| 08 October 2009
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Claims that Curb Your Enthusiasm has jumped the shark have been circulating around the Internet from snarky bloggers since at least Season Five, when its ill-advised mortality plot thread saw Larry David die and receive a second chance at life.
Murmurs that the show had lost its luster continued into Season Six, when Larry’s wife Cheryl (Cheryl Hines) separated from him, severing some of the best chemistry on television. Larry’s relationship to new girlfriend Loretta Black (Vivica A. Fox) and her copious extended family introduced a great new character in Loretta’s brother Leon, but the new household dynamic lacked the witty interplay between Larry and Cheryl.
Judging by the first three episodes of Season Seven, you get the impression that David is regretting the dramatic decisions of the previous season, removing the Black family from the paradigm as quickly as possible and restoring the show to its provocative glory. The work in these three episodes is so inspired that you’ll be hard-pressed to find any rumors of shark-jumping this time around.
In the season’s debut, David takes aims at issues both quotidian and monumental. His character naturally finds great offense when a doctor helps himself to a soda from Larry’s refrigerator without asking, though it doesn’t stop him from hypocritically taking food from another stranger’s fridge later on.
But it’s the episode’s final moments -- showing Larry squirming uncomfortably at the thought of sacrificing his own freedom to care for his now cancer-stricken girlfriend -- that finds the already un-P.C. Curb reaching a controversial and comedic new high through its narcissistic antihero’s latest low. The implication is clear: Larry is going to dump Loretta so he can still play golf.
Sure enough, he finds a way out of his relationship one episode later, discovering a gold mine in a local doctor who believes obnoxious, self-serving and negative partners only worsen a cancer patient’s condition, physically as well as emotionally. Like a disgruntled employee who decides to do the worst job possible so he can wait to be fired -- rather than man up and quit -- Larry has found his out.
Of course, like any great Curb episode, there’s a lot of other stuff going on too, and it’s all magnificently orchestrated under David’s impeccable baton, everything converging under the lowbrow leitmotif teased in the episode’s title: “Vehicular Fellatio.” The act, or perceived act, of automotive oral-sex rears its head (is it even possible to avoid a pun here?) three times in the episode, destroying the relationship between friend Richard Lewis and his new girlfriend, damaging his new relationship to Loretta’s new oncologist and revealing Jeff and Susie Green (Jeff Garland and Susie Essman) to be hypocrites in the most embarrassing way.
In both episodes, there were small allusions regarding the season’s long-awaited bombshell, dropped in episode three: the Seinfeld reunion. In this, too, Larry’s actions are completely self-serving, corralling the principal leads of Seinfeld for a comeback show not for the entertainment of the show’s innumerable fans or to dust off some new comic chops but to offer a part to Cheryl, now an actress looking for work at NBC.
Simply titled “The Reunion,” Curb’s third episode finds Larry bringing the idea to Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards individually, causing minor faux pas with two of his former cast members and nearly upending the entire project when he curses out a chief NBC executive for offering him nosebleed --instead of courtside -- Lakers tickets.
Seinfeld uses his part to decry the very idea of reunion shows as saccharine, pandering and unnecessary, a self-reflexive implication that this unique spin on the comeback episode -- a reunion show about the making of a reunion show, how Seinfeldian indeed -- will break the maudlin mold. Alexander, meanwhile, uses his lunch meeting with Larry to suggest that maybe a tribute show could correct the lousy finale of the series, an episode which, more than any other, anticipates Curb Your Enthusiasm’s uncomfortable masochism.
Seinfeld, you’ll recall, had a rather self-flagellating culmination that took its quartet of self-absorbed Manhattanites to task for nine seasons of petty and passive cruelty -– after almost killing them all in a near plane crash. The same kind of conclusion might be assembled for David’s character when he finally retires Curb.
If the three two shows in Season Seven are any indication, the list of people for Larry to offend is far from complete. In fact, it might be getting more shockingly funny than ever.
John Thomason is a freelance writer based in South Florida.
Curb Your Enthusiasm airs at 9 p.m. Sundays on HBO.
| 07 October 2009
Gertrude Berg, creator of The Goldbergs.
