6/24/15: The Cause of, and Solution to, All of Life’s Problems

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'80s comedies, ad agencies, advertising agency, advertising industry, Alan C. Peterson, Alar Aedma, alcoholism, Allan Weisbecker, alternate title, bad films, battle of the sexes, Beer, Bill Butler, Bill Conti, brewery, cinema, comedies, David Alan Grier, David Wohl, Dick Shawn, directorial debut, film reviews, films, homophobia, husband-wife relationship, Kenneth Mars, Loretta Swit, masculinity, Mel Brooks, misogyny, Movies, Norbecker, offensive films, over-the-top, Patrick Kelly, Peter Michael Goetz, racist, Rip Torn, satire, Saul Stein, sexist, silly films, spoof, The Selling of America, TV ads, unlikely heroes, William Russ

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that manages to genuinely surprise me, for one reason or another. It might be a film that’s surprisingly good or even unexpectedly great. It might be a “sure thing” that fails miserably, maybe something by a beloved filmmaker that manages to completely miss the mark. On very rare occasions, a movie might surprise with an unexpectedly thought-provoking concept or some heretofore unexplored insights into the human condition. And then, of course, there’s Beer (1985), also known by the much more on-the-nose title The Selling of America.

In this particular case, Beer surprises by being one of the most outrageously misguided, casually offensive films that I think I’ve ever seen. Coming across as a completely tone-deaf attempt to emulate the societal critique of Mel Brooks’ immortal Blazing Saddles (1974), Kelly’s film is stuffed to bursting with so many outdated, honestly offensive observations on race, feminism, masculinity, nationality, gender and sexuality that it makes something like Porky’s (1982) seem progressive. Beer is a “have your cake and eat it, too” kind of film, a movie that wants to shake a finger at society’s ills while gleefully indulging in the same sort of bad behavior.

A.J. Norbecker (Mel Brooks mainstay Kenneth Mars) has a bit of a problem: the German-born brewery owner is experiencing an unprecedented drop in sales and he places the blame squarely on the advertising agency that’s handling his promotional material. As Norbecker sees it, all beer is just “piss-water”: it’s the ads that really make the difference and he wants ads as cool as Miller and the other major players. To that end, he gives the agency’s president, Harley Feemer (Peter Michael Goetz), an ultimatum: beef up their campaign, increase his sales or lose their biggest client.

Behind the scenes, Feemer and the other guys try, in vain, to come up with anything original. Leave it to B.D. Tucker (M.A.S.H.’s Loretta Swit), the agency’s “token female executive” (their phrase, of course) to come up with the only good idea: they need an ad campaign that will appeal to the common, everyday man who’s the actual market for Norbecker Beer…nothing posh, highfalutin’ or pretentious, just a bunch of normal, macho guys drinking beer. Hiring her old friend, former hotshot director/current washed-up alcoholic Buzz Beckerman (Rip Torn, consuming scenery like a black hole), B.D. goes about putting together the ad campaign that will reset Norbecker’s fortune and secure her own future.

As luck would have it, B.D. and Buzz find their ideal spokesmen when they witness a trio of doofuses accidentally stop an attempted robbery in a dive bar. The three guys are perfect for their purposes, mostly because they’re not real people so much as generic templates: Merle (William Russ) is a good-ol’-boy (complete with steer horns on his Cadillac) fish out of water in big, bad New York City; Frankie (Saul Stein) is an Italian-American construction worker with a raging libido and the kind of enormous, stereotypical Italian family that passes around bowls of pasta large enough to drown in; and Elliot (David Alan Grier) is an uber-nerdy black lawyer who gets pushed around at his blatantly racist firm and fights a losing battle, at home, to prevent his young son from listening to boomboxes (no, really).

In no time at all, Merle, Frankie and Elliot are national heroes and superstars: all men want to be them and all women want to bed them, which is quite a change from their former loser/unemployed statuses. With new-found fame, however, comes a whole new raft of problems. Merle begins to feel a loss of identity and pines for the simpler life, Frankie develops erectile dysfunction just as he becomes a sex symbol and formerly nice-guy Elliot is starting to treat his wife and kid like crap. As the men become more and more wrapped-up in their manufactured personas, their real selves begin to fall by the wayside.

