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Tag: comedian
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0 Twelve Movies I Enjoyed In 2017
What kind of blog would this be if I didn’t do an end of year “here are the movies I enjoyed” entry? Certainly not a blog I’ve ever heard of. And while there’s something to be said for scarcity increasing value, nobody has ever read a website because it refused to put up content.
While it would be a fun challenge to list and rank the ten very best movies I saw, I don’t find that tremendously interesting. What can I say about a movie like Darkest Hour that hasn’t been said by any critic? Well, actually: “The 1990s are back, and they brought middlebrow ‘prestige’ Oscar Bait®-brand acting showcases with them!”
So these may not be the twelve best movies released this year. In fact, my placing Bright at the end (SPOILER!) tells you all you need to know about my agenda going into writing this list. But these are the ones that I most enjoyed watching, and that I still think about from time to time.
One more note: I have friends who made or starred in movies this year, and for the most part I’ve avoided listing them here. That’s because a movie like The Big Sick is great, and I highly recommend checking it out, but at the end of the day I’m less a movie critic and more of an asshole comedy professional who don’t enjoy watching his friends succeed.
(PS: Speaking of me and comedy, if you’re in Los Angeles January 11th, come check out my show.)
Colossal
I consider myself lucky that I was able to go into watching Colossal completely blind, having read no reviews or having seen no trailers. My buddy Tim and I were hanging out one afternoon, and we went to a movie theatre to see what was playing.
I don’t tend to see Anne Hathaway movies because, quite frankly, until I watched this movie; I figured her for a lightweight who’s pleasant enough, and stars as the romantic lead in movies like “Bride Wars” and “Rachel Getting Married.” But between this film and Interstellar (I know, I know, she won an Oscar brand® film award for Les Miserables, but this is a musical that does not exist in my world), I’m starting to think that maybe I need to admit that I’m wrong and pay better attention.
And believe me… I hate admitting I’m wrong.
In any event, Colossal is a great movie-going experience, a film that takes the convention of classic Japanese rubber monster movies like Godzilla and Gamera, and interpolates them into a film that starts as a typical Anne Hathaway romantic comedy, and halfway through turns into a dark meditation on alcoholism and addiction, and how they foster and encourage destructive relationships.
We may not all literally possess a spiritual link to a six-story monster, the movie says, but there is a tendency for people give in to their worst impulses. Not because we’re bad people, but because it’s the easiest thing to do.
Jason Sudeikis gives a scene-stealing performance as the typical rom-com “secretly great guy in a cocky asshole’s body” pulled inside out, exposing the toxic guts of those kinds of characters.
Birdboy: The Forgotten Children//Coco
If Colossal is a genre exploration of the cycle of spiritual decay and addiction, Birdboy: The Forgotten Children is about metaphoric demons of addiction and mental illness made literal, and how they can tear apart even the best of us. In a post-apocalyptic animated fairy tale land, where society has been destroyed and rebuilt, Dinki is a mouse, and a teenage girl, who lives with her parents who barely tolerate her, and her stepbrother, a dog in a luchador mask.
Dinki and her friend, a multi-species group of teens, decide that they are going to skip school and find a way to buy their way off of the island on which they live, on which they feel trapped. And from which, we find over and over, there seems no escape. In fact, the only proof there is even life beyond the island ate are the constantly-refilling mountains of garbage, in which hordes of nomad junkie rats forage for copper.
Birdboy of the title is an elusive figure on the island, seen as a mence to society, and a fugitive from a trigger-happy police force. He’s a tragic figure, though, a drug addict self-medicating over childhood trauma, and who we come to learn through a late religious experience, has possibly the most important job on the island.
This is a feature-length animated picture, but it’s relentlessly dark in a way that those more used to brightly-lit American cartoons will find off-putting, depressing, and possibly even unwatchably sad. I recommend giving it a fair viewing; what it has to say about what the realities of adulthood can be are fairly upsetting but rewarding. And the animation style (adapted directly from the director’s comic series Psiconautus) can be heartrendingly beautiful in its simplicity.
If Birdboy is scary and sad in its unpredictability and unrelentingly grim view of humanity, Coco somehow pulls off the balancing trick of being dark (and it is a dark story, make no mistake), scary, sad, and upbeat, sometimes all in the same shot. And that’s the genius of Pixar.
Toy Story 3, a movie from which I expected very little in terms of emotional engagement, had one of the saddest, scariest moments I’ve ever seen in a studio film. As these toys you’ve grown to root for over the course of the three movies are riding into an incinerator and, holding hands and bravely facing forward, come to silent terms with the reality of imminent death, that it’s real and inevitable and comes for everyone.
For a movie set in the Land of the Dead, the filmmakers manage to keep the tone light and the skeletons that populate the film friendly and not really scary. But all of that gets set aside for a couple of plot twists that would be, in lesser hands, shocking. And that’s always the upshot with Pixar; somehow, with all that could go wrong, this film somehow has turned out to be a masterpiece.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. II//Spider-Man: Homecoming
This year saw the release of a sequel to a science fiction blockbuster that managed to surpass the first film in scope, plotting, emotional engagement, and the ability of the writer/director to satisfactorily resolve plot points carried over from the first film while not distracting from the main story he’s telling. And that movie was not Star Wars.
