Rock 'n' Roll High School

Year 14, Day 183 - 7/2/22 - Movie #4,188

BEFORE: Ugh, I know this is the Summer Rock & Doc Block, but I kind of regret programming this one, just to help close the circle.  I'm not a fan of the Ramones, I don't like any of their songs, I just never saw the appeal.  Most of them have passed away, I think Marky is the only one left, and I only know that because somebody I know was managing him at San Diego Comic Con the last year I was there.  Still, this film from the late 1970's is regarded as something of a cult classic, so I'm curious to see if there's anything there - Turner Classic Movies ran this in a double-feature with tomorrow's movie, so doesn't THAT make you feel old? 

Alix Elias carries over from "Adrienne". 

THE PLOT: Ramones fanatic and delinquent Riff Randell battles it out with the strict new principal of Vince Lombardi High School, Miss Togar, with help from the Ramones

AFTER: Yeah, this is a bad one - I regret my decision.  The story makes no sense, the production values are practically non-existent, and it's a blatant attempt to exploit the teens' love of the Ramones music (for some reason...) to make more money from their appeal, or lack of it.  It so wanted to be "A Hard Day's Night", which also had zero plot but shot the Beatles into the stratosphere of money-earning, but it's just not that.  It wants so badly to be "punk rock", but I don't think the filmmakers even understood the term.  Jeez, I've seen porn movies with more plot and better sets, so really this feels like a porn movie where everybody somehow forgot to have sex. 

Sure, it's wish fulfillment - every teen wishes they could stand up to the authority in their school, get their favorite rock stars to come and give a concert, and then, when the shit hits the fan, just take some chemicals from the science lab and blow the whole place up.  Umm, sure, that looks good on paper, but then you've blown up the school, and you're going to jail.  Not a great plan. I can't even say this is like "National Lampoon's Animal House", dumbed down from college to the high-school level, because the plot doesn't even have the organizational structure that film had, which, admittedly, was close to nil.  

Yes, there's a Dean Wormer-like character, Evelyn Togar, who takes over the school as the new principal, and the FIRST thing she does is shut down the outdoor dancing to the Ramones song and - shocker - make everyone go to class!  For this, she has to be taken down, well, we don't want our students going to CLASS, now, do we?  After that, it's all about Riff (a girl named Riff? never happens...) cutting school for three days so she can stand in line for Ramones tickets, while her friend, the bookish Kate Rambeau, agrees to participate in dating training sessions with Tom Roberts, the school quarterback who talks about the weather with every girl in school, but is clueless about how to date them and get lucky.  This is confusing, to say the least - didn't most high school kids in 1979 know how to have sex?  Why does he need to take lessons?

Then there are two "hall monitors" who work for the principal, but they don't look like teens, they seem to be about 35 years old, and they're only interested in beating up nerdy kids and giving out "demerits".  Kate gets detention for the first time, and so does Riff, but Riff claims to have spent more hours in detention than anyone else in school.  She buys the Ramones tickets - actually she buys 100 of them at 10 dollars each.  Umm, what high-school kid in 1979 has a spare THOUSAND dollars?  Nothing makes much sense here, did the screenwriters ever attend high school?  They seem to have no idea how anything works. 

I think maybe this opened the door for irreverent teen comedies of the future, like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", and (I'm guessing) the "American Pie" movies - but it's not a great movie itself, not by any stretch of the imagination.  The acting is so bad, across the board, that everything comes off as unbelievable and ridiculous - and this is all before the Ramones even show up!  

The band finally comes to town, riding in a pink Cadillac, playing guitars that couldn't possibly be plugged in and with Joey singing into a chicken wing, not a microphone, for some reason. WTF?  And they arrive at the concert hall to hang out with the people waiting in line?  That never happens, because why would you let the fans see the band before the show?  Then they won't buy tickets, you idiot screenwriters.  The writers don't know how high school works, they don't know how rock concerts work, or microphones, or dating, or well, really much of anything, so for me, most of the jokes just didn't land. It's all just stupid, or maybe I'm getting too old to enjoy this sort of thing.  You know you're old when you root for the teachers and not the students, right? 

Anyway, I guess if I liked the Ramones or any of their songs, then maybe I'd be a little more forgiving here.  But I don't, so I'm not.  It's a cult classic, congratulations, but it's also severely dumb.

Also starring P.J. Soles (last seen in "Breaking Away"), Vincent Van Patten, Clint Howard (last seen in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Dey Young (last seen in "Frankie and Johnny"), Mary Woronov (last seen in "Looney Tunes: Back in Action"), Paul Bartel (last seen in "Hard Time: The Premonition"), Dick Miller (last seen in "Matinee"), Don Steele (last heard in "Gremlins"), Loren Lester, Daniel Davies, Lynn Farrell, Herbie Braha, Grady Sutton (last seen in "Support Your Local Gunfighter"), Chris Somma, Marla Rosenfield, Terry Soda, Joey Ramone (last seen in "New Wave: Dare to Be Different"), Johnny Ramone (ditto), Dee Dee Ramone (ditto), Marky Ramone (ditto), with the voice of Johnny Gilbert and cameos from Rodney Bingenheimer (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Lorna Doom (ditto), Joe Dante, Monte Melnick (last seen in "New Wave: Dare to Be Different")

RATING: 3 out of 10 pizza boxes

Adrienne

Year 14, Day 182 - 7/1/22 - Movie #4,187

BEFORE: Judy Gold carries over from "George Carlin's American Dream" and here are my links for the rest of July: Alix Elias, Mary Woronov, Lou Reed & Andy Warhol, Paul McCartney & Mick Jagger, Elton John, Taylor Hawkins, Neil Young, Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey, Carl Reiner, Anne Bancroft, Sidney Poitier, Regis Philbin, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Louis Malle, Carol Burnett, Warren Beatty & Faye Dunaway, Olivia Newton-John, Gloria Estefan, Norman Lear, David Letterman, Jose Andres, Julia Child, Emeril Lagasse, Oprah Winfrey, Dizzy Gillespie.  That should bring me ALMOST to the end of the Summer Music & Documentary programming.

For a long while, this film was going to be the FIRST documentary I watched in the Summer Rock & Doc Block - months ago I'd seen it playing at DocFest and then put together the initial plan, and the way the linking worked out, it seemed at the time like it would only connect to ONE other documentary, however, since a bunch of actors like Paul Rudd were interviewed for it, I figured I could use it to link TO the doc chain fairly easily and then the 2nd film would be "The Amazing Johnathan Documentary", linked via Judy Gold, and I'd progress on from there. The final documentary in the program would have then been the one about the Velvet Underground, which also presented a number of linking opportunities for where to go next. 

But, then a funny thing happened, Turner Classic Movies ran the film I'm going to watch tomorrow, and the film I'm going to watch the next day, and I realized that instead of linking from the Velvet Underground doc to those films (neither of which is a documentary, BTW), I could link back to the beginning of the doc chain, this film "Adrienne".  What are the odds of that?  So I'd essentially created a loop, a perfect circle of films, and this gave me a ton of options - I could link into the chain via anybody interviewed or appearing, which was probably a few hundred people - and I could move around the circle in either direction, so that's twice as many options right there - with 35 docs (at that time) I had at least 70 ways to run through the list, probably more.  It's great to have options - so then I decided to find the order that made me the most happy, which meant putting the BEST possible film on the July 4 holiday, and making sure that I had the intro and outro that I wanted - to best increase my chances of keeping the chain going all the way to Christmas.  

THE PLOT: As the muse of Hal Hartley's indie classics and as writer/director of the critically acclaimed film "Waitress", Adrienne Shelly was a shining star in the independent film world. 

