October Sky

Year 11, Day 201 - 7/20/19 - Movie #3,298

BEFORE: Well, after all the back and forth and hemming and hawing, and internal debate over whether to add this film or subtract that one, and after watching "First Man" and "Apollo 11" essentially a month early, look what happened.  A film about rocketry ended up on the date that's the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.  This was not intentional - this film was long planned to be my return to fiction after Documentary Month, even when I had the WRONG lead-in for it, a film that didn't connect to it at all.  After fixing the lead-out, this happens, another huge coincidence.  Sure, it would have been better for a film about Apollo 11 to land here, but as I said before, I wanted to get out ahead of the curve - I watched those films early and still I'm sort of on the same subject today.  Sort of.  

I've also been calling this weekend "Stay at Home Comic-Con" weekend, a jokey term I'm borrowing from my BFF Andy, who coined it.  Things are happening in San Diego, announcements are being made, "Star Wars" actors are signing autographs (probably) and I'm not there.  It still feels weird, because I used to organize my whole summer around that trip, I had a pattern of restaurants that I liked to check in with, I had a nice little routine going for 15 years, and the ride's over.  I didn't work at a Comic-Con at all last year, but I will work at NY Comic-Con this October.  So the stress dreams will be back before long - it just wasn't profitable for my company to keep making the trek to California, so now I'm at home, watching parts of it on TV and just relaxing this weekend, it's too hot to even go outside. 

So, lots of geek-related activities planned, I suppose I kicked it off with that film about Steve Jobs, and now I'm on rocketry, and two more geek-centric movies will round out the weekend.  Again, not planned, but I do watch so much geeky stuff that this isn't much of a coincidence, really.  I finished watching both "Good Omens" and "Stranger Things" Season 3 this week, for example.  Now I should probably move on to "Legion" or something similar.  

Laura Dern carries over from "Trespassing Bergman".

THE PLOT: The true story of Homer Hickham, a coal miner's son who was inspired by the first Sputnik launch to take up rocketry, against his father's wishes. 

AFTER: Rocketry was still a very geeky thing when I was growing up - like I didn't launch rockets in my backyard, but I think I knew people who did.  There were kits that people could order from catalogs, and teen boys spent a lot of time building them and launching them.  But why?  We had giant rockets that took astronauts into orbit or to the moon, what possible purpose could the little ones serve, ones that only go up a few hundred feet before falling back to earth?  I just didn't get it.  It's like when you play with Matchbox cars because you're not old enough to own the real thing, I guess, but to me the little ones are always going to pale by comparison to the big ones.  Maybe some things never really go out of style, like people still ride horses even though we have cars, and some people still pay their bills by check even though we have electronic banking.  

But it's important to remember that this film is set in October 1957, when the U.S. didn't HAVE the big rockets, at least not as far as the populace in West Virginia knew - so four high-schoolers setting off rockets out in the middle of nowhere might have been a really big deal.  NASA wasn't even established until 1958 - so also, a Russian satellite passing over the U.S. was also a really big deal.  What was Sputnik doing?  Was it spying on Americans?  Transmitting secret codes to Soviet operatives?  If only a bunch of misfits teens could set off their own rockets, though honestly I fail to see how that's going to compete with Sputnik - really, the line between here and there seems very ill-defined.  The best they're going to be able to do is make rockets that don't expode on ignition, and even then, they're going to go up in an arc and then come back down.  Big whoop, if I'm being honest.   

I realize that I'm blasé about the whole thing because I stand on the shoulders of giants, but I took physics in high school just to fulfill the science requirement, I wasn't genuinely all that interested in it.  By then I'd set my sights on somehow getting into movie-making and didn't really see the need to keep up with science.  But I took an astronomy course at NYU, which fulfilled a math requirement for my diploma - I finally learned the names of most of the constellations and learned the formulas necessary to observe how the sun and moon appear to travel through the sky.  That's about as far as I got in the world of aeronautics, except for visiting the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum as a kid and the Johnson Space Center in Houston last year.  And the three best things about going to the Johnson Center were getting to see the Apollo 11 Mission Control, getting a peek at the Orion capsule that may take humans to Mars someday, and having a BBQ chicken sandwich in the visitors' cafeteria.  But these were my preferences, your mileage may vary.  

Rockets this small are kind of like fireworks - I was enamored of them when I was a kid, but I grew out of it.  Fireworks don't really impress me much, unless they make cool shapes when they explode, otherwise, it's the same old shit - I fast-forwarded through the Macy's Fireworks on July 4 just to see what music cues they were using, and honestly, that seemed like the same playlist as last year.  How about keeping it current?  But then, if they did, I'd probably complain about how the music was geared toward the kids and not old fogeys like me.  Same deal for rocketry and space exploration - we're going to go back to the moon?  Ho hum, we've done that already.  Oh, wait, we're going to Mars?  That seems a bit too extreme, it's too far, I can't comprehend it.  I'm just never going to be satisfied, it seems, so let me withdraw from the conversation.  

Like, they're running "Apollo 11" again tonight on CNN, and my first thought is, "Oh great, another rerun..."  I'm a terrible person.  

I do like anagrams, though - so a movie titled "October Sky" that's based on a book titled "Rocket Boys", I find that somewhat interesting, but really, that's a limited appeal aimed at a niche market.  What does that say about me, that I think that's more fascinating than the story itself?  

NITPICK POINT #1: As a tangent to my point above, about why do people still ride horses and launch tiny rockets - why are we still freakin' using COAL?  Admittedly, if Homer Hickham had created a coal-based rocket, which I think was a natural fit considering where he grew up, that could have made things a lot more interesting.  But he didn't, did he?  Because rockets need liquid or gas fuel, because that's so much more efficient.  And now we have natural gas, hydro-power, wind and solar - as Al Gore mansplained, there's enough solar energy hitting the Earth every HOUR to give humans all the power we need for a YEAR.  So again, why continue mining coal?  It's not "clean", no matter what the President says, and any city or town that's built its economy around a coal mine is doomed to fail, sooner or later.  It's a good idea to change horses before the one you're on drops dead, not after. 

NITPICK POINT #2: I can see why someone stole the rocket nozzle from Homer's science fair project, because clearly someone wanted to prevent him from winning, but who would steal his autographed photo of Werner Von Braun.  Who else would even want that?  George Carlin used to joke that when some people misplace things, they automatically assume that somebody stole them - "Hey, who stole my collection of used Band-Aids?"  So isn't it more likely that Homer just lost this somehow?  

NITPICK POINT #3: It's a little odd that the miners would go on strike after the mining company declared that the mine was running out of coal.  This seems like an unrealistic depiction of actual events, because if there was a chance that the mine would be shutting down soon, that would be the WORST time for the miners to strike.  Realistically, this could cause the mining company to just shut it down a little earlier as planned, so logically this plot point doesn't really work, except that it creates the necessary dramatic tension to make it a big deal when Homer's father settles the strike, just to help him out with his science project.  And if the town was really behind Homer as claimed, what would be so wrong with someone using the machine shop during the strike, just to create a new nozzle?  It's not like that would be the equivalent of crossing the picket line, and the striking miners wouldn't even have to know about it, so it seems like an extreme solution to a simple problem.  