As the campaign continues to pick up steam, B.D. looks to find new ways to keep her manufactured stars in the media spotlight, mostly by injecting some all-important sex appeal into the proceedings (“Whip out your Norbecker…Beer!). With feminists around the country in an uproar, Norbecker Beer becomes more popular than ever, cornering a whopping 50% of the U.S. market. Norbecker, obviously ecstatic, sets his sights a little higher: he decides that he wants to take over the European market, as well, believing that a “surprise advertising blitz” will allow him to take over Germany (his first name is Adolph, after all). Will our hapless heroes end up losing their very humanity, becoming as callous and ruthless as the Madison Avenue execs that made them what they are? Will B.D. ever earn the respect that she so desperately wants? Will Adolph conquer Europe? Whip out your Norbecker and find out for yourself!

Make no bones about it: Beer (or The Selling of America, whichever you prefer) is an absolute mess, albeit a fascinating one. The biggest, most obvious issue with the film is that director Patrick Kelly (on his sole production, apparently) and screenwriter Allan Weisbecker (who also wrote an episode of Miami Vice) have absolutely no grasp on the supposedly satirical material whatsoever. Beer ends up in that nebulous “no-man’s-land” between pointing out the systematic stupidity of things like sexism and racism and actively upholding said prejudicial viewpoints. It’s the equivalent of someone who goes out of their way to explain that they aren’t racist before busting out the most virulently racist joke you’ve ever heard. It’s the “feminist” who drops a wink while telling women to get back into the kitchen, the “progressive” who thinks the term “twinkletoes” is a perfectly acceptable descriptor for a gay man.

Time and time again, the film seems to be attempting to poke holes in these very real issues while also attempting to milk them for easy, shallow laughs, many of which end up being more than a little mean-spirited. At one point, B.D. tells Elliot that he isn’t “black enough,” so he goes home and watches a handy “black studies” videotape, picking up such important tips as grabbing his crotch, swaggering and walking around with a boombox. When he shows up to the next shoot looking like an extra from Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1985), B.D. is absolutely shocked: “You look like you just stepped out of the ghetto! When I said ‘black,’ I didn’t mean ‘black-black’!” Funny shit, right?

Or how about the thoroughly “fresh” way in which Frankie’s entire family seems to have stepped out of a dinner-theater version of Mama Mia, complete with endless shouting and fainting when our friendly mook reveals that he plans to move out of their unbelievably crowded apartment? He’s only 29, after all, which is way too early for a good Italian boy to cut the apron strings. Frankie’s also such a completely irresistible ladies’ man that even when he can’t get it up, his conquest-of-the-moment blames it all on herself, begging him profusely for the opportunity to “do better” and not “disappoint him.” Whatta guy, right?

We even get a heart-warming, climatic scene where Merle and Frankie must wade into the “horrors” of a gay bar and “rescue” poor, drunk Elliot from a fate worse than death: that the scene devolves into the kind of rousing fist fight that would be more at home in Road House (1989) probably goes a long way towards indicating where the filmmakers sympathies lie. Never fear, however: it’s all balanced when ol’ Norbecker decides to market a new “lite” beer to gay men. As we see him cavort with a bunch of half-naked men in a sauna, he delivers the immortal pitch-line: “You can take it in the bottle or you can take it in the can.” Because, you know, “can” is also used as a slang word for “butt” and that’s kind of funny, right?

Truth be told, not much in Beer is actually funny, though nearly all of it is pitched at the kind of frantic, hysterical pace that usually denotes slapstick comedy. There are moments that manage to shine through the mess: the various TV commercials are actually pretty good and Buzz gets in a great line about how he once made Alan Ladd look “six feet tall” (I’m a movie nerd: that’s the kind of reference that makes me chuckle, sadly enough). The acting is also just fine (or, at the very least, it’s all of a piece with the film’s overall tone), with fantastic turns from David Alan Grier (in a very thankless role) and Loretta Swit (in an even more thankless role).