AFTER: Tonight, another celebrity death is explored, and also, another director is forced to insert himself into his own film.  The director in question here is Andy Ostroy, and his wife was Adrienne Shelly, the actress you may know from the film "Waitress", and she also wrote and directed that, which was the inspiration for the current Broadway musical.  Wait, is it still running?  Let me check - ah, no longer on Broadway, though it DID re-open after the pandemic, it closed again in December 2021 and is now touring the U.S. I guess we're all still in recovery mode, and musical theater productions are no exception.  Come on, it's summer and we all want to get out and party, though I guess maybe nobody wants to be stuck in cramped Broadway theater with a bunch of potentially sick people and poor ventilation.  Outdoor backyard parties, anyone?  

Anyway, Adrienne was found in her production office one night, and the NYPD wanted to treat it as a suicide, but something didn't add up for her husband, who found her.  Why would she hang herself when things were going well, she had a three-year-old daughter that she adored, her marriage was, by all accounts, the best relationship she'd ever had, and she'd just finished making the film "Waitress", and was waiting to hear if it would get accepted at Sundance, which it did?  Hope springs eternal, even with film festival entries, that's one thing I've learned over the years, and if you can't make it into Sundance, there's always Slamdance, or Raindance or Moondance or Vandance (I don't recommend that last one, it's just a guy in a van who wants to show you movies, I'd think twice about it.)

I've spent 30 years working in independent film now, and I've learned that success, in the festivals or otherwise, is a very tricky thing.  It's not a yes or no thing, you're not usually one or the other, successful or not, quite often it's a matter of degree. Back when I was in film school, I figured that after learning how to be a director, I'd start looking for my big break, maybe I'd write a letter to one of my favorite authors, somehow get the rights to make a movie from a book I liked, then there were a few steps I hadn't quite figured out yet, but at the end of that process I'd be a famous, successful director.  Yeah, that's not how the process works, not at all, and I'm embarrassed about how naive I was back then.  Instead I was a Production Assistant and Office Assistant for a couple years, changed jobs a couple times, and when I was offered an office manager job at a small studio, I took it, figuring I'd be able to work my way into producing, which I did, for a few years and several animated features.  But I slowly transitioned out of the producer role because I hadn't learned the emerging digital technologies, and I didn't have the time or money to go back to film school and learn them.  

This is how I tend to think of show biz - a film is like a big bus, and the director is the bus driver.  The movie studio is, I don't know, the company that owns the bus line.  The director has the most control over where the bus ends up, but the bus company obviously wants the driver to stick to the route, and also get there on time and with the passengers all still alive, preferably but this last point is somewhat negotiable.  The passengers are everybody else working on the film - the actors, the set designers, costumers, props, continuity, tech guys, editors, sound editors, composers, etc.  The bus driver is in charge of all the passengers, he's paid well, but also he's the one responsible if the bus crashes or drives off a cliff, aka the movie is a failure.  If the bus arrives on time with everyone alive, he gets to drive the bus again the next day.  I'm perfectly happy being a passenger on the bus, as a script guy or a producer guy or an office manager guy, just let me ride the bus every day and get where I need to go. Do I want to drive my own bus? No thanks, it's too much pressure and I don't want to be held responsible when the bus crashes.  I'm still ON the bus, so if it crashes, I go down too, but at least then it wasn't my fault. 

Adrienne had been a bus passenger (actress) in notable films made by Hal Hartley, and she was just getting to the point where she got to drive her OWN bus, and jeezus, more power to her at that point. To die just after bringing her bus into the depot, on time and on budget I assume, that's just awful - I mean, it happens, life turns out to be capably both magical and unfair at the same time, which is a quote from this film.  Everything and everybody has an expiration date, that's clear from this week's documentaries, and many people are gone from this world sooner than they should have been.  But Adrienne's husband was so right, ideally even if someone has suffered depression in the past, they're not going to take themselves out RIGHT when they might be on the cusp of something really good.  Not that anybody should commit suicide just after NOT getting their film into Sundance, but you know what I'm trying to say here. 

I may not be a big fan of the film "Waitress", but that was somebody's bus, and I'll champion her right to drive that bus, because I know how much it takes to even learn how to drive a bus in the first place.  The majority of people in the industry may think about getting to that point someday, but how many really do?  There are a lot of people already driving buses, and most of them don't want to give up their jobs to the up-and-coming drivers.  Just saying. 

You do find out in the film how Adrienne died - and yeah, it takes a while, but not a LONG while, just over 90 minutes.  But there are stops and starts, the storyline with her husband and daughter dealing with her death, and the police solving the crime, gets interrupted frequently to flash back to Adrienne's life, or her progressing career, and then the part of her life where she met her husband, then gave birth to a daughter and the "Waitress" movie. I'm not a fan of telling the story in non-linear chunks, but really, there was no other way to do this one.  Also I don't like directors becoming the focus and addressing the camera directly, but again, given the circumstances here there weren't many other choices or structures available. 

Also starring Andy Ostroy, Sophie Ostroy, Sara Bareilles, Robert John Burke (last seen in "Connie and Carla"), Nathan Filllion (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Hal Hartley, Cheryl Hines (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Elaine Langbaum, Jessie Mueller, Paul Rudd (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Irma Rivera-Duffy, Keri Russell (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Jeremy Sisto (last seen in "Robot & Frank")

 

with archive footage of Adrienne Shelly (last seen in "Waitress"), Martin Donovan (last seen in "The Sentinel"), Rachel Dratch (last seen in "Wine Country"), Griffin Dunne (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Alix Elias, Andy Griffith, Eddie Jemison (last seen in "All About Steve"), Tim Guinee (last seen in "Ben Is Back"), Louise Lasser (last seen in "Stardust Memories"), Gretchen Mol (last seen in "Laggies"), Julianna Margulies (last seen in "Three Christs"), Max Parrish, Martha Plimpton (last heard in "Frozen II"), Gary Sauer, Amy Sedaris (last seen in "Romance & Cigarettes"), Ally Sheedy, David Strathairn (last seen in "Nomadland"), Margaret Whitton. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 memorial Foundation grants

George Carlin's American Dream

Year 14, Day 181 - 6/30/22 - Movie #4,186

BEFORE: George Carlin carries over from "Can We Take a Joke?" and I just realized I'm book-ending this holiday weekend with two films that have "American" in the title - really, I couldn't have planned this any better.  

I know what you're probably thinking - is this a MOVIE, though?  This is a documentary, sure, but it's on HBO - and it's in two parts, that makes it a TV series, doesn't it?  Well, yes but also no, I think those lines have been blurred already.  Yes, I refused to include that Beatles documentary "Get Back", because it's in three parts, so to me that's a series.  I've watched 2-part documentaries before, like "Leaving Neverland", which was also on HBO in 2 parts, and "Elvis Presley: The Searcher", so there's some precedent here. 

I'm hoping this isn't just a cash-grab on HBO's part, they financed and aired the last 15 years of George Carlin comedy specials, so I'm hoping this isn't just a bunch of those clips, recycled yet again, in the vein of "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg".  And this is over three and half hours long, I'm going to try to watch both parts together, which is A LOT, and then count it as one big movie, not two.  It's all in how you look at it - it's one documentary in two parts, so to me, that's one movie.  Bear with me, as I approach another century mark, now it's all about putting the "right" movie on July4, and also in slot #4,200.  

Here's the format breakdown for June, since the month ends tonight, and I'll post July's planned links tomorrow: 

9 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Welcome to the Punch, Child 44, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, The Hummingbird Project, The Mauritanian, The Father, The One and Only Dick Gregory, Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James, New Wave: Dare to Be Different

6 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Judas and the Black Messiah, After the Sunset, Stuart: A Life Backwards, Magic, Freejack, George Carlin's American Dream

6 watched on Netflix: Windfall, Mank, The Lost Daughter, The Two Popes, Fatherhood, The Sparks Brothers

2 watched on Amazon Prime: The Courier, Can We Take a Joke?

