BEFORE: In case you missed it, the acclaimed comedy/magician The Amazing Johnathan passed away in February of this year - this documentary streaming on Hulu has been on my list for two or three years, it's taken me this long to find a way to link to it. But what, exactly is my chain trying to TELL me here, with one deceased documentary subject after another? (Except the Sparks Brothers - live long and prosper, Mael brothers...). Perhaps this is just par for the course, it's a lot easier to make a doc about a famous person once you know how their story ends, I suppose. I'm at the point where now I'm just looking forward to getting to some documentaries about living subjects...
"Weird Al" Yankovic carries over again from "Tiny Tim: King for a Day".
THE PLOT: What began as a documentary following the final tour of a dying magician becomes an unexpected and increasingly bizarre journey as the filmmaker struggles to separate truth from illusion.
AFTER: I usually don't like it when directors insert themselves into their documentaries, it usually feels too self-reflexive and/or indulgent, like saying, "I made this film because I think this topic is important..." SHUT UP, just make the film and stay silent behind the camera, we'll all figure out what's important, or whether the documentary is good. Or it implies a weakness, like the director didn't know enough about the documentary rules, that he's not supposed to be seen or heard, or he couldn't figure out a way to tell the story without turning the camera on himself. It's usually a cheap shortcut to making a point, or introducing the topic, it's like director mansplaining. Usually.
But director Ben Berman didn't have much choice here, he started following around The Amazing Johnathan - who I'm quite sure is called JOHNATHAN by his friends, and not "Amazing", like how Tiny Tim's friends just called him "Tiny" - when the magician decided to go out on a Farewell Tour of sorts. He'd been diagnosed with a heart condition called cardiomyopathy and in 2014 he announced to the world that he'd only been given a year to live. When he found himself still alive in 2017, he decided to go back on tour, but aware of the fact that too much stress could kill him, and he'd die on-stage like Tiny Tim did, also another magician named Tommy Cooper apparently died while performing magic.
But before too many gigs had taken place, Berman learned that there would be a second camera crew taping Johnathan's performance in Boston - and this crew had the Oscar-winning documentaries "Searching for Sugar Man" and "Man on Wire" on their resumés, so they had been given priority, it seems. Then, a few gigs later, Berman learned about ANOTHER filmmaker making a THIRD documentary about Amazing Johnathan, only this was a chain-saw juggler named Chad the Mad, who'd started filming in 2014, then abandoned the project, and now he wanted to pick it up again.
It makes sense, given Johnathan's diagnosis, that there would be a sudden interest in making a film about his life, and possibly his death as well - and you just never know, maybe two of these directors wouldn't have been able to complete their projects, due to a lack of funding, or wouldn't have been able to get them released, due to a lack of interest. It sure felt to Ben like he was getting played, and it seemed like Johnathan had made separate arrangements with three or four different crews to essentially all make the exact same documentary film about him, so was he being dishonest, or was he just hedging his bets?
Here's something that I've learned over the years, both from watching television and from living life - MAGICIANS ARE LIARS, plain and simple. Whether it's appearing to saw a woman in half, or making a person disappear from a box, or making the Statue of Liberty seem to disappear, whatever a magician SAYS he's about to do, you can bet 100% of the time, that is NOT the thing he's about to do. What was that film about The Amazing Randi called? "An Honest Liar" - in that case it may have referred to his personal life, but even my idols Penn and Teller ride that fine line between being honest with the audience and using deception. I remember when they first hit the scene, it was so refreshing that somebody would sort of reveal how a magic trick was USUALLY done, and then take it to the next level by hiding that trick within another, larger trick that you couldn't quite figure out.
(Yes, a couple years after I met Rick James on a music video set, I met Penn & Teller on a shoot for the framing sequences of a documentary about the band The Residents, and I got their autographs on my copy of their book "Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends", then Penn popped up at a couple of downtown Manhattan parties I'd manage to crash. I doubt he'd remember me, but I did go to see their Off-Broadway show, before they moved their act to Vegas.)
The Amazing Johnathan's magic act incorporated both prop comedy and danger acts - he would APPEAR to push a large needle through his tongue, or use a knife to cut into his arm, but again, magicians are liars, so that's exactly NOT what he was really doing. It was a fake tongue and a fake knife, most likely. But he got the shock value out of it - much more than David Copperfield with that stupid Statue of Liberty disappearance during which (spoiler alert) the whole building rotated, that was the trick. They closed the curtain in front of the statue, the building moved, and then they opened the curtain again, and the statue was GONE! But only because the curtain and the window was now facing in a different direction. The statue was still there, sorry.
Anyway, director Ben Berman started to doubt himself, and question everything The Amazing Johnathan had told him about the various crews filming him, and what permissions they all had to make their films. Although they couldn't show the title of the OTHER documentary about Amazing Johnathan, a little research on IMDB tells me that it was called "Always Amazing", directed by Steve Byrne, and it premiered at a small film festival in 2018 - Ben Berman showed up there and sort of half-confronted the director by getting a stooge to ask him a question. I'm willing to speculate here that the film crew probably LIED about their credentials, there's a good chance that notorious liar and prankster The Amazing Johnathan was fooled by them, which seems a bit ironic.
Still, there are plenty of lies to go around, and Johnathan himself isn't portrayed very well here, the documentary shows us the real reason for his trademark headband (to hold his hairpiece) and then there's his drug habit, which probably had a lot to do with his heart condition in the first place. He'd ingested so much cocaine during the 1980's and 1990's that it no longer affected him, and he had to switch to "speed", which was his euphemism for meth. Well, at least he was honest about his drug habit here, but it's a very curious thing to be honest about, when he'd probably become comfortable lying about it for so many years. All of this, combined with the fact that he'd seemed to have outlived his terminal diagnosis by three years, eventually leads the director to ask Johnathan if his heart condition was, in fact, all part of some elaborate prank or publicity stunt. Yeah, that's a tough question to have to walk back.
It apparently wasn't a stunt, because even though Johnathan lived longer than expected, he still passed away in February 2022, but at least he died at home, in his sleep, and not on stage. Maybe what my chain is trying to tell me is that this is what happens to everyone, even the famous people, and we all have to make the best out of our time while we can.
Also starring The Amazing Johnathan, Eric André (last heard in "The Mitchells vs the Machines"), Criss Angel, Ben Berman, Simon Chinn, Judy Gold (last seen in "Gilbert"), Penn Jillette (ditto), Max Maven, Marvyn Roy (Mr. Electric), Anastasia Synn, Doreen Szeles, Chad S. Taylor, Scott "Carrot Top" Thomson,
with archive footage of Ben Affleck (last seen in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), John Candy (last seen in "Spielberg"), Flavor Flav, David Letterman (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Bill Maher (ditto), Marc Maron (last heard in "The Bad Guys"), Gary Oldman (last seen in "Child 44"), Nancy Reagan (last seen in "Irresistible"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "New Wave: Dare to Be Different"), Paul Shaffer (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice")
RATING: 6 out of 10 bottles of Windex
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