Here’s an almost 10-minute compilation of some of the funniest verbal abuse in TV history. It’s an anthology of Susie Green (wonderfully played by Susie Essman) dressing down Larry David’s character on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” from multiple episodes/seasons. Susie may seem unnecessarily harsh, but to be fair, Larry is an insufferably neurotic maniac who doesn’t always make the best choices. Not safe for work by any stretch of the imagination. But no one can sling an f-bomb like Susie Green.
After watching this again recently, I’m happy to report that Judd Apatow’s directorial debut is still as fresh and funny as it was when it was released 8 years ago. Based on a routine that Steve Carrell did back when he was a member of Second City, “The 40-Year Old Virgin” pulls off an extremely tricky balancing act: an extremely raunchy, painfully funny film that also contains a lot of heart. I realize the “raunch with heart” genre has become a cliche unto itself, but Apatow perfected this genre and in my opinion, has a better batting average than most directors.
The scene above is the now-classic scene where Steve Carrell’s 40-year old virgin character tries to fake his way through a bull session with “the guys.” As a late bloomer who suffered through many of these sessions in high school and college, the only thing I can say about this scene is … Carrell’s character pulls it off way better than I ever did. Though I think every guy, regardless of the age they lost their virginity, was in Carrell’s position at some point. And, this is why the scene is a classic.
As a bonus, I’ve also attached the scene where Carrell’s character attempts a hook-up with an extremely drunk woman he’s met at a bar, played by Apatow’s wife Leslie Mann. According to the DVD commentary, Mann prepared for this role by getting s–tfaced with Seth Rogen and having Rogen videotape her so she could later imitate her drunken self for the film. She said it was one of the most painful things she’s ever witnessed, because before then, she said she was under the delusion she was funny and charming when drunk.
Here’s a funny and fascinating multi-part monologue from Henry Rollins on seeing Ratt in concert, long past their prime. The monologue rambles a bit, but is never boring. Rollins not only touches on hair metal, but also on Los Angeles, middle age, the English language, and other topics. Unfortunately, I can only find the first three parts of this five-part monologue, so if you like this, you should definitely check out Rollins’ “Live at the Westbeth” on CD or MP3.
Remember, Ratt s–t’s better than cat s–t … cat s–t’s just gross.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor have emerged as America’s leading satirists of middle-class delusion. “Election,” “About Schmidt,” and “Sideways” were all critical (and sometimes) box-office hits roundly deserving of their universal acclaim. However, rarely mentioned is Payne and Taylor’s first film, the wonderfully acidic “Citizen Ruth.”
Ruth Stoops, the titular hero played by Laura Dern, is a drug-addict and petty criminal who finds out she is pregnant during one of her many stints in jail. Given the fact that she’s had four other children (all under foster care or under the care of ex-boyfriends/husbands), a judge offers leniency if she will abort her unborn child. This raises the attention of a local pro-life group called the Baby Savers who bail her out and try to use the judge’s offer as a call to arms for their cause. Through a series of circumstances, she then winds up under the care of a pro-choice group who want her to promote their cause.
Believe it or not, the degenerate Ruth winds up being the character you root for the most in the film. Dern pulls off the impossible in her characterization of Ruth. She manages to be sympathetic while still acting like someone you’d never even remotely think of inviting into your home.
No matter where you stand on the abortion issue, “Citizen Ruth” mercilessly attacks both sides. While I don’t think Payne and Taylor are saying that all pro-life or pro-choice people are like the characters in this film, they illustrate what happens when activists use people as symbols to “send messages” instead of actually doing something to help the people they’re exploiting.
In addition to Dern, the rest of the cast, which includes Kurtwood Smith, Burt Reynolds, Swoosie Kurtz, Kelly Preston, Mary Kay Place, M.C. Gainey, Tippi Hedren, Kenneth Mars, David Graf, and Diane Ladd (Dern’s real-life mom), all deliver terrific career-best performances.
A wonderfully brittle and nasty skewering of an extremely sensitive topic. If you have a brain, a heart, and a very dark sense of humor, you’ll hopefully find this film as hilarious as I did.