1 watched on Hulu: The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
2 watched on YouTube: Dirty Pretty Things, Tiny Tim: King for a Day
3 watched on Disney+: Cruella, Eternals, Raya and the Last Dragon

1 watched on AppleTV: Swan Song
2 watched in theaters: The Bad Guys, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
32 TOTAL

Well, that was a full month, for sure - 32 films in 30 days, plus I worked MANY hours at the Tribeca Film Festival, and took two days off to go to Atlantic City (I did watch movies on my phone in the hotel room, otherwise this schedule would NOT have been possible.). I'm almost glad to have time off from one job in July, because the first order of business right now is catching up on sleep - then, maybe some videogames. 

THE PLOT: Interviews with George Carlin's family and friends, material from his stand-up specials and footage from his personal archive. 

AFTER: I got into George Carlin's stand-up act shortly after I got into Weird Al Yankovic - and the same way, by listening to the Dr. Demento syndicated radio show.  He played some of the more popular cuts from the "A Place for My Stuff" album, censored versions, obviously - but then I had one friend who I took summer tennis lessons with (before rejecting all sports activities in my life) who owned the whole album, and played it for me uncensored.  When you're a kid and the world of obscene language opens up for you, it's a wonderful thing, at least until you slip up and say one of the "bad words" in front of your parents. 

I didn't dive too deep into Mr. Carlin's history then, to me he was just a funny guy who said funny things, and made a few salient or ironic points along the way.  Later I learned that he was a staple of early 1960's TV variety shows, but then left a lucrative television career to be more of a "stoner" comic and tour college campuses.  Not everybody is cut-out for wearing a suit and being a sell-out on network TV, apparently.  I didn't stop to think that this meant an 80% pay cut for his annual salary - so there were some lean years for the Carlin family, but then between record sales, college tours and later the lucrative world of HBO comedy specials, he ended up doing OK, in terms of money, anyway.  

Like some of the other famous people appearing in my chain this week (Weird Al, Penn Jillette, Rick James) I met George Carlin once, it was a book signing at the big Chelsea Barnes & Noble (now it's a Trader Joe's) in Manhattan, after his book "Brain Droppings" got released.  I'd been a fan for a long while, but my father had recently discovered his work, so I think I bought my father a signed copy, plus one for myself, of course.  I kept giving my father George Carlin stuff for a couple years, but I think he lost interest pretty quickly, it was probably much too liberal for him. Like me, George Carlin was a Catholic who figured out fairly yougn that the religion is a bunch of B.S., he just was able to explain WHY much more eloquently than I ever could.  

That's just one of the many routines featured in clips here - as I feared, this film is mostly a rehash of every comedy special Carlin ever did for HBO, but at least they go into his whole history leading up to that point in Part 1 of this doc series.  Carlin wasn't a draft dodger like Rick James, he joined the military but worked for the Air Force as a radar technician, but moonlighted as a disc jockey in Shreveport.  This was all part of his secret plan to break into show business via radio, but before long he was court-martialed for sleeping on duty and was discharged. 

But along with another DJ from a radio station in Fort Worth, Jack Burns, Carlin headed out to California to get jobs in show biz for real.  The two had a morning radio show in Hollywood, playing lots of crazy characters in routines, and then they cut a comedy album together in 1960. When this comedy team broke up, Carlin began appearing on TV variety shows, playing some of those characters, the most famous being the "hippy dippy weatherman".  Any young people in the know got the joke that this character was probably stoned, but it was subtle enough that the old people wouldn't hate the routine.  

Yesterday's film detailed the arrest of Lenny Bruce for obscenity, and it turns out that George Carlin was in the audience that night, and refused to show his ID to the police, so he got arrested too.  He was taken to jail in the same vehicle as Lenny Bruce!  Then in the late 1960's Carlin changed his whole look, he gave up the suits, grew a beard, and wore t-shirts and blue jeans to fit in with the college crowd - this was the time of Woodstock, the flower children and such, but playing to this new audience meant that giant pay-cut and a new life of constant touring, rather than remaining at home with his wife, Brenda.  But Flip Wilson's independent record label started releasing his comedy albums, and by 1972 his touring started to pay off, and the publicity he got for saying those "seven dirty words" in concert didn't hurt.  

Eventually, he was welcomed back to television and hosted the premiere episode of "Saturday Night Live" in 1975. Gee, I wonder whatever happened to that show....  Carlin himself sort of disappeared from the public eye in 1976, and this documentary serves to fill in some of those missing years for us, to some extent.  It turns out his wife became an alcoholic while Carlin was on the road, he sort of demanded that she stay at home with their daughter instead of traveling with him, but that meant spending a lot of time apart, and while she was home drinking, he was out performing and doing a lot of cocaine.  They re-connected at some point, he stopped touring for a while and while most couples probably would have split, they found a way to come back together, which would seem very noble and positive if it also wasn't rooted in addiction and dysfunction - but, who am I to judge? 

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said there are no second acts in American lives, but he never met George Carlin - if his second act was being the hippie comic, his third act was acting, and in the late 80's he started appearing in films like "Outrageous Fortune" and "Bill & Ted's Great Adventure" as the cool, hip, time-traveling mentor.  Then the 90's brought him back to TV with "The George Carlin Show" (which, umm, didn't last very long) and then took over the role of "Mr. Conductor" on the kids show "Shining Time Station" after Ringo Starr left.  

Two big ramifications of his drug abuse, though - looming health problems and also there were a few years where Carlin neglected to pay taxes. Carlin was so in debt with the IRS that he says it took 18 to 20 years of further touring to clear his accounts.  He never complained about taxes, but it probably would have been much easier for him to have just paid them in the first place - but, the upside is that gave him the motivation to keep touring and keep developing new material. I've seen this situation before, in the documentaries about the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead, who created companies around their bands, hired their relatives and then had to keep constantly releasing albums and touring just to raise the money to keep the machine going.  I think it seems kind of rare for any celebrity to make ENOUGH money from a film or an album to just walk away, or maybe this does happen and you just don't hear people talk about it. 

The wheels sort of started to come off the proverbial wagon when he got into an altercation with Vegas audience members in 2004, then went to rehab for alcohol and painkiller addiction.  But after getting sober, his routines started to feature more material about bombings, beheadings, natural disasters and suicide - his wife Brenda had died a few years before, so I suppose you can try to explain away why his material got darker, but also he just seemed to get angrier when he got older.  Anyway, he'd gotten married again in 1998, so being in love didn't seem to help his on-stage mood any.  And then the heart problems finally caught up with him in 2008 - there's already been way too much talk of death here at the Movie Year this week - and the Summer Rock & Doc Block is just getting started - so tonight's take-away isn't that everybody dies, I'd rather focus on the fact that if you live long enough, you may get to re-invent yourself four or five times over, and that's OK. 

I'm still a fan - but I favor mid-career Carlin, when he was just kind of cranky, before he got super-cranky and seemed pissed off all the time.  Carlin gets quoted (and mis-quoted) all the time on the internet now, mostly by people on the left trying to point out the hypocrisy of the people on the right, but try to remember that Carlin himself got pissed off by both sides.  And he may not have said all, or even half of the things you see quoted.  Beware the last ten minutes of Part 2, though, because the editors have placed Carlin's routines over video of things that happened after he died - like footage of Matt Gaetz being an asshole, Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos being assholes.  This is all post-Carlin stuff, and it doesn't seem fair or right to juxtapose it with Carlin's words, what exactly was the agenda here?  Is someone saying that the world went to hell after Carlin died, or was this a failed attempt at irony?  Either way, it's dirty pool.