Guardians of the Galaxy is about family, and what it means to belong to one, while Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a movie about telling the story of Star Wars. Way back when the first Guardians of the Galaxy was announced, I followed the news with surprise and interest. Partly because that’s a big investment, in a film based on a comic title that doesn’t exactly have the popular cachet of an X-Men or Spiderman.
Also my experience with writer/director James Gunn’s work didn’t exactly scream “light-hearted romp for all ages.” His filmography including the screenplay to the Lemmy Kilmeister/Jane Jensen vehicle Tromeo & Juliet (a movie with its own rewards. In the mid-90s I went through a phase of being a big fan of the music of Jane Jensen. There are very few of us out there and so I have a degree of affection for this movie that may outweigh its charms) as well as the movie Super, a take on the superhero genre that equally made me laugh and bummed me out. I would have expected him to follow a creative path like that of Todd Solondz, turning out quirky, well-received studies of characters on the fringe.
I liked the first Guardians movie okay. But Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. II managed to strike a balance between what’s required of a blockbuster film delivery system like Marvel Studios, and great filmmaking. The movie starts with a battle royale with a space beast from another galaxy, and immediately places it in the background so we can watch a baby tree named Groot happily dance to ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky.”
As a way to reestablish your characters, universe, and overall tone with its audience, it succeeds perfectly, telling you everything you need to know about the movie you’re about to watch in a shade over four minutes. It uses CGI and special effects to create the illusion of a long, unbroken shot that dips in and out of the action, reintroducing us to the main cast one-by-one, while the camera constantly dances with the music. I would even say that this opening titles sequence is better filmmaking than most of the prestige pictures that will win Academy Award™-brand artist validation trophies.
Writer/director Gunn roots his film in something that many of the summer blockbusters I watched this year could not seem to figure out: relatable human stakes. I mean, sure, we can all understand the need to race against time to keep a bad guy from destroying the Universe as we know it. That’s the easy part.
But where Guardians takes a step beyond is to place that, again, in the background to goals we can relate to. Chris Pratt’s Starlord is running from the only father he’s ever known to chase a mythical biological father who never cared about him. Rocket Raccoon is a fellow orphan, a science experiment who has found a real family, and can’t stop himself from pushing them away. Gamora is forced to face the fact that she really owes her sister, who happens to be a notorious super-villain, an apology for the way she participated in her childhood abuse at the hands of their father, Thanos the Dark Lord.
Yes it’s all a bit silly. Superhero movies are by their inherent design. But the film engages us emotionally all the way through, and ends on an earned bittersweet moment that doubles as the greatest advertisement for the sublime Cat Stevens album Tea for the Tillerman.
At its heart, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.II is a simple redemption story staked into the ground of a blockbuster franchise tentpole. And while Spider-Man: Homecoming isn’t necessarily as well-realized, it features an appealing pair of lead performances.
Make no mistake; Sam Raimi’s first two Spider Man movies remain the definitive Spider Man movie-going experiences, and Tobey Maguire is great in it. But there’s something much younger, much more vulnerable, about Tom Holland’s performance as Peter Parker, who is much more believable as the outcast high school genius who is burdened with powers he never wanted. And the great Michael Keaton as his nemesis, the Vulture.
Unfortunately, Spider-Man suffers from the same problem a lot of even the best comic book movies (including Michael Keaton’s own Batman), which is that once you get past the fun of establishing the characters, their relationships, their various crises, and the early-going light heroics, there’s still the required Gigantic Crisis That Must Be Averted To Save The Day that takes up the last third of the film, and that brings the actual forward momentum of the story to a halt. But with Holland and Keaton, there’s enough charm and chemistry to make it easy going.
The Fate of the Furious
This might be the best bad movie I’ve enjoyed in a long, long time. If Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. II digs deep into character and situation, Fate of the Furious, the eighth entry in the Fast and Furious car chase franchise, practically opens with Vin Diesel looking at the camera and saying, “This is a dumb movie. In fact, this isn’t even a movie. It’s an exploding car delivery system. Sit back, turn your brain to ‘silent,’ and just take this in.”
Not only is this not a movie, it’s actually two movies starring two huge action stars who not only clearly do not like each other, but in the seven minutes of time that The Rock and Vin Diesel actually spend in frame together, they literally can’t make eye contact with each other. These are two movies that have been edited together and whose stories dovetail at the very end. One is about Cool Car Driving Guy Vin Diesel who has a Cool Car Driving Chick and a Cool Car Driving Baby who is kidnapped by a Bad No Good Lady.
The other stars Jason Statham and The Rock, the two most charismatic action stars working today. Jason Statham and The Rock are in prison for some reason, and they are broken out despite the fact that THE ROCK DOES NOT BELIEVE IT’S RIGHT TO BE BROKEN OUT OF PRISON SO HE IS ALMOST LITERALLY DRAGGED OUT AGAINST HIS WILL.
The movie ends with cars being chased over an arctic tundra by a radio controlled nuclear submarine that fires a torpedo at them AND THE ROCK PHYSICALLY PUSHES IT AWAY WITH HIS BARE HAND WHILE DRIVING A JEEP. Jason Statham engages in a gunfight ON A FUCKING AIRPLANE THAT I THINK NOBODY IS ACTUALLY FLYING while using A BABY IN A BULLETPROOF CARRIER AS A FUCKING SHIELD.