NITPICK POINT #4: They tried to pull a Kubrick-like "2001" transition at the end, by cutting between the Rocket Boys' final launch and the modern space shuttle.  But I'm just not sold on the implication, that there's a direct line from one to the other.  The U.S. space program consisted of many people, many projects, and I think implying that we might not have gotten where we are without a few boys in West Virginia setting off rockets feels like a grave injustice.  Or at least a giant over-simplification - but this movie seems to be full of them.  (Homer can study rocket science or work in the mines - there are simply no other alternatives, it seems.)

Also starring Jake Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Proof"), Chris Cooper (last seen in "Breach"), Chris Owen (last seen in "Ready to Rumble"), William Lee Scott (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Chad Lindberg (last seen in "City of Angels"), Natalie Canerday (last seen in "Biloxi Blues"), Chris Ellis (last seen in "Love Liza"), Elya Baskin (last seen in "Angels & Demons"), Scott Thomas, David Dwyer (last seen in "A Simple Twist of Fate"), Courtney Cole-Fendley, Terry Loughlin, Kalli Hollister, Mark Jeffrey Miller, David Copeland, Joey DiGaetano, Andy Stahl.

RATING: 4 out of 10 railroad spikes

Trespassing Bergman

Year 11, Day 200 - 7/19/19 - Movie #3,297

BEFORE: So, this is the way that Documentary Month ends - not with a bang, or a whimper, but with sort of a "WTF was I thinking when I scheduled this one?".  Because in all honesty, I've never seen a film by Ingmar Bergman.  So why would I focus on a film ABOUT his films?

Well, honestly, it started off as a linking thing.  I had to have an outro from the "Life Itself", the doc about Roger Ebert, and the cast list on IMDB was very small, but I did note that they interviewed Martin Scorsese for that film.  Had I known how much archive footage was in "Life Itself", things might have been different - but Scorsese's one of those people who gets interviewed a lot for docs, people respect what he has to say about film-related things, or maybe he's got a very popular style when it comes to answering questions, I don't know.  But my experience last year with the rock music docs showed me that the same people keep getting interviewed, again and again.

At the same time, I had a list of about 50 or 60 documentaries I might be interested in seeing, and I figured I'd let the linking decide which ones were in this year, and which ones were out.  I had a solid 28 or 29 docs that all linked together, but I found that no matter how I organized them, they couldn't connect into a perfect chain, there was always a gap.  So, I looked for a way to close the gap - one one end I had the Alex Gibney films like "Going Clear" (which has, like a couple of celebs in it) and the Steve Jobs one, which had a bunch of tech people in it, plus Ridley Scott (again, this was before I watched the doc myself, and realized there's archive footage in there of news reporters, plus famous people like Jim Henson, John Lennon and Martin Luther King in Apple's famous "Think Different" commercial".)

So, working with what I had, I found "Trespassing Bergman", which formed a neat connection that closed the gap, since both Scorsese and Ridley Scott were interview subjects in it.  I didn't think much more about it until I realized that my connection back to fiction film was a false one, and if things stayed the way they were, I wasn't going to be able to link out of Documentary Month (from the film "Life, Animated", which was scheduled last).  OK, time to re-organize.  With three weeks left before the upcoming break in the chain, I re-ordered the SAME 20 films left in Documentary Month, and found that it took me exactly where I wanted to go - so "Trespassing Bergman" suddenly became a crucial link, since an actress interviewed here will appear in tomorrow's fiction film, which was ALWAYS on the schedule for that day.  So I created a new path to get to exactly the same place, in exactly the same number of days.  I can't even calculate if that's as unlikely as it sounds.

Now, I can justify including this, even though I know almost nothing about Bergman.  I would LIKE to know more about Bergman - the fact that I haven't seen any of his films is a shameful thing for a film person to come out and admit.  I don't have any free slots this year, but maybe next year I can watch some films - maybe this documentary will give me some clues about where to start, and which films to focus on, which ones to avoid.  Maybe this can be some kind of primer, and I'll keep my eye on the TCM schedule to see if they're planning to run "The Seventh Seal" or "Wild Strawberries" this fall or winter.  Probably, right?

Also, I've got a number of films that ARE on my schedule about the filmmaking process, like that film about Kubrick's assistant, "Filmworker", and then there's "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead", which is about Orson Welles making "The Other Side of the Wind", which I'm hoping to watch next year.  So this, theoretically, should thematically fit in somewhere between "Life Itself" and those films.  So this is not the end of documentary watching, not even for this year - I'm using two more docs as critical links in August and September.  It's just the end of the doc chain for now - but I really feel the need to get back to something fictional.

Ridley Scott carries over from "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine", where he was seen in archive footage directing the famous Apple Macintosh "1984" commercial.

THE PLOT: A group of filmmakers visit Ingmar Bergman's house on the remote island of Faro to discuss his legacy.

AFTER: OK, one more shameful thing I've got to admit, as a film person - I never understood what the connection was between INGMAR Bergman and INGRID Bergman.  I just figured that there was one, like they were ex-spouses or brother and sister or something, and I never took the time to look into it. Turns out that they are NOT related - however, the actress, Ingrid Berman, did appear in at least one of director Ingmar Bergman's film, late in his career.  Also, the director was married five times, and one of his wives was born Ingrid Karlebo, later she was called Ingrid von Rosen after marrying her first husband.  While she was married to Ingmar she used the name Ingrid Bergman, but she wasn't the SAME Ingrid Bergman who was in "Casablanca", "Spellbound" and "Notorious".  All clear?  There just aren't a lot of Swedish names, I guess, so they've got to keep repeating them.

Now, that's out of the way, I really lucked out here, because this film took the time to explain what the deal was with each famous Bergman film before the interviewees talked about it.  I really appreciate that - so if you're a Bergman newbie like me, it's perfectly OK to proceed with watching this doc - it was even FREE for me since we have Amazon Prime.  (I've got to remember to keep checking that each time, before I drop a couple bucks on iTunes or YouTube...)  That said, I think I can now narrow down the field of Bergman films, and come up with a smaller and safer playlist for next year - I've got to get to "The Seventh Seal", that's an absolute must, and then "Wild Strawberries" has such a stellar reputation, I think maybe I can skip ahead to "Persona" and then "Cries & Whispers" before hitting "Scenes from a Marriage" and end with "Fanny & Alexander".  I'll consider "A Little Night Music" and "Autumn Sonata", we'll have to see how it goes.  Or maybe I should just say "In for a penny, in for a pound" and watch the whole lot.