Also starring Jeff Abraham, W. Kamau Bell (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Chris Rock (ditto), Bill Burr (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Kelly Carlin, Patrick Carlin, Stephen Colbert (also last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Judy Gold (last seen in "The Amazing Johnathan Documentary"), Jerry Hamza, Sam Jay, Robert Klein (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Jerry Seinfeld (ditto), Jon Stewart (ditto), Bette Midler (last heard in "The Addams Family" (2019)), Alley Mills, Hasan Minhaj (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Kliph Nesteroff, Tony Orlando, Patton Oswalt (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Paul Provenza (last seen in "Gilbert"), Paul Reiser (last seen in "Fatherhood"), Kevin Smith (last seen in "Catch and Release"), Rocco Urbisci, Sally Wade, Alex Winter (last seen in "Bill & Ted Face the Music"), Stephen Wright, with the voices of Gary Gulman (last seen in "Lucky Them"), Gillian Jacobs (last seen in "Walk of Shame")

with archive footage of Ben Affleck (last seen in "The Amazing Johnathan Documentary"), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Muhammad Ali (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Walter Cronkite (ditto), Arsenio Hall (ditto), Martin Luther King (ditto), Yoko Ono (ditto), Richard Pryor (ditto), Roseanne Barr (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Jeff Bezos, Lenny Bruce (also last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Donald Trump (ditto), Robin Williams (ditto), Jack Burns, George W. Bush (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Brenda Carlin, Johnny Carson (last seen in "Tiny Tim: King for a Day"), Dick Cavett (ditto), David Frost (ditto), Richard Nixon (ditto), Charlie Rose (ditto), Chevy Chase (last seen in "Windfall"), Steve Martin (ditto), Tommy Chong (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Bill Clinton (last seen in "Spielberg"), Dinah Shore (ditto), Tom Snyder (ditto), Ted Cruz (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Mitch McConnell (ditto), Vladimir Putin (ditto), John Davidson, Doris Day (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), John Lennon (ditto), Mike Douglas (last seen in "Zappa"), Jerry Falwell (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Bryant Gumbel (ditto), Sam Kinison (ditto), Linda Fiorentino, Matt Gaetz, Rudy Giuliani (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Nancy Pelosi (ditto), Ivanka Trump (ditto), Merv Griffin (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Robert Hegyes, Laurence Hilton-Jacobs, Telma Hopkins, Andy Kaufman (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Nick Nolte (ditto), Danny Kaye, Brian Keith, Jacqueline Kennedy (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), Alan King, Larry King (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Colin Kaepernick, Tommy Lasorda, Eugene Levy (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Cheech Marin (last heard in "Coco"), Andrea Martin (last seen in "Little Italy"), Elaine May, Jason Mewes (last seen in "Scream 3"), Dennis Miller, Rick Moranis (last seen in "Streets of Fire"), Elon Musk, Mike Nichols (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Oliver North (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Ron Palillo, Keanu Reeves (last seen in "The Whole Truth"), Mort Sahl, Soupy Sales, Chuck Schumer (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Doc Severinsen, Sam Simon, Barbra Streisand (also last seen in "Robert Klein Can't Stop His Leg"), Dave Thomas, John Travolta (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Fernando Valenzuela, Flip Wilson, Mark Zuckerberg, 

RATING: 7 out of 10 appearances on "Tony Orlando and Dawn"

Can We Take a Joke?

Year 14, Day 180 - 6/29/22 - Movie #4,185

BEFORE: Penn Jillette carries over from "The Amazing Johnathan Documentary" and I'm doubling up (doubling down?) today because tomorrow's movie is a LONG one, a two-parter. It's another film about a deceased comedian, I think you can probably figure out which one, as HBO recently released the 2-part doc, and it slipped right into my chain.  But adding anything makes my chain longer, and therefore that much more difficult to hit the July 4 benchmark film on time.  I think I can still make it - lots of time this weekend for movies, with the theater closed down. 

THE PLOT: An examination of Western society's apparent contemporary intolerance of edgy humor from comedians. 

AFTER: Ah, the conundrum of free speech - you'd think we as a society would have figured this one out ages ago - either you can say anything you want, or you can't, it's one or the other, right?  But then one day somebody asked if you could scream "Fire" in a crowded theater when there was no fire - that's speech with the potential to harm somebody who could get crushed in the evacuating stampede of people.  Besides, the pen is mightier than the sword, right?  You can kill somebody with a sword, but you can also poke their eye out with a pen, I heard that happened at Comic-Con once.  So, OK, no screaming "Fire" without cause, that's a no-no - but it's a slippery slope, isn't it?  What about giving somebody bad directions, or not informing them about the thin ice on the lake?  Then there's hate speech, which is also now against the law.  Suddenly there are a bunch of restrictions on so-called "free speech", it's only allowed if it doesn't hurt anybody?  

Ah but what if it merely offends others?  Used to be, back in the day if you didn't like what somebody was saying, you could just ignore it, or you could champion their right to SAY it without believing it or even agreeing with them.  Those days are gone forever, now if somebody doesn't like what somebody says or how they say it, even if it's, you know, just a JOKE, they try to get them cancelled.  Don't get me wrong, some people DESERVE to be cancelled, especially all the people using their power to get sex, like Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein and yes, comedians like Bill Cosby and Louis CK.  This is just the economics of the marketplace, if somebody is proven to be a creep or physically assaults another person, then the public has every right to vote with their wallets and say, collectively, "We won't watch any other movies or TV shows with THAT person in them."  Or, directed by that person, in the cases of Woody Allen and Roman Polanski.  

But then, there's the court of the legal system, and the court of public opinion. Do people have a right to say, for example, THAT joke by Gilbert Gottfried, about Japanese tsunami victims, it went too far.  Cancel him!  Jokes are jokes, they're not reality, they take place only in the mind, and then when people start regulating humor, they've become the thought police, and by then we're so far from the original intent of the free speech laws that we've basically come full circle.  We started at "you can say anything you want" to "you can't say anything that I don't like" - the ultimate expression of the entitled "ME" generation.  You don't like that kind of humor?  Fine, don't come out to the club, then - or walk out, demand a refund, but then when you try to shut the performance or the club down so that comedian can't perform any more, now YOU'RE the one impinging on somebody else's rights.  There's no "right to not be offended" in the Bill of Rights, it turns out.

But, this is where we find ourselves - thousands of people running schools and campuses trying SO hard over the last few decades to be "politically correct" that they've gone too far, now they try to shut down anything that could be potentially offensive to anyone.  So no more racial humor, religious humor, gender-based humor, or poking fun at the handicapped - sorry, differently abled.  We need humor in our lives more than ever these days, why would anybody want to stamp it out or put any limitations on it?  This shouldn't be a hot-button topic like gun control or abortion, the comedy club should be a safe space where anything goes and nothing is off limits.  

On the other hand, a comedian or cartoonist sometimes learns what the limits of good taste are only by exceeding them - the case in point was the French newspaper that printed cartoons depicting Allah, and this led to the newspaper offices being bombed by terrorists.  They KNEW that it was offensive to Muslim groups to depict their God in a drawing, and they did so anyway -nobody deserves to get blown up, of course, but they knew on some level that the drawing would provoke a response.  Similarly, we had Chris Rock at the Oscars this year make a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's hair loss, and this led to Will Smith getting out of his seat and slapping the comedian in front of millions of viewers. Smith got banned from future Oscar ceremonies, and debate raged over who was at fault, the comedian for telling the joke or the actor for not being able to control his response.  