No other action movie I’ve been to this year had the audience cheering as much as we did when Vin Diesel made his hero’s entrance at the end to save the day. Not Star Wars, not Thor: Ragnarok, not even my beloved Guardians of the Galaxy. Is this a great movie? No. Is it even, technically, classifiable as a motion picture? Quite possibly not. Is it completely kickass and the most fun watch of the year? You bet your sweet ass.
Kong: Skull Island
Look. If I say, “King Kong, but he was the star of Apocalypse Now,” and your reaction is anything other than, “Holy shit, I have to see this movie RIGHT NOW,” I get it. You can skip the rest of this entry, because I’m going to keep this quick. I know that I’m not going to make any converts, because anyone who was excited by that premise saw it in the theatre same as me.
Other King Kong movies have focused on removing the monster from his natural habitat into the wicked world of science and man, and how this destroys him. Kong: Skull Island prefers to take the traditional first third of the King Kong story—scientists and businessmen invade Skull Island and, unheeding to the warnings of natives, find and subjugate Kong—and blows it out into a two-and-a-half hour Vietnam-era war film.
As an allegory of man’s destruction of the Earth’s natural environment, Kong is heavy-handed but doesn’t beat us over the head too badly with its point. An ensemble cast of great modern heavyweight character actors, including Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, and Tom Hiddleston, anchor a film that, in the hands of lesser thespic talents, could come off as a bit silly. But the cast delivers the goods, especially Jackson who provides a surprising amount of shading to a character that seems to be written as a cardboard Vietnam Vet Gone Rogue accidental villain in search of last-minute redemption.
As with the best of the Kong movies, the monkey remains the most sympathetic character, a pure and innocent creature who only turned into a killer when confronted with man. If Kong’s love story with Brie Larson seems a bit more contrived than his lust for Fay Wray, our King Giant Murder Monkey is still enough of a tragic hero that we want to watch him anchor a Giant Monster “shared cinematic universe” (a phrase that should strike a note of concern for anyone who, as I did, sat through The Mummy this year).
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
I think this movie could have been called “Frances McDormand’s Next Oscar®-brand Award Show Reward” and called it a day. About a woman who rents the titular billboards outside her town to chastise her local police force for failing to solve her teenage daughter’s rape/murder, this is a film that’s unafraid to constantly shift the emotional weight under your feet.
McDormand’s character is in a sympathetic position, but is an unsympathetic personality. Woody Harrelson’s backwater police chief is in an impossible position, and he finds ways to win that hurt everyone whose life he’s touched. Even as we pull back to get a better look at the full tapestry of life in this town, pulling each character’s thread causes their lives to unravel.
But while it continues to find new ways to confound our expectations for where the story will go next, the film itself seems uncertain of its own tone. Is it a slice of life character piece? Is the film’s point of view that life is messy, without resolution or pat endings? That there’s ultimately no justice, at least not in the sense that we like to think of justice, with guilty parties getting punished? Perhaps, and it’s a powerful and daring trick to pull in a wide release film with major stars. And yet the director, as if not quite trusting himself, reverses himself in the film’s final 15 minutes, promising resolution and justice and redemption.
It’s a messy movie, and by no means a perfect one. Three Billboards tries to walk a tightrope, balancing dark humor and drama, but it stumbles and falls a few times. And like a great many movies being made, it feels about twenty minutes too long, with a couple of subplots being given particular attention with no real attempt to, if not resolve them, then at least fold them into the overarching theme of the film.
Sam Rockwell’s character, in particular, is made irredeemable; he is guilty of terrible acts for which he receives no punishment. Late in the film, he’s destroyed professionally, physically, and personally, and after we learn that there’s one thing he’s not guilty of, we’re asked to reconsider some of what we think we know about him. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t feel like a strong enough shift be asked to change how we feel about a character after having seen the things we’ve seen him do.
But just because this movie isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. You will see it nominated for, and probably win, a whole bunch of awards of the next few months. And deservedly so. Sam Rockwell does the near-impossible: create a character so fully-rounded and three-dimensional, you will forget he is a racist Southern officer named “Jason Dixon.” A name so on-the-nose it might as well “Colonel Foghorn Sanders.”
Get Out//It
I think it’s an indicator of how far the American horror film has fallen, that people got excited that Jordan Peele’s Get Out is actually about something relevant. Horror as a genre is always supposed to be about something. Halloween isn’t just a movie about a dude who stabs people in the woods. It’s about free-floating anxiety and the sense that no matter how orderly our lives may feel, there’s always the sense that there’s something just out of sight waiting for us. Made in 1978, it’s about post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, and the country’s collective realization that everything we had learned was a lie.
The Shining is less about a man trapped in a haunted hotel, and more about what it means to be a family trapped in an unpredictably violent relationship with an alcoholic. Psycho is a movie about the dysfunction lurking under the sense of self during the boomtime economic recovery that America experienced after World War II. Whether these were intentional choices by the filmmakers or not, they capitalized on a collective sense of unease that we as a society feel, even if we can’t articulate what it is or why.
Get Out audaciously makes the subtext plain on the page, so that the viewer has no chance to escape the message amid the tension and suspense: In post-Obama America, Peele tells us, even “tolerant” white Americans who would consider themselves progressive because they like rap music and black culture, are, in their own way, blind to their own racism and their destruction of black culture even as they consume it.