The problem here is that films are subjective.  There's no clear consensus in "Trespassing Bergman", even among famous directors who are very familiar with all of his films.  Was "The Seventh Seal" a masterpiece, or is it so full of serious religious metaphor that it's nearly laughable by today's standards?  Woody Allen seems to think it helps greatly if you study philosophy first, especially German existentialism.  Umm, no thanks, I had a German grandmother, so I'm full up.  And then when Bergman got to make "Fanny & Alexander", some believe that it's his masterpiece, the capper of a long and fulfilling career, while others maintain that he was essentially coasting by 1982.  Agh, this is maddening, because films are a mirror, and we often see what we want to see IN them, even if that represents an intent that the filmmaker didn't have.

So, therefore, by extension, we learn more about the filmmakers interviewed ABOUT Bergman here than we do about Bergman himself.  Right?  Allen and Coppola hold him in high regard, of course, while other filmmakers that were invited to his island hideaway on Faro spend their time going through his library of books or his video collection.  Hey, here's a copy of "Die Hard"!  And Bergman owned a copy of the soft-core film "Emmanuelle" - no shocker there, I suppose.  Others try to decipher the calendar code he kept on a whiteboard, wondering why he crossed out the year 1995 or what all the hearts meant on certain days.  (Maybe an outline heart was a day he had sex, and a filled-in heart meant that a woman was involved...)

Some filmmakers couldn't make the trip to Sweden to visit Bergman's house, or perhaps maybe they invited only the most ardent of Bergman fans to do that.  When I read the description of this film, I assumed it was going to be some kind of round-table discussion featuring all the directors chatting with each other, like at a Bergman convention or something, but no, it's all one-on-one interviews, that probably had more to do with everybody being busy and not all available at the same time.  So John Landis got to be enamored with the gorgeous sunsets one can see from Faro Island, but Scorsese was interviewed in what looked like the world's smallest movie theater.  Perhaps his own personal screening room?  I couldn't help but notice that they interviewed Wes Anderson in his own apartment in Paris (?) and it looked about how you'd expect Wes Anderson's apartment to look - there was a brown couch that had two symmetrically-placed light fixtures over it, and they framed the couch (mostly) symmetrically - so it looked like a shot from one of his movies.  Was that an inside joke?

I think the takeaway here is that no matter who you are, no matter how famous you become, when you die your family and friends are still going to have to decide what to do with your stuff.  And you'll probably be judged by whatever it is you collected, whether that's movies or books or human heads.  The top level of fame probably occurs when you pass away and your furniture and libraries are preserved as they are, rather than sold off.  Looks like Bergman and I were sort of on the same wavelength - he reportedly also watched at least one movie a day, often up to three per day.  OK, but how was he at linking films together by actor?

Also starring Tomas Alfredson, Woody Allen (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Wes Anderson, Harriet Andersson, Pernilla August, Francis Ford Coppola, Wes Craven, Robert De Niro (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Holly Hunter (ditto), Martin Scorsese (ditto), Claire Denis, Laura Dern (last seen in "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio"), Daniel Espinosa, Michael Haneke, Alejandro Inarritu, Takeshi Kitano, John Landis (last seen in "Leaving Neverland"), Ang Lee, Mona Malm, Lena Olin (last seen in "Hollywood Homicide"), Alexander Payne, Isabella Rossellini (last seen in "Life Itself"), Thomas Vinterberg, Lars von Trier, Yimou Zhang, with archive footage of Ingmar Bergman, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Bergman (last seen in "Indiscreet"), Bengt Ekerot, Sven Nykvist, Max von Sydow (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens"), Liv Ullmann (last seen in "A Bridge Too Far")

RATING: 4 out of 10 bouts of depression

Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine

Year 11, Day 199 - 7/18/19 - Movie #3,296

BEFORE: Well, I finished watching "Good Omens" on Amazon Prime, and I can't say enough good things about it.  It's everything that an adaptation of a Neil Gaiman (with Terry Pratchett) novel should be, and SO much better than "American Gods" on Starz, which is already two seasons longer than it should be, and there's no end in sight.  "Good Omens" was 6 episodes, boom, done, that's exactly as long as it should have been, since it's basically a short novelette, so they kept it moving right along.  I'd vote for a Season 2 if they could extend the characters beyond the book, but there's really no need.  Now I've moved on to "Stranger Things" Season 3, two episodes per night, and I'm already half done.  They try to make each season a little different, but it's really the same shit as season 1, for the third time now.  The best thing I can say about it is that it's feeding my need for fiction, and should get me through the last few waning days of Documentary Month.

Do I NEED to watch another movie about Steve Jobs, after having seen both of the fictionalized versions of his life?  Well, perhaps - I think both of those movies had some serious narrative flaws, like the one that only focused on five days out of his entire life.  I guess that's maybe an intriguing way to tell a story, but the chances of leaving out some of the better moments are just too great, right?  Like, are we going to ignore 99% of the days of his life, or are we going to just move important moments and interactions on to those days, just to be on the safe side?  I think that was playing a bit fast and loose with the rules - not that documentaries are incapable of doing that, but they have a different way of presenting the facts, one that might be a bit more straight-forward.

Here's hoping.  

The voice of director and interviewer Alex Gibney carries over from "Going Clear".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Jobs" (Movie #2,092), "Steve Jobs" (Movie #2,729)

THE PLOT: A look at the personal and private life of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

AFTER: In honor of Steve Jobs, I'm wearing a fresh pair of New Balance sneakers - my BFF Andy noticed that I favor that brand and mentioned to me once that it was Job's sneaker of choice also.  (Sorry, but my black turtleneck is in the wash today.)  But I was due for a new pair, anyway - I remember I was always in the habit of buying new sneakers a few days before going to San Diego for Comic-Con, because that trip always involved so much walking around - and I needed to give myself a few days to break them in and get the proper arch supports.

Now I see my organizational mistake - I should have dropped in "The Inventor" between "Going Clear" and this film - but I didn't know for sure that Alex Gibney could be heard in that documentary, he wasn't listed in the IMDB, so I had to make the connection through Errol Morris instead.  But "The Inventor" would have worked quite well thematically between "Going Clear" and "Man in the Machine", by all accounts Elizabeth Holmes admired Steve Jobs, modeled herself after Jobs, dressed like Steve Jobs, but there was probably also a little bit of David Miscavige in her.  Plus I really should have paid more attention to the directing credits and put all the Alex Gibney films in a row, boom boom boom.  (But even that wouldn't have done the trick, because he also directed "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room".)  Hell, the scheduling is never going to be perfect, I should just learn to accept that.

But as it is, with the Scientology film abutting the Apple Computers film, I'm forced now to acknowledge the similarities between the two organizations.  Both had humble beginnings, and were pitched as the "alternative" to mainstream religion and computing (I guess the Catholic Church and IBM are analogous here?) and each relied heavily on the imagination of one man (Hubbard = Jobs) and now the organizations have to continue moving forward without their leaders and original driving forces.  Plus, both organizations are fully (or nearly) tax-exempt, thanks to Scientology's status as a "religion" and in Apple's case, creating offshore holding companies in Ireland to shuffle all their profits to, thus avoiding most U.S. tax laws.