Social media, of course, plays a role in all this, because suddenly everybody's opinion MATTERS, simply because everyone has an outlet to express themselves, or at least that's what it feels like to many people.  The truth is, you as an individual are just a grain of sand on a giant beach, and your personal opinion matters ALMOST not at all, in the grand scheme of things.  Just remember that you can have an opinion on anything, but you are NOT obligated to share that with the world, just because you can. Instead, just try to relax and see the funny side of things, if you can, because we're not here for a long time, but we can be here for a good time, if you could just find it in yourself to lighten the F*CK up and get over it, whatever "it" is. 

Also starring Adam Carolla (last seen in "Down to You"), Ron Collins, Bob Corn-Revere, Noam Dworman, Karith Foster, Gilbert Gottfried (last seen in "Gilbert"), Lisa Lampanelli (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Chris Lee, Greg Lukianoff, Heather McDonald, Dan Naturman (last seen in "Top Five"), Jim Norton (last seen in "The Irishman"), Jonathan Rauch, Jon Ronson

with archive footage of Steve Allen (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Lenny Bruce (ditto), George Carlin (ditto), Richard Pryor (ditto), Mel B, Martin Bashir, Chris Brown, Nick Cannon (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Hugh Hefner (ditto), Jimmy Kimmel (ditto), Dave Chappelle (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Stephen Colbert (last seen in "The Bill Murray Stories"), Chris Cuomo, Bob Dylan (last seen in "Tiny Tim: King for a Day"), Buddy Ebsen, Mel Gibson (last seen in "Boss Level"), Jonah Hill (last seen in "The Beach Bum"), Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "Spielberg"), Don Imus, Heidi Klum (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Jo Koy, Artie Lange (last seen in "Gilbert"), Howie Mandel (last seen in "Killing Hasselhoff"), Chico Marx (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Groucho Marx (ditto), Harpo Marx (ditto), Marlee Matlin (last seen in "Some Kind of Beautiful"), Gavin Newsom, George Pataki, Steve Perry, Henry Rollins (last seen in "The New Guy"), Howard Stern (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Teller (last seen in "An Honest Liar'), Donald Trump (also last seen in "Tiny Tim: King for a Day"), Robin Williams (last seen in "Spielberg")

RATING: 4 out of 10 public apologies

The Amazing Johnathan Documentary

Year 14, Day 180 - 6/29/22 - Movie #4,184

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

Tiny Tim: King for a Day

Year 14, Day 179 - 6/28/22 - Movie #4,183

BEFORE: "Weird Al" Yankovic carries over from "The Sparks Brothers" to narrate today's documentary.  This would have been a great place to drop in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story", except they haven't finished MAKING that movie yet, so I'll have to catch up with it later.  It's still listed with a 2022 release date, but now I don't know if I'll be able to link to it when it arrives.  I guess I'll have to be satisfied watching the fake trailer they made years ago, with Aaron Paul as Weird Al, instead of Daniel Ratcliffe.  I don't know of any other instance of a fake trailer that ever became a real movie, so it's a chance for history to be made there.  In the fake trailer, Patton Oswalt also plays Dr. Demento, and that's just genius.  I don't often watch shorts before my features, but perhaps I should, more often - the "Weird" trailer from a few years ago fits into my chain though, so I'll watch it four or five times tonight before my feature, please feel free to do the same.  It's the one where Gary Cole and Mary Steenburgen play Al's parents, check it out at your leisure in preparation for the real movie.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcNuiri2dV0

THE PLOT: The story of outcast Herbert Khaury's rise to stardom as Tiny Tim - either considered a freak or a genius, Tiny Tim left no one unaffected. 

AFTER: If you're not familiar with Tiny Tim, you may not be old enough - there's no connection to the Charles Dickens character from "A Christmas Carol", this was a musical act from the 1960's who used that as his stage name, because it looked better and was easier to remember than his real name, Herbert Khaury.  And he was "Tiny" the same way you'd call a man with no hair "Curly" or a man with red hair "Bluey" (Australians only, I think).  

He also wasn't a great singer, but he was a unique singer, and back then, I guess that was enough - he played the ukulele and sang in falsetto, and many people were therefore confused, they'd never heard a man sing with such a high voice, because castrated men singing in the high tenor range fell out of favor after the 1800's.  Herbert grew up as a lonely child but a musical prodigy, who taught himself to play ukulele and violin while listening to records, and then learned he had a high singing voice, which he called his "sissy voice" - his words, not mine.  And when he performed that way, he got a reaction, either good, bad or confused, but either way, people were talking about it.  And they were interested, they wanted to see more, and slowly Herbert found the recognition and attention he'd been looking for in his life.  

The animated sequences here illustrate passages from Tiny Tim's diaries, and his words are narrated by Weird Al - this does give some insight to his personality and mindset.  He had some romantic feelings for another boy when he was a teenager, but the relationship wasn't physical, not in that sense anyway.  Herbert allowed the other boy to use him as a punching bag, and that's about as far as it went - for the documentary, the filmmakers revealed to that boy, now a grown-up man, obviously, about the diary passages, and it was news to him, so in other words, the romantic feelings weren't reciprocated. 

Tiny Tim's third wife refers to him as "half gay", and I guess today we'd call that "bisexual" or at least "bi-curious", but we may never know exactly what she knew, or how Tiny Tim felt inside.  He got married three times, so clearly he loved women, or he wanted to love women, or maybe he just wanted to feel normal, and that's the way he thought he could be.  But even Elton John married a woman once, it didn't last, but it happened.  Tiny Tim married his first wife, Miss Vicki, live on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and it got the second-highest TV ratings up to that point, second only to the first moon landing.  He was a reality TV star before there even was such a thing - and you have to figure if he'd started his career today he'd probably get a nose-job, put on a dress and compete on "Rupaul's Drag Race", or just sing in a high voice on "America's Got Talent" and he'd make it to the third round, at least. 

But the marriage to Miss Vicki didn't last, she wanted to live with him in a house, have children and cook dinner for him, play cards and watch TV, but he preferred life on the road, living out of hotels and going from town to town, always on to the next performance.  This was a form of addiction, perhaps, he couldn't or wouldn't stop making appearances, because that would mean not hearing the applause and just living life as a regular person.  It happens, I guess - you have to figure this happened to the Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead and so many other acts over the years.  If there are any other reasons why the marriage didn't last, you'll just have to read between the lines, I guess. 

Before Tiny Tim hit it big on TV, he started as a street musician, then played at club amateur nights under a variety of names.  After he grew his hair long and started wearing white make-up, he was at least memorable - I think Marilyn Manson got famous the same way, only he had much more of an "edge" to him. By 1959 he was performing under the name "Larry Love, the Singing Canary" in Times Square, at a place called Hubert's Museum and Live Flea Circus - the place had a bunch of side-show acts similar to Coney Island, like a lobster-boy and a woman with no arms who smoked cigarettes with her feet. This led to a steady gig in 1963, 6 nights a week at a lesbian club in Greenwich Village. Five years after that, he was in an independent film singing the high parts in a duet of "I Got You Babe", and this got him booked on the TV show "Laugh-In", and the rest is history.  He came on that TV show with his ukulele in a shopping bag, and performed "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" and "On the Good Ship Lollipop".  He kept the shopping bag as a trademark for some reason, he was still holding it when he sang "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" on TV, and that became his signature song. 

Some people thought he was British, some people thought he was gay, so the only thing clear is that most people just didn't understand him.  It was also a bit hard to tell if he was putting on an act, or dead serious about everything - that's a bit tough with some people, especially those who have trouble socializing with others.  Maybe he was autistic or on the spectrum somewhere, that's also a little tough to determine, was he in on the joke, or just a wack-a-doo? Sorry if that sounds insensitive, but you know what I mean.  

