Andrea and I have written a lot of comedy together. And I think she has a love-hate relationship with my notion of comedy. She, of course, is very clever and funny. I, on the other hand, am just silly. (I do fancy that I have other talents as a writer like character development and structure.) So I have to be careful when she recommends a comedy that she thinks I will like. Note: one that I will like — not necessarily one she found amusing. And thus it was with this history that I began to watch the 2007 comedy Balls of Fury.

The film is written by the comedy writing team of Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon. They are funny guys who have been involved with such films as Night at the Museum and Let’s Go to Prison. But usually, they are just two writers of many. I have little doubt that they are brought in on a lot of projects uncredited just to “punch up” screenplays. And Balls of Fury certainly has a lot of punch. It is funny throughout. Plus, it is based on a funny idea: a kung fu film where the fight sequences are replaced with ping pong games. It’s kind of hard to go wrong with that.

Unfortunately, half the comedy involves hitting people in the groin and other forms of coarse humor. I have to admit that I feel rather out of time with modern comedy. Even with Bob’s Burgers, which I consider about the best thing on television, the fart jokes make me cringe. But at least there, the jokes are scattered about. Here, when the comedy has worked itself out, it is time for a kick in the balls. It is rather too predictable. On the other hand, much of the material is comedy gold like the band of male sex slaves.

A bigger problem is that the film is structurally a mess. It starts with a scene of our hero as a young man that is completely unnecessary — it could have all been rendered in the context of the modern story. Then it plays around with the failed ping pong legend, a halfhearted attempt at a “getting in shape” sequence, and then out of nowhere, we are at the tournament. It’s not clear where the film is going and that is probably best because the film doesn’t really go anywhere. Basically, the film has a ten minute first act, the second act is 20 minutes of “training” and 40 minutes at the tournament — none of it with any dramatic momentum, and then a 10 minute third act that turns the silly up to 11.

None of this would be a problem if any of the characters were worth caring about. There are a lot of actors and comedians who I like in the film. But up on the screen, they are just actors who I like. Dan Fogler in the lead role seems kind of like Rainn Wilson in The Rocker but without any of the pathos. Maggie Q as the love interest has no personality whatsoever. And why she falls for Fogler is not clear other than that the female and male leads must fall in love. Christopher Walken as the heavy is very funny, but he’s almost a parody of himself. The characters are only the actors playing them, there is nothing else to them.

Nevertheless, the film is funny. And if you are in the mood for something silly, I don’t think you will be disappointed. But I think what Balls of Fury wants to be is Kingpin. And while it never gets as vulgar as that film, it also isn’t the cohesive film with well developed characters either. Still, I will probably watch it again some time.

I was never much of a Seinfeld fan. It was a well made and funny show, but I always find it hard to get excited about shows where I don’t like any of the characters. And Seinfeld was very much that. Even by sitcom standards, it had shallow characters. The sitcom that I liked — loved even — was Newsradio. But I don’t know if I would go as far as Todd VanDerWerff who says that, NewsRadio Was the Best Sitcom of the 1990s. Or maybe I would. But what VanDerWerff really thinks is that Newsradio was the best sitcom ever. I’m also not really interested in the question. The main thing is that Newsradio was a really, really good show.

I first watched the show because it starred Dave Foley. When I was in grad school, I was a big fan of Kids in the Hall. So it was exciting that Foley had made it to the big time. Most people no doubt watched because of Phil Hartman. But overall, it was the ensemble that worked. I immediately fell in love with Maura Tierney. And I thought that Stephen Root was one of the funniest actors I had ever seen. He has gone on to be one of my favorite character actors. The rest of the cast was excellent as well. But even without the great cast, it would have been a funny show. The writing was excellent.

What I didn’t know was just how troubled the show was. Despite initial good reviews and ratings, NBC really messed with the show. In five seasons, it was put in 11 different time slots. I’m not sure why a network would do that except if it was trying to kill a show. And for all I know it was. Hollywood is known for some of the most spiteful behavior, like network heads trying to kill off shows of predecessors. But the show managed on, even stumbling on for a season after Phil Hartman’s death.

As a result of DerWerff’s article, I went back and watched the Newsradio I could find online. The shows from the third season just blew me away. I still find them as funny as anything that I’ve ever seen. What I didn’t remember about the show was just how slapstick it is. I think I was so focused on Root’s Jimmy James and all his sly silliness, I didn’t notice, for example, Andy Dick’s amazing pratfalls. In addition, much of the writing is pure farce with people coming and going — often repeatedly to great comedic effect.