But that would mean that Apple is some kind of cult, right?  Hmm, maybe there's something to this notion, with a bunch of ardent followers who swear by their products, right or wrong, and have adopted a mindset where they're forced to cut themselves off from friends or family members who practice a different religion, or use PC's.  Then there's the indoctrination methods (your iPhone is free if you sign up for a 3-year calling plan...) and being forced to endure abuse from the cult leaders (standing in long lines to buy the new phones, constantly needing to upgrade hardware and software...).  Yeah, I think I'm going to stick with this analogy, despite using only Mac computers myself and owning an iPhone (it's an iPhone 6, I'm refusing all attempts to get me to upgrade).  So even though I'm IN the cult, I'm still trying to see it for what it is.

And for a long time, it was a cult of personality, centered on Jobs.  Remember that when he left Apple, suddenly they weren't innovating any more and financially, they were in the dumps?  Then he came back to Apple (as interim CEO, after their acquisition of NeXT) and suddenly they were pumping out the iMacs and the company was back from the dead?  And then before you knew it, everybody had an iPod or an iPad or an iPhone?  I was good for two out of three there, but then when it came time to join the iCloud revolution, I said "No way."  I'm not storing my stuff where everybody else can hack in and access it, that's what got Pee-Wee Herman in trouble.  If you want to know about me, read my blog and my Twitter feed like everyone else.

We still can't quite fathom why Steve Jobs denied having a daughter for so long - the hint here is that it had something to do with the ownership of the company, perhaps, that it somehow would interfere with the image of a single guy working around the clock for his company, that he couldn't even have the appearance of being tied down because then the shareholders might feel that his priorities were focused on family and not the company, or something like that.  Otherwise it's hard to understand why someone who was given up for adoption as a child would be so willing to not be there for his own daughter.  Or maybe it's not, it's all very foggy and still hard to discern what his motives were.  But the reporter who found out that he had a daughter who shared a name with Job's first stab at a home personal computer is still treated as the bad guy for breaking the news in the first place.  Hey, if you don't want people poking their noses into your personal business, maybe don't give the computer your daughter's name.  Or maybe don't invent something that will connect everyone and make it possible for people to hack your personal data, just sayin'.

A bigger scandal over the years was probably Job's ongoing health issues - it turns out that when you're the CEO of a large corporation, you have some kind of responsibility to stay healthy, and if not, then to at least apprise the board and the shareholders of the state of your health.  Jobs first had pancreatic cancer in 2003, but did not announce it to his company until mid-2004.  Reportedly he spent nine months pursuing "alternative medicine", yet he had the type of cancer that was treatable and curable.  Whether the pursuit of herbal remedies, a vegan diet and psychic treatments as a cure for cancer constitutes desperation or a form of suicide is for each person to determine.  But he finally had the tumor removed by surgery in July 2004.  Questions about his health persisted until he had a liver transplant in 2009. Though he returned to work after that, 18 months later he was back on medical leave.

It's still a bit hard to get a handle on Steve Jobs, a man credited with the "invention" of so many Apple products, though he wasn't an engineer or even a designer, he was essentially a marketer.  Yet his name is on so many patents, it seems he was keenly involved in every aspect of the invention and design, unless that's all "in name only".  Someone who believed in the philosophies of Zen Buddhism, yet persistently parked his car in the handicapped spaces in the Apple parking lot.  Someone who was loved, adored by Apple's consumers, yet all of his co-workers and friends admit here that he was an enormous dick with a hair-trigger temper.  Is that accurate?

Alex Gibney sounds a LOT like Michael Moore in the last third of this film - you know how Moore tries to sum things up at the end of each film, regardless of the subject matter, with one of those "What's it all about?" diatribes?  Like, "Well, I guess this means our kids will have to start wearing body armor to school.  And I guess our politicians don't really care about balancing the budget.  But maybe we should be more like Swedish people and eat herring."  Gibney tries to pull off something similar here by looking for the "meaning" of Job's life and work - but it's all around us, it's the phone in everybody's pocket that's also a camera and also a TV and also an internet browser.

But these devices were meant to connect us all, and though they've done that, they've also isolated us from each other at the same time.  Look at a bus or train full of people, they've all got their earbuds in and each one is in their own world, when the original intent was to get everyone to share the SAME world.  Now it's easier than ever for each person to watch their favorite movie or TV show, listen to their favorite music, and tune the rest of the world out, which is counter-productive to Apple's goal.  Oh, OK, there's also social media connecting everyone, but that rapidly turned into "I'm right about this, and everyone who disagrees should go kill themselves."  Plus we've created a generation of self-obsessed (and selfie-obsessed) vanity cases, who can't seem to stop taking pictures of themselves and posting it 12 times with different filters.  Like, HOW MANY pictures of yourself in your feed do you need, just tell me.  Can't we cap it at some point?

Also starring Bob Belleville, Chrisann Brennan, Nolan Bushnell (last seen in "Atari: Game Over"), Jason Chen, Nick Denton, Jesus Diaz, Peter Elkind, Andy Grignon, Michael Hawley, Yukari Itawani Kane, Daniel Kottke, Brian Lam, Michael S. Malone, Regis McKenna, Michael Moritz, Joe Nocera, Jon Rubinstein, Andy Serwer, Avie Tevanian, Sherry Turkle, with archive footage of Steve Jobs (last seen in "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley), Katie Couric (ditto), Muhammad Ali (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Bono (last seen in "Quincy"), Richard Branson, Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), Al Gore (ditto), Dan Rather (ditto), Tim Cook, Bob Dylan (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), The Edge (last seen in "Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me"), Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Mahatma Gandhi, Jim Henson (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Luther King (last seen in "Life Itself"), Ted Koppel, Carl Levin, John Lennon (last seen in "Quiet Riot: Well, Now You're Here, There's No Way Back"), Claire McCaskill, Andrew Napolitano, Yoko Ono (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Kobun Otogawa, Charles Payne, Pablo Picasso, Diane Sawyer (last seen in "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer"), Ridley Scott, John Sculley, Jon Stewart (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Ted Turner (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Stuart Varney, Ali Velshi, Brian Williams (last seen in "Gilbert"), Steve Wozniak.

RATING: 5 out of 10 Bob Dylan songs in a playlist

Going Clear: Scientology & The Prison of Belief

Year 11, Day 198 - 7/17/19 - Movie #3,295

BEFORE:  Today is the day that, traditionally, I'd usually be heading to San Diego to set up a booth at Comic-Con.  Then I'd pretty much take a break from movies for the next 5 days, because there just wouldn't be time for me to watch them while in the middle of that entertainment circus.  I know, it sounds ironic, right?  But after 10 hours a day working in a booth, I would usually just want to grab some dinner in a nice restaurant and head back to my hotel room or my AirBnb apartment.  But my last trip out to San Diego was in 2017, and currently there are no plans to return - the trip had stopped being profitable for my boss a few years before, and we found that we were sort of beating a dead horse by continuing to have a presence there.  We'll have a table at New York Comic-Con this October, that should be a lot easier for us.  Still, my body feels like it wants to fly to San Diego today, I'm a bit surprised that I haven't had the usual annual Comic-Con stress dreams yet.  Maybe when I start watching coverage of the convention they'll return.