Which is ironic, given that Jordan Peele’s previous project was the great, and greatly successful, Key and Peele sketch show on Comedy Central. A tremendous accomplishment, Peele and his sketch partner, Keegan Michael-Key (maybe the greatest comedy actor of his generation) brought an African American sensibility into the living rooms, iPads, and iTunes movie player windows of young white Americans across the country. As Dave Chappelle discovered in his own massively-popular Comedy Central sketch comedy show, you can have 100% control over the product, and you still can’t control how it will be consumed, enjoyed, or interpreted.
I may be putting words into Peele’s mouth here, but a movie like Get Out seems to be a reaction to that. Asking the question, “Who am I speaking for if not myself? Who, in this country will protect us not just from the cartoonishly evil people we already know to look out for, but those who come as friends, as fans, as family?”
And this strikes a chord in this country, which feels more polarized than ever. Where news of black men being gunned down by police have dominated the news, and in response it feels like the entire system has turned a blind eye to systemic racial murder. Because when it comes to creating popular culture, the personal is always political. And nobody knows this better than Stephen King, who has created some of the seminal works of late-20th Century horror fiction. His book, It, is a classic look at what it means to be an American child, interpreting a world full of very human horrors through the lens of willful naivete and fairy tale.
There’s a point, as you pass through the beginnings of adolescence, when you begin to see things as they truly are. That the adults you had assumed are monolithically strong and smart and good are actually just human beings, sometimes too bent to do the right things, sometimes too scared. It’s on this point that the world that Stephen King creates teeters, as the kids find the sum of their childhood fears and real world abuses embodied in one evil clown that lives in the sewers beneath. The second half of the book is actually a very smart look at Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder, and how we deal as adults with the fallout of a childhood full of things we can’t remember, or don’t care to.
Stephen King’s It, the film, focuses on the first half of this story. In deference to not releasing an unwatchable seven hour movie, a lot of the fat in the plot is trimmed away. And if the fat is where the flavor is, then so be it. Because Andy Muschietti, like Jordan Peele did with Get Out, creates a horror film that delivers the scares while remembering that it’s also supposed to be about something. If It owes as much to Steven Spielberg as it does to Stephen King, that’s no great sin. In an age of indie films that paint from a palette of handheld yellows and browns, it’s nice to see a brightly-lit film that embraces the Steadicam greens and blues.
The Ballad of Lefty Brown
This is an American Western, filmed on actual Kodak film with the sweepingly beautiful backdrop of Montana scrubland as its setting. It pulls off a narrative move in the first ten minutes so ballsy I wouldn’t dare to spoil it here. And you won’t enjoy it, because you’re going to watch it on Netflix on your TV in bed while scrolling Facebook and answering texts.
Which is fine. But if you get the chance to watch this in a dark theatre, I strongly recommend you go, as it rewards the effort it takes to allow yourself to submerge yourself into its world.
Taking its cue from the great oaters of the 1950s, the John Ford and John Wayne films, with their sense of what is right and what is just, Ballad reaches an ending that feels a bit pat and forced. Is it bad that I can no longer feel good about a happy ending anymore unless it unfolds organically? Perhaps, and I suspect I may be in the minority in that view. Bill Pullman is an American treasure of the cinema, who pulls off the common actor’s trick of being both underrated and consistently working. Also a special mention here to Kathy Baker, who takes what could have been a thankless role and dominates every scene she’s in. When you’re in scenes with actors like Pullman and Peter Fonda, that’s no easy trick to pull off.
The Shape of Water
Man, I liked this movie an awful lot. It starts as the kind of film that usually gets under my skin; highly stylized, with purposefully whimsical elements that are beautiful and as airless as a Faberge egg. As we stay wit hthe story, it becomes apparent that this is a deliberate choice.
Sally Hawkins is a mute cleaning girl at a government lab whose purpose and provenance are kept deliberately vague. She lives in an artist’s garret above a second-run movie theatre, and her closest neighbor and friend is a gay commercial artist who is obsessed with old films, and has recently aged out of a career in advertising, an industry that’s always looking forward.
Color is an important part of Del Toro’s storytelling Shape of Water, and the pallet he works with is almost another main character. The first two-thirds of the film are greens and blues, and we see that this is because the people in his world are underwater in their\ own lives, unable to communicate, barely able to communicate because they’re drowning in their own loneliness.
A swamp creature from South America is dragged in chains to the lab, and Sally Hawkins’ working girl very quickly senses a kindred spirit lurking in the muddy depths of his tank. As she falls in love, as the outside world tries to contain the creature, slowly the clockwork design that dominates the first half of the film falls apart. In fact, every time a character is about to be upended, another splash of red is added to the canvas.
And all through the film, intimacy and communication are the agents of chaos that takes this world apart piece by piece. Whether it’s Michael Shannon’s wound-up government agent putting his hand over his wife’s mouth during an act of love-making, because he “can’t” when she’s talking, or Richard Jenkins’ artist bravely making a move on a counter boy he’s been afraid to open himself up to, it’s communication that makes the colors run in this meticulously-painted masterpiece. It’s a neat trick when a filmmaker creates a fully-realized world that you never want to leave, and yet still has you fully rooting for its destruction when it happens.
Bright
I enjoyed the shit out of Bright. It is not a good movie. It’s a lot of banter and explosions and ridiculously wasted special effects.