At this point in my viewing history, I would say that Newsradio is probably most like Fawlty Towers. It isn’t as tightly plotted. But then again, there were a total of 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers, produced over the course of four years. Over the exact same period of time, Newsradio produced 97 episodes. Regardless, Fawlty Towers is the pinnacle of television comedy. The fact that I can even compare Newsradio to it says a great deal about it. Yet the show still doesn’t get much respect. My public library, for example, doesn’t hold a single DVD of the show. It does, of course, overflow with Seinfeld — even though you can watch three hours of it each night in syndication on the television. It’s sad. But apparently, there are a lot of people like DerWerff and me who greatly admire the show. And that’s something.

As I was writing the birthday post for Russ Meyer, I managed to get myself sucked into watching Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! My plan was just to watch a bit of it to get reacquainted with it. But I couldn’t stop watching it. It really is a shockingly good movie.

Let me run down the plot for you so that this is clear to those who haven’t seen the film — or at least not in a while. It starts with the three women dancing in a go-go club. The men are the way men tend to be in those places. That’s just set up. The film cuts immediately to the three dancers driving around rural California in her own sports cars. They end up at a spot used by people to race cars where they meet a young couple, Tommy and Linda. The leader of the dancers, Varla (Tura Satana), ends up killing Tommy, and drugging and kidnapping Linda. When they stop to get gas, they find out about an old crippled man who is supposed to have lots of money on his farm.

The dancers go to the farm looking for the money. We find out that the old man became crippled while saving a beautiful young woman from a train. The woman caught the next train — probably because that was why she was at the train station to begin with. But as a result, the old man has a raging hatred of beautiful women who remind him of this incident. So apparently, he has his mentally limited beefcake younger son kill such women while he watches, getting some thrill out of it.

Although it’s totally pulp fiction, it also has remarkably well formed and motivated characters — always fully in keeping with the genre. This allows for the psychopathic lead, Varla (Tura Satana), to be matched with an equally (or more) evil antagonist, the old man (Stuart Lancaster). So the emotional core of the film exists in the supporting cast who are all sympathetic in their ways — victims of circumstances.

The best example of this is Rosie (Haji), Varla’s first lieutenant or enforcer or whatever you want to call her. Although she spends much of the first half of the film arguing that they just kill Linda, the young girl they kidnapped, Rosie never really kills anyone. She does run over the old man, but clearly against her will. The film goes to great pains to show that Rosie’s motivation is that she’s in love with Varla. As such, she is clearly the most tragic character in the film, and arguably the most sympathetic. Who hasn’t fallen in love with the wrong person?

Rosie is also the most intelligent and analytical of the three dancers. Varla, of course, is just a psychopath who has little interest in anything but demonstrating her power over those around her. She’s an interesting contrast to Billie who just wants to have a good time. But Varla and Billie are just alike in never thinking much about the future. They both would have been better off if they had listened to Rosie — something neither of them ever did.

Rosie is matched on the farmer side by the old man’s elder song Kirk (Paul Trinka). His commitment to his family has resulted in his father planning to kill him. He is mocked for reading books. (Nerds as noble characters is a constant thread in Meyer’s work.) He tries to limit the damage done by his father. And once it becomes clear that the kidnapped girl Linda is threatened by both his father and Varla, he spends the rest of film trying to protect her.

Interestingly, Kirk is also attracted to Varla in an unhealthy way. When she seduces him because she wants to get information about where the old man’s money is hidden, Kirk gets some of the best dialog in the whole film. After telling Varla that she is like his father in most ways, he explains why he is there kissing her, “Because you’re a beautiful animal. And I’m weak, and I want you.” But unlike Rosie, Kirk is not a tragic character because he is able to move beyond his attraction to Varla to actively fight against her.

The other aspect of the film that is really interesting is that it is fundamentally a feminist vision of the world. It isn’t just the portrayal of the physical power of the three lead women. Nor is it that men are largely portrayed as obnoxious and weak. But the film does seem to be saying that the only reason that women don’t completely dominate the world is because they haven’t chosen to do so. But the best reflection of the feminist basis of the film is found in the ending.

The last 20 minutes of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is setting up a final confrontation between Kirk and Varla. Kirk and Linda have been fleeing across the desert. Varla, after killing everyone else, uses the family truck to track down Kirk and Linda. Varla and Kirk fight with obvious results: Kirk is about to die, just like Tommy did at the start of the film. So Linda runs to the truck and starts it up. This gets Varla’s attention and she moves toward the truck, allowing Linda to run her down.

This is fairly standard in a movie today. But this was fifty years ago — in 1965. That’s the year when the top five grossing films were: The Sound of Music, Doctor Zhivago, Thunderball, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, and everyone’s favorite, That Darn Cat! What’s more, when I see a strong female character in most movies today, I don’t usually believe it. It is proforma: stuck in the film the same way that the eccentric sidekick is. It’s movie writing via Mad Libs. Russ Meyer offers something more.