Instead, I get to continue with my movies and get closer to wrapping up Documentary Month.  This year's movie schedule is so packed that I don't see how I could have taken a break for Comic-Con, anyway.  If I'm being honest, I've watched bits of this film before - for a while a year or two ago, HBO was running the hell out of it, and it was hard to turn on TV without seeing it.  But I've never watched it all, front to back, so here we go.  It just took me a while to be able to link to it and clear it off my books.

Barbara Walters carries over from "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic" via archive footage.

THE PLOT: A documentary looking at the inner-workings of the Church of Scientology.

AFTER: This is where things get a little tough for me, because I have to comment on things I don't really know all that much about, and then my opinions and feelings about other things might get in the way, and I can't really compartmentalize myself enough to comment on some things while ignoring others, so there's this sort of personal minefield that I have to navigate through.

But the question still comes down to this - is scientology a religion, or something else?  And if it not a religion, what is it?  A cult?  Isn't a cult a religion?  A bunch of people who love the same science fiction?  That also sounds a bit like a religion to me.  A group of people running a tax scam?  Maybe we're getting a little closer with that one, but still, that also kind of defines a religion.  Because we're SUPPOSED to have a separation of church and state in this country, but when you look at the exemptions that are made for the major religions, things start to get a little foggier.  We don't tax the Catholic Church or other major "acceptable" religions because theoretically that would interfere with their mission of "doing good things".  But at the end of the day, who's making sure that these religions are following through and doing those good things?  OK, so this church claims to run a mission or a soup kitchen that feeds hungry people - let me see the paperwork on all that before we give them a tax break.

The last third of this film also deals with people who say they were abused as scientologists, or were witnesses to others being abused.  Well, OK, but welcome to the club.  How many people have been abused by the Catholic Church over the years?  Not just by pedophile priests, you've got to throw the Inquisition in there, along with the Crusades, and a number of other holy wars and scandals.  What about conversion therapy, making people try to "pray the gay away"?  What about violence and ill will directed at women who have abortions, when the world's already over-populated as it is?  But since that's one less Christian baby in the world and therefore one less person to indoctrinate, that affects the church's bottom line, now, doesn't it?

At the end of the day, which is crazier, believing that an ancient alien named Xenu threw souls into volcanoes on Earth to imprison them, turning them into Thetan spirits that can inhabit modern people and prevent them from achieving their life goals - OR that God created the universe in 6 days, lives up in heaven (Umm, where is that, exactly) and can see everything we do, judges us at the end of our lives to see if we're deserving of eternal peace or eternal hellfire?  Oh, and also he impregnated an Earth woman, had a son who somehow absorbed all the sin from his followers when he died, so as long as we believe in him and ask forgiveness, we can get the eternal peace, and not the hellfire?

Honestly, if you switched "God" and "Xenu" in that last paragraph, I think I could look at the two scenarios objectively and have a hard time choosing between them.  Which is more likely to be real?  How about "None of the above"?  Who says one has to be the way the universe works?  If God is infinite and works in mysterious ways, what are the odds that HUMANS (who wrote down both the Bible and "Dianetics", BTW) would somehow land on the right details, that we could somehow understand how the divine machine works?  Christianity sounds a lot like wish-fulfillment to me now - it's like that's the way that people WANT the universe to work, but how could we possibly know?  Wishing doesn't make it so.

And if you want to do good deeds in the world, just DO them.  There's no reason that religion needs to be involved.  You can donate money to charity or you can give your time to an organization that helps people, there's just no reason to bring God into the mix.  Because once you do, then the help you're giving others becomes conditional.  Oh, we'll feed you today, but we want to make sure that you KNOW you're being fed in God's name.  Oh, we'll take care of you when you're sick, or bring water to your country, but you're gonna KNOW that God had something to do with it.  Umm, no thanks, you can keep your gift if there are strings attached.

So Scientology finally filed enough lawsuits and put enough pressure on the IRS to be officially declared a religion, for tax purposes.  If you ask me, they should have aimed higher.  Who wants to be lumped in with Islam and Hinduism and Buddhism (these are the "bottom feeder" religions, according to most Americans...) and then who wants to be associated with all the pervs in the Catholic Church?  Christianity's dying anyway, have you seen how few people are still going to church these days?

If you don't like the fact that Scientology won itself tax-exempt status, there's a simple solution: legislate that away.  But you've got to do that for ALL religions in America, it's well past the time that they should have been paying their fair share, anyway.  Again, we're SUPPOSED to have a separation between church and state, and the best way to prove that is to remove the tax-exempt status for ALL of them.  Boom, problem solved, you're welcome.

Well, there's still this little issue with e-meters and PreClear folders and all of the blackmailing that could lead to from the leaders of Scientology.  The other religions have this, too, only the Catholics call it "confession".  When I was a kid I had to go into a dark room with a priest on the other side of a little window and tell him the bad things I'd done.  Now, I was an altar boy for several years and I knew all the priests, I always felt that they recognized my voice, and therefore knew way too much about me.  Or maybe they didn't, and they just wanted to KNOW what I was up to, those sick freaks.

Meanwhile, the priests live pretty much rent-free on the Catholic church's dime, and that doesn't seem right either.  Why can't they grow up and start pulling their own weight?  And what do I get, as a church-goer, for paying their salaries and their room and board?  Forgiveness and eternal peace?  Umm, no thanks, I'm good, I'd rather hang on to my own money and live with my own guilt and worry about the afterlife, umm, after.  If there is one, which there probably isn't.

My heart goes out to the people who realized that they were in some form of a cult, and then worked hard to get out, even though that meant disconnecting from family members who are still involved.  Honey, I've been there, only the cult I was in was the Catholic one.  And you don't quit anything that ends in "olic" very easily, like "alcholic" or "shopaholic" - you just take it one day at a time and try not to backslide.  Now I wish more people would watch this film and realize that their religion, whatever it is, probably shares a lot more of its DNA with Scientology than they realize.

Also starring Jason Beghe, Tom De Vocht, Sara Goldberg, Paul Haggis, Kim Masters, Tony Ortega, Marty Rathbun, Mike Rinder, Spanky Taylor, Lawrence Wright, with the voices of Alex Gibney, Sherry Stringfield, Marina Zenovich,

with archive footage of Nazanin Boniadi, Anderson Cooper, (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Larry King (ditto), Tom Cruise (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), L. Ron Hubbard, Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), David Miscavige, John Travolta (last seen in "Gilbert")

RATING: 6 out of 10 suppressive persons

Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic

Year 11, Day 197 - 7/16/19 - Movie #3,294

BEFORE: I've reached the end of this little "Tribute" week, where I focused mainly on stand-up comedians (and an actor, and a film critic), both dead and alive.  Now I'm just three films away from the end of Documentary Month - jeez, that went by quickly - and only SIX films away from Movie #3,300, which will mean that this year is 2/3 over.  I know, it's only mid-July, so you'd think it would be half over, but no, in a few days the year will be 2/3 over, and I'll start the final push toward Christmas, while trying my best to keep the chain intact.  This is already the longest I've ever been able to maintain a chain without a break, and if I can keep it going for another 100 films I think I'll have done something nobody has done before.  Not by my knowledge, anyway.