One of the best indie films from a time when indie truly meant “independent” is the 1988 comedy-drama “Patti Rocks.” The film is about a married blue-collar f–k-up named Billy (played by co-writer Chris Mulkey) who is in a jam when he finds out he has impregnated a girlfriend he has on the side named Patti (played by co-writer … and Mulkey’s wife in real life … Karen Landry). Billy enlists the help of good friend and former employer Eddie (played by co-writer John Jenkins) … with whom there is bad blood … to travel hundreds of miles to meet with Patti and help Billy through his crisis.
During the journey to see Patti (which takes up more than half the film), Billy talks a lot of s–t, not only about Patti, but about pretty much any subject you can think of. Billy is obviously an idiot, but despite the X-rated dialogue and s–t talking, he has the maturity of an 11-year old. Eddie is not too far behind Billy, but is definitely the “adult” of the two. Of course, when we finally meet Patti, she is not how Billy has described her and is far more aware of the dynamics between the two of them than Billy is. The result is a sad and poignant tale of a pathologically dumb man-child who sadly, doesn’t have the sense and maturity to grow up.
“Patti Rocks” was extremely controversial when it was released, because the dialogue was too raw for an “R” rating and went out unrated instead. Though, arguably, had it been a major studio release, the film probably would’ve gotten an “R.” In any case, “Patti Rocks” is a profanely funny and cringe-inducing comedy about male sexuality.
When I finally saw it, it was in college during a sponsored event by the campus Women’s Center. I must say, given the politically correct tenor of the times (late 1980s) and the content of the film, it was a ballsy choice on their part and a nice reminder that sometimes a sense of humor prevails among organizations that stereotypically don’t seem to carry such traits.
Some of the X-rated language and humor the film is controversial for is featured in the attached clip. It is not safe for work or kids.
The film is a sequel of sorts to a mid-1970s film called “Loose Ends” (featuring Billy and Eddie) which I’ve never been able to track down. If you can direct me to this film, I will be eternally grateful.
One of the best satirical films of the last 25 years, Mary Harron’s and Guinevere Turner’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious novel “American Psycho” is an excellent mix of comedy, horror, and social satire.
Originally written in 1991, Ellis’s novel was so controversial that the original publisher, Simon and Schuster, decided to let Ellis keep his $300,000 advance for writing the novel and shelved it. The rights were eventually picked up by Vintage (Random House’s highbrow quality paperback division) who published it in paperback. Unfortunately, many of the book’s early critics focused solely on the graphic murder scenes, which … while they are indeed disturbing … only comprise a small percentage of the actual book. A New York Times critic called it “a how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women.” Yes, it’s true that the lead character Patrick Bateman hates women. He also hates homeless people, homosexuals, Jews, African-Americans, prostitutes, his fellow privileged white friends, bartenders, waitresses, his fiance, his mistress, dogs, rats, dry cleaners, live concerts, etc. Just because a book’s lead character is a misanthropic, misogynist a–hole serial killer, doesn’t mean the story, let alone the author, supports that viewp… ah, what’s the use in even explaining this? Look, many people don’t like Ellis’s book for a variety of reasons, but the hysterical overreaction (and sole focus on Bateman’s misogyny, which again, is just one component of his overall misanthropy) was completely misguided and a product of the ultra-politically correct early 1990s. The fact that “Psycho” is now considered a literary classic bears this out.
Interestingly, Ellis later admitted Bateman WAS based on him, but only because like Bateman, he was obsessed with buying and consuming things, which made him miserable instead of happy. From an interview Ellis gave to “The California Chronicle” in 2010 “[Bateman] was crazy the same way [I was]. He did not come out of me sitting down and wanting to write a grand sweeping indictment of yuppie culture. It initiated because of my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself. That is where the tension of ‘American Psycho’ came from. It wasn’t that I was going to make up this serial killer on Wall Street. High Concept. Fantastic. It came from a much more personal place, and that’s something that I’ve only been admitting in the last year or so. I was so on the defensive because of the reaction to that book that I wasn’t able to talk about it on that level.”