I first saw Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! 20 years ago. I thought it was an amazing film then. But it has only improved over time. I really don’t understand why it isn’t a more widely admired film. There doesn’t seem to be any rational reason why Criterion Collection hasn’t released it with film scholar commentaries. So it must be that there is an irrational reason: it’s a Russ Meyer film. It’s exploitation. It has big breasted women who show them off. But I think there is something more: our society hasn’t even caught up to where Russ Meyer was in 1965.

It’s always interesting to revisit films you liked a long time ago. So when I saw Bowfinger at the library today, I grabbed it. I wondered if I would find it as funny as I had back in 1999 when it was released. And I did. It is an extremely funny film. It has a solid script by Steve Martin. And Frank Oz directs it for its full comedic potential — matching his great comedy, Death at a Funeral. Eddie Murphy is truly brilliant. And the rest of the cast does a great job supporting him. (Steve Martin still annoys me as an actor, but I’ll admit that’s more about me than him.)

Bowfinger is one of the silliest films I’ve ever seen. In terms of the broad outline of the film, there isn’t much there. The Kit Ramsey stuff regarding the “Laker Girls” is not subtle. The Heather Graham character sleeping with everyone is tired. And the film they are making is inexplicably the kind of things people were making in the late 1950s. It’s on the edges where Bowfinger is at its best. The MindHead cult is probably a good rendering of how Scientology actually works. It’s take on both studio and independent film are about right. And I especially like the way it shows Hollywood to be effectively a class based system. And like all class based systems, power is distributed randomly.

But the best part of the film is the crew. Bowfinger needs to get a crew that will work cheap, so he goes to the Mexican border and picks up three guys who are crossing illegally. It is done in typical over-the-top fashion with bullets flying. At first, the trio are terrified and befuddled. But halfway through the film, they are having a Spanish language discussion of great films like Citizen Kane and Apocalypse Now. By the end, they are polished film technicians — speaking English and tied to their cell phones.

Thematically, it is hard to know which way to go with the film. On the one hand, the “losers” manage to make their film. And given that they were not given any help, they really are the betters of the establishment types who seem to spend more effort on their fancy cars than on any project they are working on. On the other hand, the film they produce is embarrassing. And the film they go on to make in Taiwan is ridiculous. No effort is expended to give them even the smallest amount of dignity.

What’s more, ultimately, the heroes of the film are so caught up in their effort to make this film that they don’t have any care for the fact that they are causing Kit Ramsey to have a nervous breakdown. But as I discussed in my article No Special Pleading From Hollywood, this behavior is the norm. No one seems to believe the Hollywood myth quite as much as the people in the industry itself. So we can forgive desperate people with big dreams for doing this, given that the studio executives would do it as a matter of course if they thought they could make a couple of bucks at it.

But as pure entertainment, it is hard not to like Bowfinger. It certainly isn’t great. But it is damned good comedy — especially by American standards.

I just saw Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film, Medea. As usual, it is a beautiful film without a great deal of bother about the plot. I think this is why Pasolini picked subjects like the Gospel of Matthew and Oedipus Rex for his films. It allowed him to deal with film as an art without getting too bogged down in the transitions required to tell a story. That worked especially well with, The Gospel According to St Matthew, as I discussed in Pasolini’s Atheistic Tribute to Christianity. The gospels are episodic with no real transitions themselves. That’s not so much true with Medea.

Pasolini put two different stories together in the film. The first 50 minutes of the film involves Jason’s quest for the golden fleece and Medea’s abandonment her entire life in order to give it to him. The remaining hour is dedicated to a curious telling of Euripides’ play Medea. But even if you know these stories well, you will still be fairly confused. All together, the film comes off as a series of moments. As though Pasolini is saying to the viewer, “Remember when Medea murdered her brother to allow Jason to get away? Remember when Creon banished Medea?” The major scenes are rendered, but there are very few dots connecting them.

In addition to this, the second half of the film is presented in a seemingly random order. Jason’s infidelity is only made clear in retrospect. And perhaps the most confusing thing: Medea’s murder of Glauce is presented twice in two different ways. It was only on second viewing that I realized what Pasolini was doing. At first, he is presenting it as Glauce’s father, Creon, imagines it. This leads him to go to Medea and banish her. This is not in the play and it is a very welcome addition. But Pasolini provides not clear indication of this. In fact, in the Wikipedia entry on the movie, it speculates that the first murder is Medea’s vision. This is an understandable error.

Having said all this, you probably have the impression that Medea is not good. But that isn’t my impression of it at all. I thought it is was riveting from the very start. But I’ve begun to question whether I can much speak for other people. In recent years, I’ve begun to see film much more as pure visual art. Or at least that’s how I approach it when that is how it is intended. And that’s certainly the case with the Pasolini that I’ve seen. In that regard Medea is a tour de force.