Gene Wilder carries over, and this is why I'm kicking myself, for almost leaving out the movie "Love, Gilda" - the connection was so obvious, because who'd be likely to appear in both films?  Wilder was married to Gilda Radner, and appeared in several comedies with Richard Pryor, so he'd be super-likely to appear in archive footage in both docs.  I must have had trouble linking TO yesterday's film, because the outgoing connection should have been blatant.  Once I saw that Alan Zweibel could carry over from "Gilbert" I had to make that happen.  And if you don't like the Gene Wilder connection, there are two or three other people who carry over from "Love, Gilda".

THE PLOT: The life and times of Richard Pryor.

AFTER: There was a more recent documentary called "I Am Richard Pryor" which was released this past March, but it's not available on the major streaming platforms yet - it's on Vimeo for $4.99 but I don't want to break the bank.  If I rent too many movies those $3.99's and $4.99's start adding up to a serious expense.  I've got this one from 2013 that aired on Showtime, I mean, how different can they be?  They're both covering the same material, interviewed the same people, and it's the same story, right?  So probably one doc about Pryor is enough -

What I'm forced to conclude after this week is that the story of most every comedian, like the story of every band, is more or less the same.  And it turns out that the clown is the most neurotic, reckless character in the circus, more so than the lion tamer or even that guy who shoots himself out of a cannon.  Maybe I shouldn't lump ALL stand-up comics together, but all of the super-famous ones that got profiled here this week were really messed-up head cases.  Going back to the circus analogy, what kind of person needs to paint on a happy face (think about it..) and wear a silly costume, then get out in front of the fans and dance around, acting silly?  What kind of approval are they looking for, or have they figured out that people are going to laugh at them anyway, so if they say the right self-deprecating things and force the laughter to come, at least this way they'll be in on the joke, sort of?

In Pryor's case, he was the son of an alcoholic prostitute, and his grandmother was her madam - his father was a hustler and former boxer.  He was raised in a brothel, beaten and sexually abused.  After joining the army, he spent most of his service in a military prison after stabbing a white soldier who laughed at the racially-charged scenes in the film "Imitation of Life".  By 1963 he was performing clubs in New York City, alongside Woody Allen and Nina Simone.  He was following the track of his idol, Bill Cosby, then started doing appearances on Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson's shows.  But when he got the chance to perform in Las Vegas, and saw a sold-out but mostly white audience, he walked off the stage, seemingly committing career suicide.

But he surfaced in the San Francisco area a couple of years later, had fallen in with hippies and was performing again, under a new name.  Eventually he was lured back to the business to put out an album of his comedy, and that was a great success.  He also began writing for TV shows like "Sanford & Son" and "The Flip Wilson Show", and shared an Emmy for a Lily Tomlin special.  After a few Grammys for his comedy albums, he set his sights on movies, and famously co-wrote "Blazing Saddles" with Mel Brooks, only was not permitted by Warner Bros. to play the star role that went to Cleavon Little.  Instead he embarked on that series of buddy comedies with Gene Wilder ("Silver Streak", "Stir Crazy") and also appeared in "The Wiz" - heck, this guy's line of credits is way too long for me to break down here.

You probably want to skip ahead to the part where he set himself on fire, right?  You're sick that way, aren't you?  Yes, when he had been freebasing cocaine for a couple days straight, he did pour a bottle of rum over himself and he lit it, then forgot all about "Stop, drop and roll" and chose to run outside and down the street instead.  This has, in different circumstances, been called either a suicide attempt or a drug-induced accident, both by Pryor himself.  Surprisingly he lived, and spent six weeks recovering in a hospital burn unit, with second and third-degree burns over half of his body.  I can't even imagine the amount of pain he was in, yet that also became grist for the mill, a series of jokes he told about the incident in the concert film "Live on the Sunset Strip".

Then after recovering from the severe burns, Pryor was later diagnosed with M.S. - does it seem like his life had more tragic moments than a typical person's life, or do the tragedies just seem more pronounced when they happen to someone who's known for being funny?  Maybe I'm looking at this all wrong, because every person's life is ultimately a tragedy, if you think about it, and sooner or later, everything gets balanced out, or so I'd like to think.  Richard Pryor was married seven times to five different women, but seven marriages seems like it would have been balanced by six divorces, right? He also had seven children with six different women (some of those women he was married to) and maybe that was great, but then again, that's seven kids that he may or not have been there for when they needed him.  I guess that somewhere there might be a comedian who had a great life, one or two solid relationships, and for whom everything seemed to fall into place - but that sounds like a pretty boring subject for a documentary, right?

Also starring David Banks, Skip Brittenham, Mel Brooks (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Dave Chappelle (ditto), David Steinberg (ditto), Cecil Brown, Mike Epps (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Alan Farley, Budd Friedman, Sandy Ballin, Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "Gilbert"), Dr. Richard Grossman, Jesse Jackson (last seen in "Quincy"), Quincy Jones (ditto), Rashon Khan, George Lopez (last heard in "The Smurfs 2"), Lonette McKee (last seen in "The Cotton Club"), John Moffitt, Paul Mooney, Walter Mosley, Thom Mount, Bob Newhart (last seen in "Catch-22"), Jennifer Lee Pryor, Richard Pryor Jr., Ishmael Reed, Scott Saul, Paul Schrader, Michael Schultz, Stan Shaw (last seen in "Snake Eyes"), Lily Tomlin (also last seen in "Love, Gilda"), Rocco Urbisci, Robin Williams (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind") with archive footage of Richard Pryor (also last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Jack Nicholson (ditto), Muhammad Ali (last seen in "The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years"), Warren Beatty (last seen in "Life Itself"), Rona Barrett, David Brinkley (also last seen in "Quincy"), Don Cornelius (ditto), Diana Ross (ditto), John Byner, Johnny Carson (last seen in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work"), Chevy Chase (also last seen in "Love, Gilda"), Merv Griffin (ditto), Bill Cosby (last seen in "California Suite"), Mike Douglas (last seen in "Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words"), Redd Foxx, David Franklin, Dick Gregory, Pam Grier (last seen in "Larry Crowne"), Alex Karras (last seen in "Against All Odds"), Eddie Murphy (also last seen in "Gilbert"), Barbara Walters (ditto), Dolly Parton (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Dinah Shore (ditto), Jane Pauley (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Rain Pryor, Nipsey Russell, Damon Wayans (last seen in "The Great White Hype").