The first thing you need to know is that I am a David Ayer fan. In 2001, two screenplays he wrote, Training Day and The Fast and The Furious, premiered becoming massive, genre-defining successes. End of Watch, a movie he wrote and directed, a minor classic. Even if he had never directed a movie before Bright, there is a lot of evidence out there that he knows a thing or two about crafting story. And believe me, there’s very little in Bright.
The second thing you need to know is that I am HUGE fan of the buddy cop action/comedy genre. I love the best of it: Lethal Weapon, 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop. I love the worst of it: Beverly Hills Cop III, Running Scared (where tiny middle-aged Long Islander Billy Crystal plays a tough-as-nails Chicago cop who can dunk on a bunch of teenagers in a game of street ball), Red Heat, and Dead Heat, a movie that pairs Joe Piscopo with Treat Williams as a zombie cop named Roger Mortis. I love these movies, and in a perfect world, Shane Black would have as many Oscar® brand entertainment industry-strength suppositories as the great William Goldman.
And it’s not as if Bright doesn’t have a killer hook; transposing a fairy tale world onto a modern-day noir is about has hooky as a premise gets. However, in Bright, we’re given stakes that are way too big to be relatable. As I said in the entry for Guardians of the Galaxy above, if your movie can’t find a way to get big while also being small and relatable, it doesn’t matter that you have human charm machine Will Smith in the lead role, your viewer just is not going to give a shit by the end.
Will Smith, by the way, deserves an MVP award from Hollywood for carrying this movie, as well as Ayer’s previous, Suicide Squad, like a champ. For the record, Suicide Squad was another movie that I enjoyed unironicallyas a pure moviegoing experience. If you’re going to make a bad comic book movie, don’t make it so boring that people mistake your film for art (Logan, which is basically The Piano with mutants). And for god’s sakes, don’t let your actors in on the fact that you’re making garbage. By the time they got around to filming Justice League, the stars had been so lambasted for Batman v. Superman, they walked through Justice League depressed. Like they know they’re going to get beaten up for appearing in this movie, no matter how it turns out. Like the group of cool kids who go to their high school reunion and realize that middle age has transformed them into losers somehow.
Suicide Squad was all forward motion and optimism, and Margot Robbie is a standout because it feels like she’s decided that she’s in her own amazing action movie where she’s the protagonist. It looks great, and moves at fast clip for a movie that’s easily an hour too long, and everybody, from Ayer to the actors to the set designers to makeup to costumes, all conspire to help the audience forget that what they’re watching makes no goddamn sense.
Justice League is the aftermath of a trainwreck, a public hearing with Amtrak officials to determine what went wrong. Suicide Squad is a neon spaceship with its controls set to find the heart of the sun.
By contrast, Bright is an Edsel with four screaming passengers that’s been pushed off a cliff. At times you can convince yourself you’re flying along, but when the ride ends it ain’t going to end pretty. Will Smith is great as always, but for the first time he seems genuinely tired. Like he’s he made a wish with an evil genie and got stuck in the cycle of starring in big budget action movies and promoting big budget action movies, and hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since Bad Boys II (a GREAT movie, by the way).
There’s a great many things wrong with this movie that wants to be a parable about racism, but unlike Get Out, was written and directed by two men who never experienced it first-hand. See, it’s set in a world where, essentially, Lord of the Rings is actual history, and Will Smith’s partner is an Orc. Orcs have been discriminated against for 2,000 years after siding with The Dark One in a massive battle. The problem is the film also seems to embrace shades of actual racism (Latino gangbangers straight out of a 1990s LAPD recruitment film) and anti-Semitism (elves are all rich, and live in their own separate section of Beverly Hills, and not-so-secretly control the government).
But the biggest problem is the lack of give-a-shit stakes. See, the most powerful weapons in this film are magic wands, which can only be handled by supernatural beings called Brights. It’s supposed to be a major plot twist that Will Smith, an ordinary street cop and regular human being, is a “Bright.” But we know this already for two reasons:
- First, a street prophet tells us so, communicating this fact to his Orcish partner, in subtitled orcish, so we know even if Will Smith doesn’t.
- Secondly, it’s a movie called Bright, starring Will Smith. All of the poster art for the film say “BRIGHT” in big letters over a picture of Will Smith’s face. Sure, it’s an ancillary aspect of filmmaking, but in this case it’s very important in what the movie communicates to the audience.In the movie The 40 Year-Old Virgin starring Steve Carrell, with posters of Carrell’s face over the title, you are left with no mystery walking in about which character in the movie is a virgin, or how old he is. In the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar (a better movie than it’s given credit for), there’s no third act twist where it turns out that Jim Carrey’s son is the Liar.It’s as if The Usual Suspects was called Who Is Keyser Soze? and was advertised with Kevin Spacey standing alone on the poster for the film.
So the movie tries to throw us a curve ball by withholding fifty percent of the information we would need to enjoy the story until the very end. See, there’s an Orcish prophecy about the end of the world, and the twist is that Will Smith is a central figure in their doomsday fable. But we don’t learn there’s even a prophecy until the final half hour. And in the end, Will Smith learns he’s a Bright by grabbing the magic wand.
Now, this could have been a movie about Will Smith knowing he’s got special powers but not wanting to acknowledge or use them for reasons. Or it could have been a movie where Will Smith slowly learns he has powers and in the final scene he decides to risk trusting his gut that he’s a “Bright” by grabbing the wand in what would otherwise be a scene of tremendous self-sacrifice.