Aviva Kempner can pinpoint the moment she chose to make a film about radio and television pioneer Gertrude Berg, whose radio and television show The Goldbergs was a precursor of so many sitcoms, from I Love Lucy to Seinfeld.
“I went to the Jewish Museum in New York, for an exhibit called Jews Entertaining America,” the 62-year-old documentary filmmaker recalls. “I walked in and there was a whole recreation of The Goldbergs’ living room. I decided on the spot that this had to be my next film.”
That film, Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, which opens locally Friday, comes after such well received non-fiction movies as Partisans of Vilna, on Jews who fought in the resistance against the Nazis, and The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, an eye-opening biography of the first Jewish baseball player in the major leagues. They form a thematically linked series of what she calls “under-known stories of Jewish heroes."
Berg, the winner of the very first best actress Emmy Award in 1950, is barely recalled by today’s younger generation, says Kempner, because “most of Gertrude’s episodes were on kinescopes and never syndicated, where Lucille Ball forged the use of videotape.”
In part because of Kempner’s film and in part because of video technology, awareness of Berg is about to take a quantum leap. “Well, let me tell you the good news,” she chirps. “I don’t know if it will be by Chanukah, but UCLA is putting a package together of the show on DVD, whatever they have and have negotiated for. And they’ll be including an excerpt of my film."
She has no doubt that a contemporary audience will be fascinated by these 50-year-old programs. “My theory is that a lot of people back then lived with families, spoke with accents. And it was really a show about how to get through tough times, through the Depression, through World War II, and it was a damn good show,” she enthuses. “And that she, Gertrude, despite the loss of her brother and her mother being mentally ill, she crafted such a wonderful mother character which was not something modeled on her own home."
But ask her if The Goldbergs were a new show today whether it would get on the air, and Kempner pauses. “You know what, I don’t think so,” she says. “If you look at shows and movies of the past 10, 20 years, from Woody Allen on, the Jewish mother is an object of ridicule or caricature.”
She reconsiders the question and adds, “I think she might be able to get a show now, but I am sure we need one.”
Filmmaker Aviva Kempner.
Of all the things in her film, Kempner takes particular pride in the inclusion of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, talking about the influence that The Goldbergs had on her. How in the world did she persuade her to do it?
“I live in Washington. I get invited to the French Embassy a lot, and there she was,” says Kempner, relishing the story. “So I went up to her and I said, ‘I made The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg.’ And she started smiling, so I thought, ‘God, I’m going to get to second base.’
“So then I said, ‘Now I’m doing Molly Goldberg’ and she really smiled. I thought, ‘Home run.’ She was very good about my filming her. I said to her, ‘I made a film about Greenberg, now Goldberg, Maybe I should do Ginsburg. It would be like a law firm.’ So she loved that."
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg is expanding slowly across the country and Kempner, who has still not paid for all the kinescope rights and laboratory bills, has been traveling the country with it as it opens in new markets.
“And like Hank, people are just loving it and kvelling,” she says. “They walk out and either of two things are said. One, thank you for bringing me back to a period I loved when I watched this with my family. And two, I had no idea about this woman. She really was the Oprah of her day.”
Like the old Levy’s Rye Bread ads, Kempner feels strongly that you do not have to be Jewish to enjoy Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg. But it helps.
“I think for American Jews, it’s so much a preview of what they were going through in the ‘30s, the ‘40s and ‘50s. I think it’s the most positive depiction of Jewish characters you’ve ever seen on the screen.”
| 02 October 2009
The hip-hop seniors of Gotta Dance.
The movies generally ignore the population over 55, unless it is to poke fun at the old geezers. But with so many Baby Boomers approaching that age range, they have become a subject of considerable fascination and, perhaps, box office.
The latest documentary on this senior subculture, opening in Palm Beach today, is called Gotta Dance, the lighthearted tale of a group of fish out of water, 60+ agers vying to be chosen for a new dance group formed to entertain the NBA’s New Jersey Nets fans at halftime with hip-hop routines. While there is no direct link between this movie and last year’s Young@Heart, about a senior chorus that sings heavy metal hits, comparisons are inevitable.