RATING: 5 out of 10 Grammy nominations

Love, Gilda

Year 11, Day 196 - 7/15/19 - Movie #3,293

BEFORE:  This one wasn't part of the original plan, but now that I've switched things around, and found some other people appearing in these documentaries that are not listed on the IMDB, it became possible to drop this one in here.  Or maybe it was always possible, and I just missed it.  But sometimes the decision gets taken from my hands - in this case I was watching "Gilbert" on Hulu, and when it was done, the streaming service cued up the next film, which was "Love, Gilda".  I'd already decided I wasn't going to include this one here, maybe I'd save it for next year, though it WAS very thematically related to what I've been watching this week.

But stopping the film means getting up from the recliner, because the Playstation controller doesn't reach that far - so I let the film run, switched the TV input to the cable box and came back later to disconnect from Hulu - and that's when I saw writer Alan Zweibel being interviewed, and I remembered him distinctly from the last TWO films, so there's my connection.  All I'd need to do would be to confirm that there's a solid link to tomorrow's film - wow, that was easy - and suddenly this film is back on the list.  So writer Alan Zweibel carries over from "Gilbert", and two other people carry over via archive footage.

Now, this means I'm going to have to delete THREE films from the schedule for the latter third of this year, but I think I can do that.  I already had two movies marked for elimination that could be jettisoned without breaking the chain, three's a little tougher but I think I found five instances where an actor appeared three times in a row, and I could just take out the middle one without interrupting the flow.  It's just a matter of prioirities - is it more important to stay on a theme here, or to have three films with Joaquin Phoenix in a row in August, instead of two?  Well, my ruling is to re-insert this film here, because this also puts a much more important film on the 3,300 mark.  And this also turns Documentary Month into a chain of 30 films instead of 29, and 30 is a full month, 29 is not.

THE PLOT: Weaving together recently discovered audiotapes, rare home movies and interviews with her friends, this documentary offers a unique window into the honest and whimsical world of comedienne Gilda Radner as she looks back and reflects on her life and career.

AFTER: I saw a couple rock music documentaries that took this sort of approach, like one about Jimi Hendrix ("Voodoo Child") that had Bootsy Collins reading excerpts from his own journals.  This one invites (mostly) female comedians to read excerpts from Gilda's journals, and they all seem to find something meaningful in them, because as I've already seen this past week, most comedians have the same anxieties - the fear that they're not funny enough, not attractive enough, not thin enough, not good enough.  Mostly they all started performing for their parents, and got enough encouragement to continue, despite family tragedies or societal awkwardness.  It's like our society has a bunch of filters in place, and people who exhibit enough weirdness or pass certain personality tests all end up on "Saturday Night Live" - yeah, that seems about right.

But as long as SNL has been around, it wasn't ALWAYS there - so we're going back tonight to the onset of the long-running show, and I've seen this seminal moment before, in at least two other movies, when Lorne Michaels recruited most of the cast and writing staff from the National Lampoon radio show, and moved them all across town to NBC's new show "Saturday Night" (the "Live" came later, it was being used at the time by a sports show hosted by Howard Cosell.)

Did we, at the time, ever think that the show would last 40 years, and have over 150 cast members come and go?  SNL had so many "off" years during the 1980's and '90's that it always seemed like it might be on the edge of cancellation (because it was) but it turns out that with ensemble comedies, all you have to do is fire everyone on staff, bring in a new team and the network will probably give you another chance - because who the hell is watching TV late on a Saturday, anyway?  Mediocre ratings are probably the best you can hope for then, and the cult that built up around the show guaranteed slightly-above mediocre ratings nearly all the time.

But I keep coming back to the original cast - I thought I'd seen a film like this before, but the release date here is 2018, so this is really a new take.  And yeah, there's information about Gilda that I didn't know before, like I didn't know that she was chubby as a kid, and I didn't know about her struggles with eating disorders in the 1970's.  I didn't know that she dated most of the male cast of SNL at the time, off and on - that she couldn't go to see "Ghostbusters" because most of the main cast was made up of her ex-boyfriends.  I should probably read that behind-the-scenes tell-all about the original SNL cast, it seems like that would be very informative.

I'd seen the movie "Gilda Live", of course, but that was so long ago, I was probably just a young kid and missed all the adult subtext.  That might be worth another look if it's streaming somewhere. Back in those days the cast of SNL took the summer off - or maybe did some stage work, but nowadays it's a chance for the cast to film five or six movies that will be released throughout the next year.  Gilda didn't jump right into a movie career after SNL, but it did eventually happen when she met Gene Wilder.  Whatever movie cred she got from "Hanky Panky" got negated by "Haunted Honeymoon", unfortunately.  Then of course her battles with ovarian cancer are recounted here, and while this is yet another comedian who left Planet Earth much too soon, at least there was some positive change that resulted with the formation of the Gilda's Club network of cancer support centers, and a program at Cedars-Sinai to screen high-risk candidates, to prevent other people from being misdiagnosed, as she was.

There's no telling what this Emmy & Grammy winner could have gone on to do - she was scheduled to return to SNL as a host, but this was cancelled due to a writer's strike.  She could have been an EGOT contender, if cancer hadn't taken her away too soon.

Also starring Chevy Chase (last seen in "Life Itself"), Bill Hader (last seen in "The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them"), Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "Ghostbusters"), Lorne Michaels (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Laraine Newman (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Amy Poehler (last seen in "Envy"), Maya Rudolph (last seen in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Paul Shaffer (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Martin Short (last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"), Cecily Strong (last seen in "The Meddler"), Tracey Ullman (last seen in "The Queen"), Anne Beatts, Janis Hirsch, Michael F. Radner, Stephen Schwartz, Rosie Shuster, Jordan Walker-Pearlman, with archive footage of Gilda Radner (also last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Dan Aykroyd (ditto), Jane Curtin (ditto), Garrett Morris (ditto), Harold Ramis (ditto), Gene Wilder (also last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Charlie Chaplin (ditto), Rob Reiner (ditto), Harry Shearer (ditto), Bea Arthur, Lucille Ball (last seen in "Follow the Fleet"), John Belushi (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Steve Martin (ditto), Candice Bergen (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)"), John Candy (also last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"), Tom Snyder (ditto), Lynda Carter (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Brian Doyle-Murray (last seen in "Club Paradise"), Joe Flaherty (ditto), Al Franken (last seen in "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power"), Teri Garr (last seen in "The Conversation"), Merv Griffin (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Debbie Harry (last seen in "Quiet Riot; Well, Now You're Here, There's No Way Back"), Hugh Hefner (last seen in "Gilbert"), David Letterman (ditto), Buck Henry (last seen in "Town & Country"), Madeline Kahn (last seen in "Paper Moon"), Eugene Levy (last heard in "Finding Dory"), Bill Murray (last seen in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III"), Michael O'Donoghue (last seen in "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon"), Jonathan Pryce (last seen in "Woman in Gold"), Bill Russell, Garry Shandling (last seen in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work"), Lily Tomlin (ditto), G.E. Smith, Patti Smith (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Vivian Vance.