Bateman is someone who knows he’s not normal … knows that he is, in effect, a psycho. So he overcompensates by aggressively trying to fit in. Like an alien studying what it’s like to be human, he obsesses over all of the material possessions in his life and others: clothing, cars, food, restaurants, business cards, workout machines, audio-video equipment, pornography, etc. He reads obsessively and expresses all the so-called popular viewpoints in public (anti-nuclear weapons, anti-racism). Yet inside he hates everything and everyone around him, including himself. As Bateman explains, “…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”
Christian Bale delivers, in my opinion, his all-time best performance as Bateman. Leonardo di Caprio and Johnny Depp were once slated to play Bateman. And while I think they would have done a good job, Bale is the perfect choice. Not only is he a terrific actor, Bale is British playing an American with an American accent. While Bale’s accent is impeccable, there’s still something slightly off about it. Since Bateman is a monster pretending to be a human being, Bale’s characterization is frighteningly perfect. Bale said that a large part of his characterization was based on watching Tom Cruise being interviewed on talk shows. According to Harron, Bale told her he was struck by Cruise’s “very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy.”
The idea of having a female director and screenwriter behind the film version of “American Psycho” may seem like a cynical ploy to keep feminist critics at bay. But Harron has always been a terrific director (“I Shot Andy Warhol,” “The Notorious Bettie Page”) and Turner struck the correct balance between the novel’s humor and horror. Overall, the two created a classic and a film, while it got some respectful notices when released, remains severely underrated to this day.
The attached 20-minute plus summary of clips contains many spoilers and also very disturbing violence, sexuality, and language. It is not safe for work or children. But if you have a strong stomach and a highly evolved sense of humor, “American Psycho” is one hell of a movie. It is one of those films that you will not have an indifferent reaction to.
Veteran character actor Harry Dean Stanton delivered what was perhaps the best performance of his career as the burned-out, but principled automobile repo man Bud in Alex Cox’s nihilistic punk comedy masterpiece “Repo Man.”
Key line: “Ordinary f–king people … I hate ’em.”
Other key line (not in this clip): “What are you, a f–kin’ Commie? Huh? … I don’t want no Commies in my car. No Christians either.”
Hands down, my favorite Python bit of all time, this is the Python’s infamous take on Little Red Riding Hood from their concert film “Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl.” The “wolf” … and the wolf’s “handler” … are comic genius … like Ed Wood on shrooms.
Back in the 1970s, prior to the success of TV shows like “Saturday Night Live,” there were movies that featured various comedy sketches instead of a feature-length plot. These movies tended to have a lot of raunchy, satirical, countercultural humor and were extremely popular as cult and midnight movies. The most popular of which were “The Groove Tube” (1974) and “Kentucky Fried Movie” (1977).
In the mid-1980s, “Kentucky Fried Movie” director John Landis tried to replicate one of those classic sketch comedy films with “Amazon Women on the Moon.” The concept was that you were watching a really low-rent UHF station late at night and saw a wide variety of cheesy programming. Like “The Groove Tube” and “Kentucky Fried Movie” (as well as a typical episode of “Saturday Night Live”), many of the sketches were hit or miss in “Amazon Women on the Moon.”
However, “Son of the Invisible Man” (starring Ed Begley, Jr.) was always my favorite sketch. The concept is beyond stupid, but hilarious. I won’t reveal what happens in this 3-minute clip, but I laugh harder each time I see it. Due to some brief (but non-offensive) nudity, it’s not safe for work. But I promise you, this is really really funny stuff.
The classic Warner Brothers cartoon about a sheepdog and a coyote, who are otherwise friends, clocking in and doing their respective “jobs” of hating each other and stopping each other from doing what they’re supposed to do … albeit being very mindful of the clock. Chris Rock once said this cartoon epitomized the concept of “racism” for many people in this country, meaning that a lot of it is people going through the motions of what they feel they’re supposed to be doing, rather than any legitimate hatred on their part. Which … may arguably be worse.
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