But instead he just blindly grabs the wand and trusts that he’s awesome enough to survive. It’s as if Star Wars decided not to tell us anything about the Force and Luke Skywalker’s connection to it until the very end of the final trench run sequence.
I hold none of this against the movie. This is a list of films I enjoyed this year, and Bright closes it out with no sense of irony or sarcasm. Because in this movie, you get to root against everybody. Everybody, every character, turns out to be a dick to one degree or another. If it seems one guy is unjustly accused of something, you find out that no, he really did the wrong thing and got lucky it worked out. And so you really just get to dig in and enjoy two solid hours of CGI-enhanced mayhem. And in this case, it failed in a way I find more interesting than many of the “good” movies of 2017 succeeded.
0 Liam McEneaney: The Number Four Comedian in Queens
You can read it here.
0 HOW I PUT TOGETHER MY FIRST ALBUM, ‘COMEDIAN’: A Track-By-Track Guide To Constructing A Decent Comedy Record
I’m recording my next album on January 10th, a Sunday in the year of our Lord 2016, at a live show at The Bell House in Brooklyn. As I am a lucky ol’ fella, my buds Colin Jost, Dave Hill, and Rob Paravonian will be opening for me. It will be recorded for release by Comedy Dynamics, a wonderful record label.
My first album, Comedian, which was released two years ago by ASpecialThing Records, was not only a professional milestone, but a personal one as well. I know that as a young comic in the 2010s, I’m supposed to be all about the TV or Netflix special, but when I was a kid I would go to sleep almost every night listening to the Richard Pryor, or the George Carlin, or even Cosby albums. (I know, I know. I never thought I’d describe the late ‘90s as a “more innocent time,” but there you go.) To me, the comedy album was the real Big Time.
And especially to release an album on AST, the same label as releases the albums by some of my favorite comics, including Paul F. Tompkins, Jen Kirkman, and on and on, was–and still is–a huge thrill.
That being said, putting together a full hour of material is not as easy as just “saying funny stuff into a microphone.” I had a whole philosophy about the material I wanted to present, and it’s a process that a few people have actually asked me about. I always warn folks, “Comedy is way more boring than you’d think.” And then they insist and then I proceed to prove my point because, what the hell, talking about myself is one of my favorite activities after all.
So for your elucidation, and to save myself breath the next time I’m at a party and someone asks, “Oh, what do you do?”, here is a track-by-track breakdown of how I put an hour’s worth of material together for my first album. (You can listen to it for free on Spotify right here.)
- POSITIVE AFFIRMATIONS
This recording was the first time I’d performed the bit live in probably three or more likely five years. When I actually made the deal with AST Records, I decided I didn’t want this to just be a “Greatest Hits of Liam’s Standup.” I had a specific vision for Comedian, something a little jazzier, a little more mid-early Nighthawks/Blue Valentine/Heartattack + Vine Tom Waits.So I went through my archives and while doing some digging, I remembered my positive affirmations, which I had originally specifically written for an appearance at Eating It at the Ludlow Street rock club Luna Lounge. When I started standup, “alternative comedy” was the hot term for “anything that isn’t recognizable “didja ever notice?” comedy club comedy. The big show in New York City that all the press and industry and in-the-know fans went to was Eating It at Luna Lounge. If you were a newer comedian, the pressure was always on to kill there, and showcase your “range” by not just doing polished comedy material (even though the TV bookers and agents there totally wanted to see nothing but your polished comedy material). So I came up with the affirmations, which was originally three times as long. I workshopped it at an open mic around the corner, called “Faceboyz Open Mic.” It went really well, but there weren’t too many other shows I could really feel comfortable busting it out.But clearly it was, as Willie Nelson says, always on my mind. I thought it might be good to have Heidi Vanderlee play something meditation-y behind me on the cello. She picked a Bach piece. “Love is beautiful but porn is easy” is always one of my favorite, not jokes, but laughs I get on a joke. When this bit was played on the Dr. Demento Show, it was, to me, like receiving a Nerd Grammy.
- LIVING SINGLE
This is just a collection of one-liners I like that I was opening my set with at the time. If you can open with a handful of killer one-liners, you can lead an audience down any road you like. While I was definitely ready to retire them by the time I recorded Comedian, I thought it would be nice to get them all in one place. They’re interspersed around Tell Your Friends! The Concert Film! , but I’m proud of having written these jokes. For instance, writing the “Sex/Olympic Athlete” was SO. MUCH. WORK. I have a notebook where I have three pages of bad comedy writing trying to write a very strained and hacky bit about the Olympics and gay dudes, and I plucked this one line that was almost funny, reversed it, made it about me, and it was like a bright light descended from on high while a holy chorus sang and hit the paper.Also, yes, I named this track after the ’90s sitcom.
- THE DOUG DATE
The problem with this bit has nothing to do with the bit. But it sets up a callback that works very well in a bit I have about karate. When I had my set list that I would work out around town, I decided to do this material in the Doug Date bit early in the set, and then call back to it in the Karate bit towards the end. But the karate bit never ended up on Comedian, which I didn’t even realize until I went over the set list for this blog entry. I’m not sure if I did the bit in the live show, and just didn’t end up cutting it for time (unlikely) or just plain forgot to do the bit both nights we recorded (far more likely). In any case, I’ll put it in the set list for my second album, which means I can use it to close all these shows I’m doing to warm up for this album recording show, but man, I’m flummoxed I didn’t put that there.
- EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT WOMEN
I thought it would be funny to have a track titled “Everything I Know About Women” and make it as brief as possible. My original thought was to make it a blank 30 seconds, but I quickly came to my senses and instead I put the title on a track under four minutes. It’s tough to do material about relationships, because it’s a meal picked over by many comedians before you, so whenever you get a new take, or a new way of delivering an observation, it’s very exciting. Framing the way women talk about men as a witch’s coven isn’t the most flattering way, but it was fairly original and people seemed to dig it. I’m actually pretty proud of the way it came out.
- THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND RACHEL
Rachel is the name of my ex, and John is her new boyfriend of many years, who is a very very cool guy, and they are not the couple in this bit. Seriously. I just liked the way their names flowed together. I like to write bits with crazy structure; beginning, middle, end, callback. I consider it to be like architecting a building. Some dudes are Brutalists, and just want to do the job no matter how ugly. Some dudes are Functionalists, and they want their jokes to do the job with nothing fancy. I like to try for a Frank Lloyd Wright; even if not every part of it is functional, it’s still interesting to look at.The bit (and the whole set of dating jokes in general) ends at almost exactly a third of the way through the album. I like to start a set with relationship material because it’s something that literally everybody on earth can relate to, and once the audience is with you, knows who you are, and trusts that you can make them laugh, it’s a lot easier to do the esoteric, weird, and fun stuff that I enjoy doing. I’m not putting my dating bits down when I say this. JOHN & RACHEL is one of my favorite bits on this album, and the fact that I made it work in time to record it made it feel like I had just pulled off a magic trick that involves spinning plates while balancing cups and saucers on my chin while yanking a tablecloth out from under a place setting.It’s just that I’m a bit of a risk-taker, and it interests me more to figure out how to make, say, my love of Irish folk music relatable to a wider audience. But the dating stuff is my price of admission into the audience’s good graces.
- THE McENEANEY FAMILY HOSTAGE SITUATION
I got the title from a joke I thought of immediately after the second show was over and was mad at myself for not making in the moment. I couldn’t even tell you what it is anymore. In any case, this was strictly there because I liked the bit, and it represented what was a turning point in my comedy for me, and I thought it might be nice to make it the turning point into the rest of the album. I wrote it when I worked at a market research firm, making minimum wage making survey calls to strangers. It was a truly miserable time in my life, and it was, after reading a biography of Woody Allen, when I realized that if I wanted to actually be the comedian I always believed myself to be in my heart, and not just a guy who’d done Premium Blend once and disappeared, I was going to have to make an honest to God job of work out of this thing.I was reading a great piece about greeting cards in the New Yorker at work, and realized a bit about Hallmark Cards would be relatively unique. My friend Veronica Mosey heard me do it at the Irish Arts Center and fixed it for me afterwards (by suggesting I put my cuh-razy greeting cards in contrast by giving an example of a regular card first). This was the point in my life, and my career, when I went from being a guy who could do well through sheer tyranny of will into a comedian who was able to write actual bits from my point of view without any reliance on shock value. So while it’s not a groundbreaking piece of standup, per se, it was a turning point for me as a comedian. And also for this album in a bit more literal sense.
- MY HACK PAGES
Another concrete pillar bit that I knew would hold up a section of my set; it was part of my standard set whenever I was getting paid for performing. It’s definitely one of the oldest bits on this album, and it is a young man’s joke. But I’m glad I could stick it in there, and it helps bridge into some more autobiographical material.
- MEOW MEOW MEOW
Ah, everybody’s favorite bit, and another one I was writing all the way down to the wire. It started with a couple of different things; I had a half a joke about my parents’ cats and I fighting for space in their will. It was an amusing idea with a line I liked, but had no real weight to it. I was also hanging with my dope-as-fuck friend Dr. Leona Godin a lot, and whenever our conversation would hit a lull, I’d go “meow meow meow” like Henrietta Pussycat from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. It really is, no joke, the funnest thing you can randomly say out loud. Try it some time!But it wasn’t fully complete as a joke, and I was doing it onstage at these weird little shows in New York, and I just improvised the idea of throwing it into uncomfortable situations, like a Jesus guy approaching you on the street, but I couldn’t quite get into it. Then I hung out with parents the week before recording, and, as you hear on the track, my mom said something she didn’t realize was hilarious and weird, and I decided it would be a good way to get into the joke. I recorded the show over two nights at Union Hall, in Brooklyn, and the joke worked great except for the bit about sassing a religious guy. It just was a little too on-the-nose. While walking around Park Slope the second morning, I started thinking about a shitty encounter I’d had with one of those “Do you have a moment for the environment” guys. It occurred to me that was the perfect time to have actually said “Meow meow meow,” and I realized I’d just finished the joke. So what you hear on the album is the first time I ever performed the whole joke correctly, which isn’t bad considering that that morning I’d decided it wasn’t worth trying to salvage.One final note: It’s funny to me to realize that the newest bit on the album was sandwiched by the oldest.
- DROP OUT!