While I frequently found myself cringing during the film, my heart really went out to poor Swit: she really is a great actress and she gives the performance her all but it’s a ruthlessly stacked deck, from the get-go. Nothing about the character of B.D. really makes sense (at one point, she actively fights against sexualizing the ads, only to flip-flop a moment later) and the filmmakers seem bound and determined to humiliate her as much as possible. Rather than letting B.D. succeed, since she mounted a successful ad campaign and won a coveted CLEO award, we instead get the pathetic culmination where Merle comes to his senses and decides to leave, spurring B.D. to bed him to stay: “Do I have to get down on my knees,” she asks, with her tone and body language pointing to the obvious.

Turning B.D. into the butt of the film’s joke actually manages to sum up the movie’s problems in a pretty good nutshell: while Beer makes noises about tackling issues like sexism, racism and masculinity, it’s pretty clear that its sympathies lie elsewhere. The feminist protesters are portrayed as shrill nuts, the gay men in the club are lascivious wolves, the German guy is power-mad and the only one who makes any sense is the guy who looks like he stepped out of an old Western. It’s a stacked deck, regardless of how ridiculous the prejudicial portrayals are: showcasing an eye-rollingly obvious example of racism isn’t the same thing as condemning or commenting on it, after all.

There will, undoubtedly, be many who would counter my observations with the rejoinder that Beer is nothing more than a typical, ’80s comedy (almost, but not quite, a sex comedy, to boot): was I really expecting any kind of astute observations on anything? I’ll freely admit that I never expected Beer to be a great film, nor even a particularly smart one. There’s nothing wrong with dumb, politically incorrect comedies: I saw more than my fair share of Police Academy and Porky’s movies, growing up, and I don’t consider myself to be a raging, misogynist beast. This is a very different era than 30 years ago (or even 10 years ago, to be honest) and certain mindsets have a tendency to look as quaint as museum setpieces in this day and age.

At the end of the day, however, Beer can really only be judged on its own merits. As a film, it’s silly, nonsensical, occasionally funny but, for the most part, resoundingly lunk-headed. With too many detours into genuine racism and sexism to have much modern value, Beer/The Selling of America will probably best be remembered as a curio, a representation of a time when films could flaunt flagrant stereotypes, all in the guise of “making a statement.” Don’t be fooled, though: the only statement here is that this Beer is warm, flat and skunky.

10/9/14 (Part One): Nothing Divided By Four is Still Nothing

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31 Days of Halloween, Adam Green, Adam Rifkin, AJ Bowen, anthology films, bad movies, Chillerama, cinema, Deathication, Detroit Rock City, drive-in fare, Eric Roberts, film reviews, films, horror, horror films, horror-comedies, I Was a Teenage Werebear, Joe Lynch, Kane Hodder, Knights of Badassdom, Lin Shaye, low-budget films, Mel Brooks, monster movies, Movies, multiple directors, multiple writers, parodies, Ray Wise, Richard Riehle, Ron Jeremy, satire, scatological humor, terrible films, The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, Tim Sullivan, Wadzilla, writer-director, Zom-B-Movie, zombies

I have absolutely nothing against offensive, abhorrent, socially-unacceptable humor: after all, I was raised on a steady diet of Mel Brooks, Troma, South Park and Italo-splatter films, so stuff like that is part of my cinematic DNA. When done well (and fearlessly), crude, rude humor can be a powerful tool, cutting through societal niceties in a way that allows filmmakers to make honest, pointed commentary about the less-than-perfect world we live in. Racism, sexism, gender politics, religion: these are but a few of the hot-button topics that fearlessly unflinching comedy can often handle in more powerful ways than more dramatic works. All this is by way of saying that I’m most definitely neither a prude nor an easily-outraged mouthpiece for the censorship of deviant ideas.

That being said, the multi-director horror anthology Chillerama (2011) is a complete and total piece of shit, a waste of both time and resources that manages to entertain for a scant 20 minutes out of an astoundingly painful two hour running time. This was a film that managed to lose me early, yet irritated me so profoundly that I was determined to sit through its wretched excesses in order to see how much more irritated I could become. This towering testament to scatological humor in all of its nasty, sticky excesses is both lazy and stupid, too cheaply made to be effective, too sloppily conceived to be entertaining and too needlessly offensive to be anything more than the foot-stomping tantrum of a collection of filmmakers that must, surely, fancy themselves more clever than they really are. Ultimately, my overall impression of the film can be summed up in one tidy, little declaration: I was not amused.