By the 1980's all the TV work had dried up, and Carson wouldn't invite him back on The Tonight Show after a performance of Rod Stewart's song "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" where he rolled around on the floor and had trouble keeping his shirt on.  So Tiny Tim took to touring with a live circus, which is about as far from network TV as you can get, but still, technically part of the entertainment industry.  He had a role in a horror film called "Blood Harvest", for which he wore clown make-up.  There's no way around it, he was just an odd duck, as they say - and he didn't like not being in the limelight.  He died on stage - metaphorically, probably dozens of times, but for real in 1996, while playing at a benefit concert for the Women's Club of Minneapolis. Well, at least he died doing what he loved...

You know, I'm just realizing now what the majority of my documentary subjects so far have in common.  Dick Gregory died in 2017, Rick James in 2004, and Tiny Tim in 1996.  This was not intentional on my part, to start out the Summer Rock & Doc Block with so many deceased subjects.  Hey, the Sparks Brothers are still around, right?  And many of the acts seen and interviewed in "New Wave: Dare to Be Different" are still active.  I followed the linking when I set this chain up, and I found the order that would allow for me to easily enter the documentary chain and also end it where I wanted to.  I assure you that in the next few weeks I'll have some docs coming about people who are still living - but yeah, there will be more dead subjects as well.  For every Wolfgang Puck, there will be a Julia Child, I guess. 

NITPICK POINT: Everyone in this film, including Tiny Tim's close friends, seems to call him "Tiny" for short. Jesus, why not just call him "Tim", for short, wouldn't that make more sense?  Sure, he wasn't born with the name Tim, but he wasn't born with the name Tiny either - people don't call "Weird Al" by the name "Weird", to his friends and family I think he's just "Al", because THAT'S HIS NAME. Calling him "Tiny" just sounds stupid, and a bit disrespectful - are we sure he didn't mind that?  If I knew him personally, I'd call him "Tim", just saying. Calling him "Tiny" makes it seem like his last name was "Tim", and that's not the case either. 

Also starring Richard Barone, Ron De Blasio, Artie Butler, Will Friedwald, Bobby Gonsalves, Wavy Gravy (last seen in "Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation"), Tommy James, Harve Mann, Justin Martell, Jonas Mekas, D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Perry, Johnny Pineapple, Eddie Rabin, Rita Ritz, George Schlatter, Bernie Stein, Tulip Stewart, Susan Khaury Wellman, Peter Yarrow (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"). 

with archive footage of Tiny Tim (Herbert Khaury), Jan Alweiss, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Vicki Budinger, Johnny Carson (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Charlie Rose (ditto), Dick Cavett (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Frank Sinatra (ditto), Bing Crosby (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Bob Dylan (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), David Frost (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Ed Sullivan (ditto), Jackie Gleason, Dick Martin, Ed McMahon (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Richard Nixon (last seen in "Irresistible"), Dan Rowan, Martin Sharp, Donald Trump (also last seen in "Irresistible")

RATING: 5 out of 10 comeback attempts

The Sparks Brothers

Year 14, Day 178 - 6/27/22 - Movie #4,182

BEFORE: This is another film that played at AMC last fall, while I was working there.  BUT, I never took the time to watch the film, except I saw the closing credits a few dozen times, when I was getting ready to sweep the theater.  So, I just put the film on my list and decided to make an effort to watch it when my Summer Rock & Doc Block came around again. 

This is pretty much where I find myself, after three or four years of watching documentaries about rock, pop and other musical figures.  I started with documentaries about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Chicago, The Eagles, Janis Joplin, Chuck Berry, Joe Cocker, George Michael, Michael Jackson, James Brown, David Bowie, The Who, The Beach Boys, Alice Cooper, Twisted Sister, Metallica and Rush - got a lot done that first year. The next year, 2019, I didn't watch any rockumentaries, because I'd covered so many the previous year - that year I watched docs about Mr. Rogers, Jane Fonda, Robin Williams, Joan Rivers, Richard Pryor, Gilbert Gottfried, Lance Armstrong, Eliot Spitzer, Roger Stone, Steve Jobs, Ed Koch, Joan Didion and the Apollo 11 astronauts. In 2020 I returned to form and watched docs about Bob Dylan, The Band, David Crosby, John Lennon, Whitney Houston and Motown artists - then last year it was Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Tina Turner, The Bee Gees, The Go-Go's, Pavarotti, Joan Jett, and Frank Zappa. 

Now, I'm down to acts like Rick James, and Sparks Brothers, among others (to be revealed over the next few weeks).  This is where I find myself - I'm not really a Rick James fan, and I can't tell you one song performed by Sparks.  So, then WHY am I watching this?  Besides the reason mentioned above, that I almost watched this one in theaters, there are some very cool people in this documentary that I know personally, like in the real world.  And one of them is the band's ex-drummer, she's married to an animator who's a friend of my boss, and I know them from San Diego Comic-Con, they came and visited our booth every year, back when we had one.  And if Weird Al and Patton Oswalt like these guys, well, surely there must be something there, right?  

Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode, Erasure) and Nick Rhodes (Duran Duran) carry over from "New Wave: Dare to Be Different".  And a quick birthday SHOUT-out to Jason Schwartzman, who was interviewed for this documentary.  OK, his birthday was yesterday, June 26, but I started watching the film (it's long) late on that date, and finished in the early morning. 

THE PLOT: A musical odyssey through five weird and wonderful decades with Ron and Russell Mael, celebrating the inspiring legacy of Sparks. 

AFTER: Look, I don't know very much about the music industry, how it all works, I'll admit that.  But any band that's been around for over 40 years, they must be doing SOMETHING right, even if not every album or song is a hit, even if they've had some failures from time to time, they're persistent, if nothing else.  And the Sparks Brothers have re-invented themselves and their sound about a dozen times, so there's that, they've always been willing to try something new, there's always some risk involved in art, whether you're a filmmaker, a painter or a musician, and you have to keep your art changing for it to feel alive and current, right?  

Looking back at the Rick James documentary, how he spent decades moving from city to city, from band to band, working at Motown for years trying to develop his sound, then hitting the road for California because there seemed to be a better vibe out there - he was constantly failing, but he was failing upwards, if that's possible.  And failing didn't mean giving up, he stuck with it until he found his place in the music industry, or the music industry was ready to accept him, whichever.  The story of Sparks feels somewhat equivalent, a lot of failing but never giving up, constantly working even if it seemed like maybe things weren't working out - that's not a reason to quit, it became a reason to work harder, and for them to try something different and re-invent themselves yet another time.  That has to garner some form of respect, even if the Mael Brothers never got super-rich or had that one "Sgt. Pepper"-like album that broke wide among a mainstream audience.  

So this songwriting/performing duo, Ron and Russell Mael, has to be important SOMEHOW, if for no other reason than the fact that they've been around for so long, and seen it all, probably twice.  And as the poster points out, they've been so influential on other musicians that Sparks is probably YOUR favorite band's favorite band.  Would there even be a Joy Division, a New Order, a They Might Be Giants, dare I say even a "Weird Al" Yankovic, if there hadn't been a Sparks?  The world may never have to find out, because there WAS a Sparks. IS a Sparks. And somehow they bridge that gap between the 1960's rock of the Beach Boys, Doors, The Who, The Kinks and the synth-pop of the 1980's, like Kraftwerk, Devo, The Smiths and The Cure.  