This is also material from when I was young. I always liked these bits, and that’s pretty much it, except, the only reason it’s its own separate track is because Tom Waits has a ton of songs that have their own little funny musical intros on Nighthawks at the Diner and I wanted to do that, too. I promise I’m not as pretentious in person as I am when I discover my thought processes.
- THE TRUE STORY OF FAST EDDIE (THE BANK ROBBER)
I wrote this entire seven minute set, beginning to end, literally over the course of my entire career. The beginning bit, about Hector the ice cream truck driver, was a true story that I tried for the first time my second or third time onstage. The rest of it was written and perfected within nine months of recording. People always ask if these stories are true, and they aren’t always, but this one is, more or less. I changed a lot of stuff around, I asked permission of one guy to joke about him, and I condensed a lot of stuff to remove the parts that were sad or unfunny or just plain not believable as biography.By the way, the use of parentheses in the title is strictly because shitty pretentious bands did that a lot on their albums when I was a kid, as a way of showing that they were serious artists, and I never stopped finding it funny.
- LIAM vs. THE AUDIENCE 1: “MY FIRST TIME”
Christine is a very nice woman I’d met in the East Village art open mic scene. She is a lovely young lady who really had never been to a standup show before. As soon as she spoke up, I got really excited because I knew that whatever was about to happen was going to go onto the album. My original plan had been to record an hour of material and cut it down to the best forty-five minutes.All my favorite comedy albums when I was young had been, on average, no more than forty minutes, and I really believe that there’s a reason they’re considered unimpeachable classics. But of course, the best-laid plans, so the album includes 15 minutes of audience participation. The label wanted to edit a point halfway through where I declare my intention to be mean, which was entirely meant to stop me from sounding like an utter dick, but I thought that would be completely unfair.
- NEW YORK STORIES
My goal for this album was to do longer bits. I really tried to stretch these out to ten minutes, but the most important part of writing is editing, and it’s better to just cut four minutes than make an artistic point. I’d originally conceived the middle third of this album as almost a “suite” of longer bits that thematically flowed from one to the next. Of course, that went out the window with the previous track, which is fine. By the way, this is named after the Coppola/Scorcese/Woody Allen film about life in NYC. I genuinely put that much thought into each and every detail on this album.
- NEW YORK I LOVE YOU BUT YOU’RE BRINGING ME DOWN
Just like Track 8, this was a bit I was bombing with all over town, trying to write it into decent shape. It just never shaped up the way I’d hoped, and my plan was to leave it out and rewrite it into a better bit. But Ryan at the label liked it a lot, and he convinced me to let him edit it. I don’t think it ruins the album by any stretch, and he was so passionately behind this track I genuinely didn’t have the heart to cut it.
- AN EVENING WASTED WITH LIAM McENEANEY
First of all, this was my original title for this album. It’s a total rip of Tom Lehrer’s An Evening Wasted With… album, and when I decided to go with a complete throwback jazz theme to Comedian, I realized the title didn’t fit anymore. I did keep it for the bit, though, as a tribute to one of my favorite comedians.This is the bit that people always ask me if it’s true. Yes and no. The basic facts of the story are true. But structurally, the joke is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. I originally had a joke about taking my first AIDS test, with the idea that the wait for your results is way more frightening than any scary movie you could watch. A funny idea, but it would require more and I didn’t want to be the guy with a killer five about AIDS. So I put it in the vault and forgot a out it and about five years later, I was watching a comedian on TV talk about asking a woman if she was pregnant. That’s happened to a lot of people, and it’s a super hacky used premise. But it had, as I say, actually happened, and so the challenge for myself was to figure out a way to take a hacky premise and make it fresh and personal. As I was trying to find my way into the subject, I remembered the AIDS test joke, and reappropriated it for this bit. It was one of those bits, just the first time I ever tried it at my Tell Your Friends! show, I knew I’d made the right move.
- LIAM vs. THE AUDIENCE 2: “SHANNON’S BETTER”
I went back and forth on this one. On the one hand, I didn’t want this to be a crowd work album, and I definitely didn’t want to encourage people to talk to me during a future show. On the other hand, this woman automatically arguing that a lesser-known Irish airport was “better” was about the most Park Slope thing I could imagine.
- DUBLIN AIRPORT AND IRISH RAIL
I’d talked about my dad’s family being Irish Catholic earlier in the show. There was actually a lot more stuff about religion, but it was material that, when I started performing it, got very strong laughs, and then kind of just started getting less and less as the years went by. I’d hoped that a friendly album taping crowd would mean I could get it on tape one time. But as Ryan at AST Records pointed out, we had a LOT of material and we had the luxury of cutting anything that came off as weak, so at least you know that every laugh you hear on this is earned. Other than that, these are both true stories, and the people who’ve liked them the best have been Irish people from Ireland.
- HOW TO WRITE A TRADITIONAL IRISH FOLK TUNE
My next album isn’t going to be as custom built; it’s going to involve less storytelling, and is going to have a very different structure. But as you may have noticed, there are a lot of musical references in the track titles, and I wanted to bookend the show with a second musical number to provide a big finish and bring the whole thing full circle. I wrote this as a silly blog entry 15 years ago, and my mom bugged me and bugged me to perform it as a live bit. She was right.
That’s it. I kind of can’t believe you made it all the way through, but thanks for doing so. And if you’re intrigued, please feel free to let people know and buy a copy why not, I’ll autograph it for you at the next show.
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