By their very nature, cinematic horror anthologies are always pretty safe bets for entertainment: the stories usually aren’t very long, so they don’t wear out their welcome, and they usually feature punchy twists and plenty of surprises to keep the audience guessing. In the past, I’ve watched anthologies where the current tale failed to grab me, yet my anticipation for upcoming stories would pull me through the rough patches. No such luck in Chillerama: as each fetid tale unfolded, I was only left with the sinking suspicion that each subsequent short would only be worse than the preceding one. In a feeling that Dante could certainly understand, I had abandoned all hope after entering the miraculous world of Chillerama.

Here’s what we get with this lovely little anthology film: a wrap-around segment involving horny zombies fucking and eating everything that moves at a drive-in movie theater (Zom-B-Movie, directed by Joe Lynch); a take-off on ’50s monster movies featuring a sperm that grows to the size of a house (Wadzilla, directed by and starring Adam Rifkin); a parody of ’60s surf-flicks that equates homosexuality with lycanthoropy (I Was a Teenage Werebear, directed by Tim Sullivan); an intermingling of Anne Frank and Universal Studios (The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, directed by Adam Green); and a “hilarious” send-up of scat films (Deathication, directed by Joe Lynch under the “hilarious” pseudonym, Fernando Phagabeefy).

From a purely conceptual-level, there’s no reason Chillerama shouldn’t have worked. The capsule descriptions for each short promise, at the very least, that they’ll be anything but boring. On their own rights, each of the film’s writers/directors have plenty of individual merits: Rifkin wrote and directed the ’90s cult classics The Invisible Maniac (1990) and The Dark Backward (1991), before going on to make more mainstream films like Detroit Rock City (1999) and Night At the Golden Eagle (2001); Sullivan was involved with the low-budget ’80s cult classic The Deadly Spawn (1983) and went on to write/direct the effective chiller Driftwood (2006); Green is the creator of the Hatchet series, one of the more interesting, effective modern horror franchises, as well as the subtly effective Frozen (2010); and Lynch directed the long-delayed but well-reviewed Knights of Badassdom (2013). The film features appearances from such genre greats as Ray Wise, Lin Shaye, Eric Roberts, Kane Hodder, Richard Riehle and AJ Bowen. And, most importantly, each short only clocks in at about 20-odd minutes. With all of these factors involved, what are the chances that Chillerama ends up being utterly and completely worthless? Unfortunately, the chances end up being pretty damn good.

As already mentioned above, there are a nearly limitless range of issues that help to scuttle the film but if I had to pick out my personal reason for this massive trainwreck, I lay the blame fully at the feet of the film’s lowest-common denominator obsession with scatology in all of its wonderful forms. Despite any pretensions otherwise, the entire point of “Wadzilla” becomes the final bit where the colossal sperm is blown-up and proceeds to coat the entire city with about 10,000 gallons of jizz: if you really enjoy seeing actors getting doused with buckets of fake spooge, this will, undoubtedly, be your Citizen Kane (1941). Any salient points that “I Was a Teenage Werebear” makes regarding homophobia are obliterated by things such as the forced rape of a character via baseball bat and ridiculously sub-Troma gore effects. “The Diary of Anne Frankenstein” comes out head-and-shoulders above the others simply by virtue of featuring actual jokes: despite being a little rough around the edges, it’s virtually a masterpiece compared to the others. “Deathication” is a minutes-long goof that features truly nauseating depictions of scat-play (staged, I’m hoping) and was the only short I had to fast-forward through: I like shit in films to be off-screen, thanks very much, although I’ve always laughed at Spud’s little “accident” in Trainspotting (1996). The wrap-around story, “Zom-B-Movie,” gets a big kick out of equating pseudo-pornographic humping with extreme gore, delighting in moments like a zombie plucking out an eyeball and “servicing” the hole or a wife zombie ripping off and eating her husband zombie’s penis. This particular short’s only grain of ingenuity comes from the fact that the blood in the segment is depicted as neon-blue fluid, like the inside of a Glo-stick. To be honest, it’s a simple concept that’s light-years beyond anything else in the film, “Diary of Anne Frankenstein” notwithstanding.