RATING: 6 out of 10 neurotic poems

Gilbert

Year 11, Day 195 - 7/14/19 - Movie #3,292

BEFORE: I like to say that I don't take suggestions for what I include in the Movie Year, because stumbling on to films that I didn't know I needed to see is all part of the fun (and realizing how terrible some "must-see" films are definitely isn't).  But the truth is that I take suggestions from everywhere - movie reviews, Netflix listings, IMDB recommendations, they all sort of seep in by osmosis, it seems.  But when my wife mentions to me that she watched a documentary on Hulu about Gilbert Gottfried JUST after I put together my documentary chain that already had two films with him in them, that seems a bit like divine providence from the movie gods.  Then when I mentioned my upcoming doc chain to my BFF, he said, "Oh, are you going to watch the one about Gilbert Gottfried?"  Umm, sure, I was planning that all along.  When two people whose opinions I respect recommend a film, it's probably a lock.

Gilbert Gottfried carries over again, of course, from "Life, Animated"

THE PLOT: A funny and unexpectedly poignant portrait of the life and career of one of comedy's most iconic figures, Gilbert Gottfried.

AFTER: The clips are standard, by now, of course - a filmmaker wouldn't be doing their due diligence if they didn't include clips from "Beverly Hills Cop 2", "Look Who's Talking 2" and "Problem Child 2".  These were those first few film appearances Gilbert had, pre-Disney even, where people first started to notice him.  If you ran a comedy franchise in the late 1980's or early 1990's you could do a lot worse than casting him in your second installment, especially if you were trying to justify making a third installment.  If you watched a lot of late-night talk shows, especially Letterman's, you might have already known who he was, even if some of his stand-up routines left you scratching your head a little bit.  Like Robin Williams before him, he was in the midst of doing something different that was sort of turning the genre on its ear.

Being the voice of cartoon birds, of course, was a game-changer for his career - first Iago in "Aladdin" and then a long-running stint as the voice of the AFLAC duck in commercials.  Hey, if you can find your niche in this crazy business, more power to you.  And voice-over work is a great gig, you show up, you don't even have to dress well, have a cup of tea to get your vocal cords warmed up, scream a couple of words into a microphone, and you're back on the street in an hour with check in hand. I've done that semi-professionally, I just don't have the time to pursue more voice-work outside my current circle of associates.

But in this documentary, we get to see what kind of apartment Gilbert's AFLAC money and Disney residuals have bought him, and it's a really nice one.  And we get to meet his wife and kids, plus his two sisters, one of which was undergoing cancer treatments, and Gilbert spends time with her at the clinic, so there is a human side to this comedian known for his foul-mouthed jokes, it's just one that he rarely lets the audience see, for fear of being seen out of character.  But I think by this point he's become so ingrained in the fabric of comedy that it would be hard to imagine that business without him.  But show biz has tried, he's been blacklisted for everything from masturbation jokes at the Emmys to 9/11 jokes at a Comedy Central Roast, to twitter jokes made right after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.  That cost him the AFLAC job, but he had a good long run - and that duck still sounds a lot like him, which makes me wonder if they're using a sound-alike, or just recycling old audio files.

But still he pops up again and again, as Abraham Lincoln in "A Million Ways to Die in the West", or as a rabbi on "Son of the Beach" or as Mr. Mxyzptlk in a Superman cartoon.  Lately he's even been supplying the voice of Trump toady Jared Kushner on "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver".  Why? Because it's funny to depict that, duh. And because his voice is instantly recognizable, even if he's not screaming - but it's funnier if he is.

We also learn that other comedians think he's notoriously cheap, a stereotype that is supported with footage of him taking a cheap Metrobus to a gig in another town, or getting all the free toiletries whenever he checks in to a hotel, including asking for "underarm" (does he not know the word "deodorant"?) and then later we see that his wife has filled bin after bin with hotel soaps, shampoos and toothbrushes that he brings home and refuses to throw away.  We've all done it, just maybe not on that scale - when my wife and I went on our BBQ crawls across the South, I also accumulated a few shampoos for my travel bag.  Life on the road for a comic also apparently means soaking his socks in the hotel sink, and that's something to think about in the future when you wonder how well they clean hotel rooms between guests.

Gilbert's also got a successful podcast these days, and we see him interviewing people like Jim Gaffigan, Richard Kind and even Dick Van Dyke.  But I think it's true of any profession, if you hang around long enough, you're likely to get viewed as being part of the "old guard", even if you occasionally wake up and reflect on how you got to where you are, and maybe sometimes feel like an alien walking around in someone else's life.  Gilbert doing a set at a military cosplay convention probably didn't help that feeling, since being surrounded by people wearing authentic Nazi uniforms gave him quite a start.  His life sort of seems like an endless parade of bizarre encounters, but hey, that's the gig.

I've never seen him perform live, but I've seen him twice in the real world, at the premiere of the horrible Robin Williams film "What Dreams May Come", and once on the street in Manhattan.  So I think I know what neighborhood he lives in, which means he's come a long way from Crown Heights, Brooklyn - more power to him.

Also starring Dave Attell (last seen in "Trainwreck"), Joy Behar (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), Richard Belzer (last seen in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work"), Lewis Black (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Whoopi Goldberg (ditto), Jay Leno (ditto), Bill Burr (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Susie Essman (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Judy Gold (ditto), Jeffrey Ross, (ditto), Alan Zweibel (ditto), Jim Gaffigan (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Arlene Gottfried, Dara Gottfried, Karen Gottfried, Lily Gottfried, Max Gottfried, Arsenio Hall (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Anthony Jeselnik, Penn Jillette (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Richard Kind (last seen in "Suburbicon"), Artie Lange (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Howie Mandel, Patton Oswalt (last seen in "Keeping Up With the Joneses"), Joe Piscopo, Paul Provenza, Bob Saget, Dick Van Dyke (last seen in "Mary Poppins Returns") with archive footage of Harry Anderson (last seen in "She's Having a Baby"), Drew Carey (also last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Andrew Dice Clay (last seen in "A Star Is Born"), Chris Connelly, Jimmy Fallon (also last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Kathie Lee Gifford (also last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Regis Philbin (ditto), Elisabeth Hasselbeck (also last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), Barbara Walters (ditto), Hugh Hefner (last seen in "Life Itself") Jimmy Kimmel (also last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Jane Seymour (ditto), Alan King (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Robert Klein (last seen in "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"), Cloris Leachman (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), David Letterman (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Larry Miller (last seen in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"), Eddie Murphy (last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"), Joe Pantoliano (last seen in "Ready to Rumble"), Markie Post, Robin Quivers, John Ritter (last seen in "The Prisoner of Second Avenue"), Rob Schneider (last seen in "Hype!"), John Stamos (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"), Howard Stern, George Takei (last heard in "Mulan 2"), John Tesh, John Travolta (last seen in "The End of the Tour"), Brian Williams (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Amy Yasbeck (last seen in "The Odd Couple II") Ray Bolger, Judy Garland (last seen in "Easter Parade"), Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, Frank Morgan, Boris Karloff (last seen in "House of Dracula") and the voice of Jonathan Freeman (also carrying over from "Life, Animated")

RATING: 6 out of 10 vulgar Valentines Day cards