Young@Heart had a more dramatic bent, as its chorus members began flirting with mortality as they neared a crucial concert. Gotta Dance -- first seen locally at the Palm Beach International Film Festival -- does not have a similar emotional tug, but it is nevertheless well shot and assembled by director Dori Berinstein (ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway) and contains an ingratiating cast of characters worth rooting for.
The group, dubbed the NETSational Seniors, is chosen after endearingly nerve-wracking auditions, not unlike those in A Chorus Line, except the competitors are strictly amateurs who are completely at sea in the ocean of hip-hop. Still, without too much trauma, 12 women and one courageous guy -- the only male who auditioned -- are chosen and molded into a genial, progressively less awkward dance troupe.
Berinstein tries to generate some suspense over the NETSations’ ability to execute these homeboy moves, particularly in front of a crowd of 19,000 in the Meadowlands Arena. But they are an instant hit with the sports fans in their debut performance and Gotta Dance peaks a bit early.
After their initial triumph, they go on a media blitz of television morning shows, become minor celebrities in print and, briefly, let the attention go to their heads. Still, it is hard not to like, if not relate, to these folks, either current or retired teachers, secretaries, city workers and a few medical professionals. Two of the oldest members of the group, Marge, 83, and Fanny, 81, are grandmothers of Nets cheerleaders who double as the group’s choreographers.
At 95 minutes, Gotta Dance feels a bit overlong, but the appeal of its dancers does not flag.
GOTTA DANCE. Studio: Dramatic Forces; Director: Dori Berinstein; Not rated. Continues through Sunday at Cinema Paradiso, Fort Lauderdale; opening today at Delray Square 18, Delray Square, and Movies of Delray, in Delray Beach; Shadowood 16 in Boca Raton; and Movies of Lake Worth 6 in Lake Worth.
| 23 September 2009
Ursula Werner and Horst Westphal in Cloud 9.
Even as statistic after statistic shows that senior citizens fornicate just about as much as the rest of us, showing sex among elders remains taboo in American film and TV.
If not found under the “educational” auspices of HBO’s Real Sex, senior citizen flesh is usually only depicted in sophomoric comedies for cheap laughs (recall the hospital scene in The Hangover or Andy Griffith’s embarrassing orgasm-face in Play the Game).
Then again, it’s only natural for movie executives to succumb to the knee-jerk “eww” factor in approaching senior sex; it’s not clear the public wants to see it. Sex among old people has been stigmatized by a generation of people who like to think their parents only had sex one time – the day of their conception – and certainly not afterwards. Thinking of 50-year-olds doing dirty deeds is bad enough, but the inhabitants of retirement communities? Why, that’s just wrong.
Countries more mature than this one have gotten past both the prudish censorship hurdles and societal stigmas, if indeed there ever were any. Look at Britain’s The Mother, for instance, or, most recently, German director Andreas Dresen’s Cloud 9.
The film, which opens Friday at the Lake Worth Playhouse, is about an older woman who is cheating on her husband of 30 years with a virile, young 76-year-old stud. Within five minutes, we see seniors tear off each other’s clothes with adolescent fervor, and the sex is presented matter-of-factly, like everything else in this severe chamber drama. In its honesty and veracity, it’s even physically arousing.
But these moments, however much they shatter preconceptions about senior sex in mainstream cinema, belie an otherwise routine melodrama with messages that hardly resonate beyond grass-is-greener clichés.
You’ve seen this story before: Inge (Ursula Werner) leaves her caring and sweet, but boring and predictable, husband Werner (Horst Rehberg) for a new and exciting beau named Karl (Horst Westphal). Like many a poor sap who’s gotten the shaft in many a familiar love triangle, Werner is presented as a fine and devoted husband, the perfect companion to grow old with. Problem is, Inge has already grown old with him, and when she stumbles upon someone new, she finds both liberation and sexual fulfillment through infidelity.
The sex she shares with Werner is passionless missionary doldrums; with Karl, she tries everything, revitalizing old areas of stimulation. Her forbidden life with Karl is skinny-dipping in tranquil lakes; her mandated life with Werner is complaining that he dropped his cigarette ashes in the bowl with the pretzel sticks.