Look, here’s the thing: I didn’t hate Chillerama because it was offensive, scatalogical and stupid…I hated the film because it was all of these things AND poorly-made, sloppy, lazy and mean-spirited. There are plenty of ultra-low budget horror films out there that try their hardest, despite their limitations: Chillerama ain’t one of ’em. At the very least, it looks like the cast were all having a great time, so that must count for something (poor Lin Shaye even appears in two separate shorts, bless her heart). Sprinkled throughout the film are little inklings of the production it could have been, had anyone involved cared to make anything more than a tasteless goof. More than anything, Chillerama strikes me as a classic case of wasted potential, not least since it completely squanders the first gay-themed anthology short that I’ve seen in, quite possibly, forever. I mean, c’mon: the damn film squanders Ray fuckin’ Wise, for god’s sake…how do they live with themselves?

Ultimately, I haven’t felt as let-down by a film as I have by Chillerama in quite some time. Even though I enjoy the individual filmmakers’ work, to a greater or lesser degree (I actually really like Green’s films, especially the vastly under-rated Frozen), this was nothing but a complete disappointment. If you’re so inclined, check out Green’s short, which manages to hit some nearly Mel Brooksian levels of absurdity, mostly thanks to a truly inspired performance by Joel David Moore as a very stupid Hitler. Other than that (relative) high-point, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to recommend Chillerama. If you want an intentionally bad movie, go watch Sharknado (2013): at least that has a totally wacked-out Tara Reid to recommend it…all Chillerama features are a bunch of bored jokesters playing chicken with the audience. My advice? Don’t take the bet.

1/24/14: Are We Supposed to Laugh Yet?

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Borat, cinema, Eric Wareheim, Film, hipsters, indie comedies, indie dramas, James Murphy, Jeffrey Jensen, LCD Soundsystem, Movies, Neil Hamburger, pretentious, Rick Alverson, Sacha Baron Cohen, satire, scatological conversations, self-satisfied, tedious, The Comedy, Tim Heidecker, unpleasant

Since things have been a little hectic for the past several days, last Friday was the last time (for a few days, at least) that I was able to cram several films into one day. This particular day, however, ended up being more miss than hit but just barely. I watched one extremely irritating film, one fantastic film and one very disappointing film. Since it turned out that I had more to say about The Comedy than I initially figured, I’ll go ahead and split this day into two: we’ll get to You’re Next and Curdled in the next installment.

As I’ve often found to be true, it’s entirely possible to detest the content of a film while still admiring the craft behind said film. This is certainly true of film’s with extremely disturbing content (Salo, most “torture porn” films) but the same can also be said of film’s that display a masterful touch with cinematography and style yet offer nothing whatsoever as far as content goes. These films, in other words, are the cinematic equivalents of Little Debbie snack cakes: bright, vibrant outsides filled with nauseating nothingness inside. Nowhere can I think of a film that better exemplifies this aesthetic than Rick Alverson’s The Comedy.

Before I begin to detail everything that I disliked about this film — and that’s no inconsequential list, might I add — let me take a moment to list the things that actually worked for me. Right off the bat, the film looks pretty great, at least as far as moody indie films go. The acting, when it can manage to stay away from endless litanies of debauched profanities (which it cannot do for any great length of time), isn’t bad. The trump card of having oddball comedians like Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim and Neil Hamburger (listed as Gregg Turkington in the credits) perform in the equivalent of a dour indie drama is interesting, at first, but wears its welcome out pretty quickly. Alverson has a tendency to use indie-instrumental music to set moods and, in scenes such the wordless bicycle ride through the city, it really works. I actually found the bicycle riding scene to be very atmospheric: I only wish that the filmmaker’s had followed that particular muse instead of the one that actually informed the picture: South Park.