However, that being said, if it weren't for the fact that I've met their drummer several times, I might not know that this IS a real band.  The documentary is so out there in its presentation, and combine that with the fact that I've never heard ONE of their songs IRL, and it wouldn't be TOO hard to believe that this is all a put-on, that all the footage here is faked or was recently filmed and then made to look old.  Do you remember that part of the "This is Spinal Tap" mockumentary, when the interviewer keeps listing all of the band's albums, and the reviews, and then the band responds to each one by saying, "OK, that wasn't our best album..." or "We were all so high when making that album..."  Well, the majority of this movie reminds me of that scene - and it takes over an hour to go through EVERY Sparks album, because there are 25 of them, and then there's concert footage of songs from that album, or a clip of them on "American Bandstand" (could all be faked...) and this gets tedious rather quickly, especially if you're not already a fan of the band.  

But I'll champion the band's right to make and play whatever kind of music they want, for as long as they want - "rock star" is not a job that anybpdy wants to retire from, because why would they?  Mick Jagger's still out there touring, isn't he?  And he's like 100 years old by now, with no plans to quit.  So why can't Sparks keep going, too?  Or stop for a while, if they want to?  It doesn't really matter to me.  I suppose I should try to stick to musicians I cared about, because the Sparks music in this film just left me kind of cold. Advice to myself, I suppose, to stay in my own lane. 

Also starring Ron Mael, Russell Mael, Jack Antonoff, Fred Armisen (last heard in "The Mitchells vs the Machines"), Scott Aukerman, Beck (last seen in "The Circle"), Andy Bell (Erasure), Tosh Berman, Björk, Les Bohem, Roddy Bottum (Faith No More), Bernard Butler, Adam Buxton, Alex Casnoff, John Congleton, Pamela Des Barres (last seen in "Zappa"), Chris Difford (Squeeze), Larry DuPont, Harley Feinstein, Flea (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Jake Fogelnest, Neil Gaiman, Mark Gatiss (last seen in "The Father"), Gillian Gilbert (New Order), Ian Hampton, Christi Haydon, Nick Heyward, Steve Jones (Sex Pistols), Alex Kapranos (Franz Ferdinand), James Lowe, Earle Mankey, Dean Menta, Hilly Michaels, Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Paul Morley (The Art of Noise), Giorgio Moroder, Stephen Morris (New Order), Mike Myers (last seen in "Spielberg"), Stevie Nistor, Patton Oswalt (last seen in "Eternals"), Daniel Palladino, Katie Pucknic, April Richardson, Lance Rock, Jonathan Ross, Todd Rundgren, Jason Schwartzman (last heard in "My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea"), Amy Sherman-Palladino, John Taylor (Duran Duran), Tony Visconti, Martyn Ware (Human League), Jane Wiedlin (last seen in "The Go-Go's"), Muff Winwood, Edgar Wright, "Weird Al" Yankovic (last seen in "Bill & Ted Face the Music"), and the voices of Simon Pegg (last seen in "Scream 4"), Nick Frost (ditto)

with archive footage of Chuck Berry (last seen in "Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band"), James Brown (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Tim Burton, Belinda Carlisle (last seen in "The Go-Go's"), Dick Clark (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Roger Daltrey (last seen in "Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation"), Doris Day (last seen in "Tina"), Danny DeVito (last seen in "The Virgin Suicides"), Adam Driver (last seen in "House of Gucci"), Jean-Luc Godard, Bill Haley, Bob Harris, George Harrison (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Billy Idol (also carrying over from "New Wave: Dare to Be Different"), Mick Jagger (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), John Lennon (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Jerry Lee Lewis, Chico Marx, Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney (last seen in "Tina"), Elvis Presley (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Molly Ringwald (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), George Segal (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Talia Shire (last seen in "Dreamland" (2016)), Donna Summer (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Ringo Starr (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Jacques Tati, Pete Townshend (last seen in "Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation"), Liv Ullmann (last seen in "Autumn Sonata"), Shelley Winters (last seen in "The Portrait of a Lady")

RATING: 4 out of 10 snow globes

New Wave: Dare to Be Different

Year 14, Day 177 - 6/26/22 - Movie #4,181

BEFORE: It's Pride Weekend here in NYC, as I'm reminded every time I ride the subway, which has essentially been turned into a giant moving gay club for the duration.  And so we're going back to a time where the boys wore more make-up than the girls - the EIGHTIES!  Today I'm celebrating the music of that time, including the Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Joan Jett, the B-52's, The Cure, Blondie, and so many others... (look, I'm not an expert here, I'm not going to parse out which 80's rock stars were gay, maybe all of them?  None of my business, really. Lou Reed? Michael Stipe? whatever...)

Mike Score carries over from "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James" - if you don't know him by name, you may know him as the lead singer from the band A Flock of Seagulls, aka The Guy with the Most 80's Haircut Ever, as seen in the music video for "I Ran (So Far Away)". He appeared in yesterday's film in a clip that was just a few seconds long, but he's interviewed in today's film for a much longer time.  I've added below the names of the 80's bands everybody was in, just in case you're not an expert - it was a long time ago, who the hell remembers the 1980's, besides me?  Where are my fellow 80's kids-turned senior citizens at?  

This is one of two documentaries about radio station in this year's line-up - and for the longest time I had the two films next to each other in the chain, and, well, then things changed around, but it was in the interest of adding MORE films to the line-up, which is always encouraged here at the Movie Year.  This film is about Long Island radio station WLIR, and the other one, which I'll watch next week, is about WBCN in Boston, the rock station that I grew up with, and that other film will go back a bit further, into the 1960's and 70's - but today, it's all about the 80's, so get your hair styled up, put the shoulder pads back in warm up with a game of Ms. Pac-Man and settle in...

THE PLOT: In 1982, a small Long Island radio station battles to bring the New Wave to America. 

AFTER: As I said, I didn't grow up in NYC, so I wasn't familiar with WLIR, but it was kind of like indie rock, the alternative station before there was "alternative" music.  They broadcast out of Garden City, then Hempstead, Westbury, Garden City again, and then finally Floral Park. Please note that the map shown in the film is completely WRONG, it depicts the transmitter somewhere out in the Rockaways, which is in Queens, part of New York City.  Technically, this would be ON Long Island, but it's not what New Yorkers would CALL Long Island - to be considered Long Island, you have to go out past Queens, into Suffolk County and Nassau County, where Garden City and Hempstead are.  On a good day, if the wind was right, and if the station had paid the electric bill for the transmitter, their signal MIGHT have reached Manhattan.  

WLIR started in 1959 by playing a mix of show tunes, jazz and light classical, but switched over to progressive rock in 1970 - and at that time, "progressive" meant Jackson Browne, the Allman Brothers, the Doobie Brothers, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, none of whom would be considered "progressive" today.  Though many staff members moved on to Manhattan radio stations like WNEW, a lot of them stuck with WLIR, and the format didn't change again until 1982, which is when things got interesting.  The station owner gave program director Denis McNamara a choice between "adult contemporary", aka "commercially viable", aka "safe", or new music, and Denis chose the latter.  What's that saying about the road less travelled by?

Things were changing in NYC because of clubs like CBGB's, and things were changing in the U.K. because the punk era was essentially over, and there were a ton of bands calling themselves "post-punk" or "synth-pop" or the hated (at the time) term "new wave". It turns out that "New Wave", the gritty, shocking, raunchy, openly gay, sound that was about to tear America a new one, means absolutely nothing, at least in terms of being descriptive.  It's a bit like learning that the Canadian province Nunavut just means "Our Land", or that Antarctica just means "There are no bears here."  It comes from nonsense, essentially - there were just so many acts breaking out of the U.K. in 1981 or 1982 at the same time that it was regarded as a wave, a 2nd British invasion, if you will, but then when Duran Duran caught on and Billy Idol and Pet Shop Boys and Frankie Goes to Hollywood followed closely behind, the name stuck, and nobody really ever came up with a better term.  Hey, we still haven't named the first decade of the 2000's, and it's been in the rear-view for 12 years now. Collectively, we're all kinda dumb, and there really should be some English language department in charge of this. 