Adopting the rigid Scandinavian minimalism of Scenes From a Marriage and the Dogma 95 movement, Dresen’s aesthetic uses no music but gains powerful traction from incidental noises on the soundtrack, like the metronomic drip of percolating coffee and the piercing chime of a ringtone. The latter effect signals a pointlessly bleak coda that somewhat exploitively tries to turn a garden-variety tale into a morality-laden tragedy.
Dresen runs into a double-edged sword here: By turning these senior citizens’ dilemmas into a traditional formula, it renders their problems universal, thus making us forget the novelty of their ages. Which is great, except that the novelty is what makes Cloud 9 so unique. It’s less a film about a senior citizen lighting her sexual fire anew as it another infidelity story.
There are elements of sexual frankness and cinematic purity in Cloud 9 that we could certainly use more of; too bad they’re housed in a plot that’s old enough for retirement.
[This review has been updated to correct a factual error.]
John Thomason is a freelance writer based in South Florida.
CLOUD 9 (WOLKE NEUN). Director: Andreas Dresen; Cast: Ursula Werner, Horst Rehberg, Horst Westphal; Distributor: Music Box Films; Rating: Not rated; In German with English subtitles; Opens: Friday, Lake Worth Playhouse; opens Saturday, Cinema Paradiso, Fort Lauderdale
| 17 September 2009
Matt Damon in The Informant!
Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh is like a box of chocolates. You’re never sure what you are going to get. His recent releases -- the epic political biography Che and the low-budget independent art film on the world of call girls, The Girlfriend Experience -- have virtually nothing in common with his newest film, The Informant!, a jaunty comedy about a real-life corporate whistle-blower starring his Ocean’s Eleven (and …Twelve and …Thirteen) cast member, Matt Damon.
With its opening titles that wink at us while declaring the movie’s fidelity to fact and the sitcom-like bounce of the Marvin Hamlisch musical soundtrack, The Informant! all but insists that it is nothing to be taken seriously. Although its plot is not too far off from Soderbergh’s earlier, earnest Erin Brockovich, the breezy tone of The Informant! is far more reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s fable of lighthearted larceny, Catch Me If You Can.
Instead of an impostor, it concerns a duplicitous biochemist for Archer Daniels Midland, the agribusiness conglomerate which specializes in corn syrup derivatives, food additives and price-fixing. As Mark Whitacre, the longtime executive who goes undercover to gain evidence against the company for the FBI, Damon is blithely nerdy. Having added 30 pounds, a fake-looking mustache and a cheesy hairpiece, he brings the suave James Bond to no one’s mind except his own.
When Whitacre agrees to become a double agent for the feds, strapping on a wire to obtain the aural evidence of collusion, he is suddenly excited by the idea of becoming a government hero and do-gooder. In addition, he is so far out of touch with reality he sees himself succeeding to the top ranks of the company once his corrupt superiors are hauled off to jail.
The only problem is Whitacre is not that bright, and he blunders his way through many an electronic eavesdropping situation that he bungles. Or maybe he is far smarter than any observer would ever give him credit for, because we eventually learn that he has been siphoning off millions of dollars along the way.
The book that all of this is based upon is deadly serious in tone, but Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns have turned it into a goofy comedy. The voiceover narration by the Whitacre character is laced with nutty irony and the mere fact that all of this could have actually happened becomes a darkly wry statement of how screwed up the corporate landscape -- and the federal justice system -- really are.
Standouts in the cast are Scott Bakula as Whitacre’s increasingly incredulous FBI contact and Melanie Lynskey as his puzzled, but loyal wife. Still, the crucial performance that makes the whole movie work as well as it does comes from Damon. Though he fancies himself an Ian Fleming secret agent, his lumbering gait and one-beat-too-slow verbal delivery puts the lie to that image. He makes us identify with him, picturing ourselves in such a quandary and rooting for his unlikely extrication from the enveloping net around him.
All of these filmmaking choices are risky, and the movie has its share of misfires and miscalculations. But we have seen the straight dramatic version of stories along these lines, so another would likely be redundant. The Informant! is an odd, often unbalanced, minor film, but brash and surprisingly entertaining.
THE INFORMANT! Studio: Warner Bros.; Director: Steven Soderbergh; Starring: Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Melanie Lynskey. Rated: R. Opens: Friday, at most commercial venues