You see, The Comedy isn’t so much a film, per se, as an extremely misguided attempt to call out that most mystical of modern beasts: the hipster. What, you may ask, is a hipster? Well, it seems to be a bit harder to define than a hippie, goth or metal-head, mostly because those sub-strata of society can (usually) be readily defined by either their attire or their choice of music. Hipsters, on the other hand, seem to be more defined by attitude: a slack, lackadaisical, ultra-sarcastic view of the world that allows for only ironic attachments, whether they be to entertainment, friends or political viewpoints: a hipster will hate Motley Crue but wear a Motley Crue t-shirt because it’s ironic. The hipster (at least as defined by what we see in The Comedy) is a PBR-swilling, smirking, self-satisfied putz, a rather repugnant creature that feels any subject (Hitler, rape, slavery, death) is ripe for hilarious satire. Because, you know, it’s all ironic, dude.

And that, essentially, is my huge problem with The Comedy. Under the guise of taking to task these odious individuals, Alverson has actually given them free rein to run amok for almost two hours. Here’s the exact format of the film, a formula that’s played out time and time again:

— Swanson (Heidecker), a rich, bored “hipster” and his equally bored friends Van Arma, Ben, Cargill and Bobby (played, respectively, by Wareheim, LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy, Jeffrey Jensen and Hamburger), hang out together, damn each other with faint praise (“I totally respect your friendship”…”You are so good at being you”), drink PBR, have disgustingly scatological conversations with each other (The low point? Either the bit about hobo cocks being super clean because stock brokers are constantly sucking them or the delightful bit about smearing shit on vaginas…take your pick.) and then go out into the public where they act like boorish assholes and, apparently, attempt to get themselves killed by as many offended people as possible. This is usually followed by a short, quiet scene where Swanson seems to reflect on his actions, only to have the whole cycle begin anew within moments. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Here’s the thing: cinematic history is filled with great films about absolutely loutish individuals. Hell, it’s filled with plenty of great films CREATED by loutish individuals. There’s a fine trick involved, however, with such depictions of obnoxious characters, a trick that outre filmmakers like Todd Solondz know only too well: you may depict any number of endless atrocities, you may say anything, you may go anywhere, as long as the audience understands that you don’t actually agree with these things.

And yes, that is a mighty slippery slope, since it really begins to edge around issues of creative control, intent, art vs pornography, etc. But here’s the other thing: the filmmakers who are the undisputed masters of this domain, people like Todd Solondz, Mel Brooks, Trey Parker/Matt Stone and John Waters, never allow the audience to lose sight of what’s wrong or right. They may depict racist, misogynistic, insane, unpleasant and downright bizarre individuals but there is always the sense that humanity is upheld. The truly evil individuals, in these particular universes, will always be known to us: the filmmakers may not always give them their just comeuppance but we, as an audience, can always see through the act. I don’t mean to say that bad characters in films always need to be punished: I do mean to say, however, that it should be very evident where the actual filmmakers stands on issues like racism, sexism, etc.

The Comedy, unlike something such as Blazing Saddles or Pink Flamingos, is a much more confused  affair. For the most part, there is no commentary on these boorish acts, mostly because everyone in the film (with very few exceptions and we’re talking perhaps five, total, if I’m pressed) are equally obnoxious. Swanson takes a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant and engages in verbal sparring with a comely waitress (played by Kate Lyn Sheil). His method of courtship? Graphic descriptions about how he’s a convicted rapist and will rape anything that moves, including her. The waitress, for her part, gives as good as she gets, indicating that she’s pretty okay with this line of discussion. We’re supposed to understand, of course, that Swanson is being super-duper ironic here: he’s saying the worst possible things he can think of, simply to provoke any kind of reaction in his stunted life. His technique, it must be said, is also successful: after some light rape talk at the restaurant, Swanson eventually takes the waitress back to his houseboat for some more “clever” repartee and some hanky-panky.

All fair and good. What, then, to make of the “hilarious” scene where Swanson goes into a predominately black bar and swaggers around, loudly asking, “Where your bitches at” because he “wants to fuck some black ass?” It couldn’t possibly be racist because no one, save the caddish Swanson, would actually do that, right? How about the priceless gag where Swanson pays a Middle Eastern cab driver $500 so he can drive his cab around and yell at innocent women like they were prostitutes for hire? Another fun bit of harassment involves Swanson planting himself in a chair by his dying father’s bedside and regaling the male nurse with delightful anecdotes about “prolapsed anuses” before launching into a clever routine involving the word in phrases such as “Anus and Andy” or “Famous Anus Cookies” (okay, full disclosure: I did laugh at Famous Anus Cookies but I’m pretty sure that was the 12-year-old in me).

