great concept for the DVD package for season four: Couples’ Commentaries. Each of five episodes has a commentary track by the actors who play one of the main couples on the show, plus there are two additional commentaries of the traditional nature.
Features: Audio Commentaries: Marc Cherry, Bob Dailey and Jeff Greenstein on the season premiere, “Now You Know,” and Marc Cherry, Nicollette Sheridan and David Warren on Mother Said; Couples’ Commentaries: Marcia Cross and Kyle MacLachlan on Now I Know, Don’t Be Scared; Dana Delaney and Nathan Fillion on Distant Past; Eva Longoria Parker and Ricardo Antonio Chavira on Something’s Coming; Felicity Huffman and Doug Savant on Welcome to Kanagawa, and Teri Hatcher and James Denton on Mother said; Getting Desperate: From Beginning to End – following the making of Something’s Coming; Spare Time: Hanging With the Men of Wisteria Lane; Cherry-Picked: Creator Marc Cherry’s Favorite Scenes [with optional commentary]; Alternate ending [with optional commentary]; Deleted Scenes [with optional commentary], and a Blooper Reel. There is also an eight-page booklet designed as a Fairview Reality flyer with realtor’s descriptions of the eight houses we’ve seen in the show, along with ads for local businesses and a list of episode titles and some [but not all] of the bonus features [at the least, they could have included the list of commentary tracks].
Grade: Desperate Housewives, Season 4 – A
Grade: Features – A
Final Grade: A
Tags:
ABC,
Buena Vista,
Comedy,
Dana Delaney,
Eva Longoria Parker,
Felicity Huffman,
Marc Cherry,
Marcia Cross,
Nicollette Sheridan,
Teri Hatcher
He sees dead people... and they annoy him.
Ghost Town is one of those rare romantic type comedies that doesn’t fall prey to the over use of clichés or sappy sweetness. It remains smart, funny and sometimes bitingly sarcastic.
The premise of Ghost Town falls somewhere between the elements of the recent ‘Over My Dead Body’ and the older ‘Heart and Souls’ and this movie manages to capture the comedy aspects that ‘Over My Dead Body’ failed to live up to and yet match the reaffirming warmth found in ‘Heart and Souls’. For this reviewer it made for a funny and winning combination. [click to continue…]
Tags:
Comedy,
Greg Kinnear,
Ricky Gervais,
Tea Leoni
Akira Toriyama is best known for the manga/anime series Dragon Ball Z, but he has done a good deal more. One of his most entertaining is COWA!, the tale of a half-vampire/half-werekoala named Paifu and his friends as they seek a cure for Monster Flu – a disease that affects ghosts, were-beings, vampires and all other monsters, but not humans.
The world of COWA! is one where humans and monsters generally co-exist in peace – human children go to school during the day, while their monster counterparts go to the same schools at night. Paifu and his best friend, a ghost named Jose Rodriguez, are typical kids who like to play pranks, skip school and enjoy their lives/unlives. When a strange illness strikes their friends and relatives, the two set out to find the cure. They enlist the aid of a curmudgeonly former sumo named Mr. Maruyama – but known as The Volcano – and another kid, Arpon, who considers himself Paifu’s arch-enemy, tags along [to swipe the credit if they’re successful].
Toriyama’s storytelling is clever enough, and his art guileless enough, that COWA!, although aimed at younger readers, is terrific fun for everyone. The characters are beautifully developed; the plotting is more than sufficient to hold one’s attention; the twists aren’t telegraphed, and the ending is satisfying enough that I, for one, would love to see more of the characters.
The first chapter [sixteen pages] of the book are in color – and beautifully done – which allows the reader to imagine the “real” look of the black & white remainder of the story. It’s kind of amazing to see the range of color to be found in Toriyama’s nights.
COWA! is thoroughly delightful.
Final Grade: A
Tags:
Akira Toriyama,
Comedy,
Dragon Ball Z,
Manga,
Supernatural
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