It isn’t just the visuals here. The performances are great — Most especially Maria Callas! — and the music and sound are overwhelming. The whole package is incredibly self-assured. Pasolini seems very clear that he is going to present these two great myths with a maximum of power. And that’s why he can’t be bothered with trivialities like why Jason is treating Medea so poorly. And that’s probably for the best, because a modern audience can’t really understand Jason’s betrayal anyway. And what does it matter? It’s really just about the injustices done to Medea and her (over) reactions to them.

The film ends with Medea shouting at Jason from behind a line of fire, “Nothing is possible anymore!” It’s shocking but appropriate. And it sums up her whole life from meeting Jason. It also sums up all of our lives — it is just that our tragedies are so much more banal. Medea takes our pedestrian sufferings and transforms them into something powerful. If you are up to it, it will not disappoint. But Medea is certainly not for casual viewing.

Afterword

Here is the whole film on YouTube. The print is not great, but it will do. And the subtitles are better than on my print.

Last night I watched the 2013 film, The Lone Ranger. And before I discuss it, let me just point out that even at five years old, I thought that the Lone Ranger was the most pathetic hero imaginable. Nothing since that time has changed my opinion. He is the archetype of the Good Guy™ — a character so earnest he shits puppies. So I appreciate the problems that the filmmakers faced in trying to make this film. The obvious, and correct, solution to this and many other problems with modernizing this franchise was to not make it. Obviously, they did not do that.

The Lone Ranger is brought to you by the same people who brought you Pirates of the Caribbean. And it has many of the same problems. In particular, it is quite boring whenever Johnny Depp is not on the screen. And the action sequences — just like in the second the third Pirates films — are overlong and so over-the-top that they reach escape velocity — never finding their way back to earth. In the pursuit of these action sequences, the film also commonly depends upon animation that sticks out. Finally, the film is at least forty minutes too long.

The best part of the film is when it is going for comedy. It is incredibly silly. Clearly, the filmmakers decided to go for a postmodern approach. Generally, the film is not so much about the Lone Ranger as it is a modern meditation on the Lone Ranger. And for anyone who doesn’t think much the old incarnations of it, these sequences are very funny. But for some reason, everyone thought it was a good idea to oscillate between Duck Soup silliness and The Ox-Bow Incident seriousness. I don’t think it worked, but it was an interesting idea. In a world of art, I’m sure the writers would have continued working on it. In the world of commerce, I’m sure everyone did their very best to get this thing done on schedule and budget.

In addition to the fundamental problem of the Lone Ranger being a very boring character, the film has perhaps a bigger problem: Tonto and the depiction of Native Americans in general. The problem is that genocide is hard to deal with as a side issue. In Captain America, I thought it was great and all that that over-earnest hero saved the world during World War II, but I thought maybe he might be able to do something about the genocide going on. Call me stick in the mud. Regardless, The Lone Ranger deals with the issue better: we get to see the genocide happen in real time.

Thematically, this is the best part of the film. Business interests have manage to take control of all parts of the government. The military is portrayed as basically decent, but cowardly and foolish. And in the name of protecting “civilized society” from the “savages” they use Gatling guns to wipe out the Comanche. The real reason, of course, is so the bad guys can make a bunch of money and take control of the railroad. To be honest, I was shocked about the portrayal of the military. But isn’t that pretty much what the function of the military is? When I talk about cowardice, I’m not talking about rushing into battle and killing and risking death — they clearly have that kind of bravery. But the bravery to stand up to authority? Not really. This isn’t a slight against the military. This is definitional. If you are going to have a military, you want them to do what they are told. But that is so dangerous and I don’t think Americans have given that any thought. Instead, they idealize the military as if it is the only part of the government that can do no wrong. Good God, we are doomed!

Tonto is a difficult character. Traditionally, he is Gunga Din: the good and loyal savage. Clearly, that doesn’t fly anymore. So what the filmmakers do here has now become almost as much of a cliche: they flip it so the audience sees the story largely from Tonto’s perspective. Rather than look up to the Lone Ranger, Tonto looks down on him. And we share that view because the idealism of the Lone Ranger is childish and insipid. But the film also makes Tonto insane in the same way that Jack Sparrow was. I’m not sure how we are supposed to take that.

Ultimately, I liked the film far more than I expected to. But the bar was set pretty low in that regard. About the only reason I watched it was because I wanted to see Johnny Depp play a funny character. I’d heard the film was quite bad, so I was expecting something like Wild Wild West — which really was bad. In an absolute sense, The Lone Ranger is more good than it is bad. But I will do my very best to never watch it again.