And yes, of course, there is plenty of history for material like this. Hell, Sacha Baron Cohen turned these kind of interactions (in the real world, no less) into his entire career and the Jackass guys have been doing it for a while, too. We also have some pretty racist material in Blazing Saddles and South Park, some pretty awful sexual ickiness in Happiness and a horribly worthless schlub in The King of Comedy. The difference, as far as I can see it, has to do with the equal-opportunity scope of the other filmmakers, particularly Mel Brooks and Parker/Stone. Mel Brooks is famous for never meeting anything he wouldn’t make fun of in a film: religion, ethnicity, racism, sexism, social mores, incest, mental illness, nationalism…you name it, Brooks poked at it. You’d have to be pretty brain-dead, however, to mistake whether Brooks’ sympathies lay with Bart or Hedley Lamarr. Every edgy joke, reference and rim shot in the film is funneled towards one, explicit purpose: shining the cold light of truth under the rock and exposing racism as the ridiculous, self-defeating, self-cannibalizing disgrace that it’s always been. Similarly, South Park may seem to unleash quite a bit of scorn on Scientology but compare that to what they’re saying about Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, Islam and the like and it comes across as just another target bottle on the fence. Offensive? Sure. But equal-opportunity offensive rather than specifically targeted.

With The Comedy, however, I was never sure where my sympathies were supposed to lie. I’ll be honest: I’d already mentally checked out a few minutes into the film, as the first scene was a slo-mo fest of slobby, shirtless guys spraying PBR everywhere while dry humping each other. There was such an air of detached bemusement to the scene, almost as if Alverson were saying, “Aren’t these guys just too, too crazy?,” that I could almost smell the self-congratulation coming from the screen.

None of this, by the way, is to insinuate that either Alverson or any of the cast have any intentional purpose to salute this sort of behavior. I do believe, however, that everyone involved lacked the abilities to pull this kind of thing off gracefully, opening the door wide for just such an insinuation. The whole thing, to be honest, smacks of the “enlightened” individual who relishes telling racist and sexist jokes because they “outrage” him so much or the gore-hound who studiously tracks down every frame of questionable content for films that she has no intention of seeing, just to see how bad it really is.

By the time I got to stuff like Swanson arguing for the return of feudalism (because some people just need to serve other people), the relative merits of Hitler (if one could look past all of the murder and stuff) and the scene where the waitress has an epileptic fit (I guess) as Swanson is preparing to have sex with her, only for him to spend the next several minutes watching her convulse while sipping a drink…I had just given up. Any attempt to look for deeper meaning, any idea that Alverson would be pulling the rug from under my feet and doling out bottomless shame to these assholes, was defeated completely by an ending that seems to posit Swanson as a lost, confused soul. Really? Because he kind of came across like a pretentious, racist, privileged douchebag for the entirety of the film. I realized that the extent of Alverson’s commentary on the subject was confined to the title: it’s ironic because the movie isn’t actually a comedy but a drama, dude…get it?

Ultimately, I was left with more questions than answers by The Comedy: What, exactly, is a hipster and does it actually exist in any minds other than other “hipsters”? What the hell was James Murphy doing in this? (to his credit, Murphy often looks pretty ashamed of what’s going on around him but his glee in the church-scooting scene is pretty obvious) Is it possible to have a really good, dark drama populated entirely by comedians? Where is the line between satirizing frat-boy misbehavior and just depicting it wholesale?

Perhaps, in the end, the joke really is on me. The characters in the film are all in their mid-30s, just like me. Perhaps I’m supposed to identify with this in the same way that twenty-somethings identify with films like Ben Stiller’s The Secret of Walter Mitty or Spike Jonze’s Her. If so, the joke is still over my head. I couldn’t imagine doing anything with these people but repeatedly hitting them with a 2×4. When I watch The Comedy, all I see is a bunch of stunted man-babies acting like complete and total jackasses. If Alverson sees something more noteworthy or noble, I sure wish he’d point it out to me.