Oh, yeah, and there was this little thing called MTV, which (get this, kids) for YEARS played music videos 100% of the time, and NO reality shows. At all. No "Teen Mom", no "Jersey Shore", no "Road Rules", no "The Hills", no "The Challenge".  Nada, zip, just 3-minute or 4-minute videos.  Umm, yeah, MTV started airing in 1981, and WLIR switched their format in 1982, so most likely they took inspiration from MTV, not the other way around, which this documentary might have you believe.  I'm willing to believe that they had a direct Heathrow-to-JFK connection to import records from the U.K. faster than previously possible, and I'm willing to believe that they broke some songs before the record companies would have liked, but the real driving force in changing the world of music was probably MTV, since suddenly bands had to not only sound good, but also look good, or at least interesting.  

Still, it seems like WLIR was the radio equivalent of an indie film studio, with a constant stream of characters both on-air and off-air.  They worked out of ramshackle studios with an expense budget of zero dollars, maybe on a good day the management might spring for a box of donuts or remember to buy some instant coffee for the break room. I know those situations well - but those people will bond together as co-workers and they had each other's backs, and they all got drunk and got high and fooled around together, I'm sure. Famous rockers were in and out of that studio daily, and security was minimal, fans frequently swarmed the studio if they thought they had a chance of seeing the Pet Shop Boys or the guys from Tears for Fears getting interviewed.  Meanwhile the studio managers were questioning the life choices that brought them there and trying to land better jobs anywhere else.  So I imagine...

WLIR also had the "Screamer of the Week", the station's equivalent to those "Staff Pick" books you see on a special table in the Barnes & Noble.  Each DJ chose a new song or one that hadn't broken yet, and the audience phoned in to vote - which song by New Order, or Depeche Mode or Ultravox was likely to be the next hit?  All this started to catch on, and people were tuning in, which meant that the station was starting to draw advertising dollars away from the giant NYC market.  And that's when the troubles began, the "little station that could" drew a bit too much attention to itself.

It turns out that the radio station's license, which is controlled by the FCC, had been changed in 1972 to a temporary license, due to a previous slow-moving legal battle (they try to explain this in the doc, but it's beyond comprehension, a lot of what I call "legalese".). When WLIR started to draw listeners away from the bigger stations, somebody phoned the FCC or got their lawyers to investigate the station, and they found out that WLIR had changed formats without giving the FCC the proper notice, and apparently that's illegal.  So the "temporary" license was revoked after 15 years of operation, and the station was forced to shut down in 1987.  Really, there's nothing more "rock and roll" than playing rock and roll illegally, right?  Congratulations, you've been running a pirate radio station for years!  

The documentary says that WLIR "never returned", but that's not exactly true, either.  One company took over their frequency, 92.7, and another company started using their call letters for an AM-radio station in Rockland County. But neither of these stations had the same feel, the same on-air personalities, the same bent toward the new wave sound.

Ah, but then there's online streaming - according to Wikipedia, WLIR.FM began streaming online in 2005, with a lot of the same songs and on-air talent from the old station - it's just that by then, New Wave had become "classic rock" and so they mixed in some new music, which by then was called "alternative" - only, alternative to what, exactly?  The streaming lasted until 2020, then that operation got sold to ABC Radio and changed its name to WDARE-FM.  By then almost everybody who listened back in the 80's was either dead or a grandparent - too old to rock and roll.

I wish the documentary had stuck more with the Long Island DJs and staff of the station - after it takes a left turn into the Long Island "club scene", with old person after old person saying, "Yeah, I went to the Malibu Club" or "I spent Thursdays at Spit, Friday's at Hammerheads" it all becomes a little tedious - nobody cares where you drank on which night!  This all goes on way too long and is ultimately pointless.  Same goes for the stories from musicians like Fred Schneider discussing his target audience and the lead singer from Bow Wow Wow regretting her haircut, what did any of this have to do with WLIR?

Also starring Nancy Abramson, Sam Ash, Tom Bailey (Thompson Twins), Ivan Baker, Jeff Carlson Beck, Eric Bloom (Blue Oyster Cult), Delphine Blue, DJ Byrd, Pete Byrne (Naked Eyes), Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode), Miles Copeland, Paul Cramer, Cy Curnin (The Fixx), Gary Daly, John De Bella, Gary Dell'Abate, Ron Delsener, Rick Dobbis, Thomas Dolby, Donna Donna, Larry "Duck" Dunn, Michael "Eppy" Epstein, Wayne Forte, Chris Frantz (Talking Heads), John French (Twisted Sister), Andy Geller, Mark Goodman (last seen in "ZZ Top: That Little O'd Band from Texas"), Jed "The Fish" Gould, Charlie Greco, Tony Greco, Mike Guidotti, Deborah Harry (Blondie, last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Billy Howerdel (A Perfect Circle), Billy Idol, Joan Jett (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Howard Jones, Steve Jones, Jim Kerr (Simple Minds), Bob Kranes, Kenny Laguna (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Steve Leeds, Mickey Leigh (The Rattlers), Max Leinwand, Katrina Leskanich (Katrina & The Waves), Howard Liberman, Eddie Lundon (China Crisis), Annabella Lwin (Bow Wow Wow), Lori Majewski, Ben Manilla, Mickey Marchello (The Good Rats), Bob Marrone, "Malibu" Sue McCann, Paul McGuinness, Denis McNamara, Monte Melnick, Steve North, Susan Ottaviano (Book of Love), Theodore Ottaviano (Book of Love), Michael Pagnotta, Arthur Scott Peacock, Joel Peresman, Mike Peters (The Alarm, Big Country), Matt Pinfield, Julie Price, Nick Rhodes (Duran Duran), Joseph Riccitelli, Seth Rudman, John Scher, Fred Schneider (B-52's, last seen in "The Flintstones"), Carl Segal, Rich Shoor, Bob Shuster, Carol Silva, Curt Smith (Tears for Fears), Darrin Smith, Elton Spitzer, Chris Stein (Blondie, last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Seymour Stein, Ed Steinberg, Glenn Tilbrook (Squeeze), Laurence Tolhurst (The Cure), Midge Ure (Ultravox), David Wakeling, Bob Waugh, Tina Weymouth (Talking Heads), Ray White

with archive footage of Adam Ant, David Byrne (Talking Heads, last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), Bono (U2, last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Adam Clayton (U2), Elvis Costello, Charlie Daniels (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), The Edge (U2, last seen in "Pavarotti"), Jerry Garcia (last seen in "Fyre Fraud"), Eddy Grant, Robbie Grey (Modern English), Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads), Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders, last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Holly Johnson (Frankie Goes to Hollywood), Mick Jones (The Clash), Ayatollah Khomeini (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Chris Lowe (Pet Shop Boys), Larry Mullen Jr. (U2), Jack Nicholson (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Phillip Oakey (Human League), Pope John Paul II, Ric Ocasek (The Cars), Kate Pierson (B-52's, last seen in "The Flintstones"), Prince (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James), Sting (ditto), Dee Dee Ramone, Joey Ramone (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Johnny Ramone, Marky Ramone, Ronald Reagan (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Lou Reed, Robert Smith (The Cure), Bruce Springsteen (last seen in "Tina"), Michael Stipe (R.E.M., last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Keith Strickland (B-52's, last seen in "The Flintstones"), Joe Strummer (The Clash), Neil Tennant (Pet Shop Boys), Sid Vicious (Sex Pistols, last seen in "The Go-Go's"), Cindy Wilson (B-52's, last seen in "The Flintstones"), Ricky Wilson (ditto).

RATING: 5 out of 10 tour managers