Blog O’ Leaps

BALLS OF FURY (2007)

YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN (2008)

I’m partial to the sub-genre of comedy that, around the heyday of the Chris Farley oeuvre, I termed the “Hitting in the Head comedy movies”. Lord knows, it doesn’t have to be smart to make me laugh. I was just watching some Three Stooges shorts recently, most notably, their only Academy Award-nominated * excursion into face-slapping, Men in Black and experienced the shortness of breath and episodes of dizziness which only coincide with extreme laughter, or becoming overwhelmed by all the helium during the propaganda-oriented commentary on Anthony Mundine fights.

Quite frankly, in the immortal words of cinema-phile Mr T, I “pity the foo’” who derides slapstick comedy, often without knowing what slapstick comedy is **, and sees it as being ‘beneath them’, and then turns around and praises bumph like Seinfeld and twaddly-dee like Frasier as the heights of sophistimicated comedy gold. It’s amazing how often you’ll find the same people doubled over with laughter during inspiration-proof televisual dingleberries such as Australia’s Funniest Home Videos. I put all this down to the spread of too much democracy in the industry, around the time Friends and its cardigan-comedy like began to proliferate, when it was decided that people bereft of a sense of humour needed comedy shows made for them as well. You know, the kind of people who if they ever had to lodge a personals ad, would definitely include the descriptive, “GSOH”. (Which as medical science has since proven beyond doubt, in laboratory test conditions, necessarily means “NSOH”.)

That said, the sub-genre of idiotic comedy movies continues to flourish in abundance, and arguably they’ve never been more insubstantial, nor stupider than they are right now.

The low end of the food chain are those generic titled ones, called Epic Movie or Superhero Movie or whatever, which should all cut their losses and just be called Wiener Movie, with a roman numeral in the title. Or Marketed-As-Comedy Movie, with the disclaimer “Caution – May Not Contain Actual Comedy”. These operate on about the level of a truly uninspired MAD Magazine parody. Sometimes they don’t quite make it to that level, but that appears to be more or less where they’re aiming.

Then there’s the hi-concept ones (which means kind of a fancy-dress party, set in 70s TV news-reading, or 70s pro basketball, or 70s anything, apparently) riddled with whiney, cringing, lead characters, and a supposedly ‘feel-good’ approach, which slowly but surely chokes any attempts at satire, parody, or indeed comedy to death. This is reserved almost exclusively for ex-Saturday Night Live performers, and in particular, Will Ferrell, who has turned them into some sort of bizarre personal cottage industry, rather than ever putting his considerable talents to some worthwhile use.

Also, there’s the gross-out bloke-comedy sub-genre which divide into three or so different strata – the ones with Rob Schneider, the ones about beer and snot from that comedy troupe which has that guy Chandrasekhar in it, and the ones featuring the clean-cut unfunny guys from Saturday Night Live who are all called Will, but not Ferrell. Oddly enough, in between sperm-related attempts at hilarity, these also go the ‘feel-good’ route, according to the Law of Diminishing Returns.

And, of course, there’s the other movie they keep making, where Seth Rogen gets stoned. This movie has one advantage over most of the others, in that Seth Rogen is inherently a funny man, which he had better be, considering they keep making the same movie with him in it over and over again.

What I need out of a stupid comedy movie, which most of these don’t do, is a consistent, funny, point-of-view, no matter how idiotic that is. In writing, directing and performance, it needs to be informed by some guiding intelligence, even if, in this case, the term ‘intelligence’ is used at the most giddy, ridiculous and knot-headed end of the spectrum.

This is why I respect Adam Sandler. While they knocked him for it, and despite the general excoriation of some true clunkers he was responsible for (the animated one about Chanukah comes insistently to mind), he just kept on making silly, inconsequential, hitting-in-the-head comedy movies which had no excuse for their existence other than the oddly idiosyncratic nature of their own light-headed foolishness. When he proved he could be a serious actor, and major box-office, he still went right back to making the stupid movies when he knew the high-minded general reaction would garner him a face-full of crap. Why? Because it’s a CALLING. The guy has a rare gift for doing dumb Adam Sandler movies. A dumb Adam Sandler movie is unlike anyone else’s idiot comedy movie. It’s nice to know the guy is essentially, for however else he’s developed and matured as a person and all that guff, the same happy-go-crackers grinning goofball who looked like he was having a whale of a time hooning around with his mates on Saturday Night Live being silly for a living. He’s the major auteur figure of stupid comedy.

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is, bless it’s pointy little head, yet another entry in the long-running series of Adam Sandler movies in which people get hit in the head and fall over in funny ways. Yeah, it’s got some well-intentioned stuff in there about Israelis and Palestinians forgetting their enmities and “just getting along, people”, but when their ultimate aim in teaming up is depicted as being the defeat of famed boxing ring-announcer Michael “Let’s Get Ready to Rummm-baaaaalllll” Buffer, it’s hard to take it too seriously, and you’re not meant to take it too seriously.

In fact the gift of the Sandler movies (the real ‘core’ Sandler pix, not the ones in which he’s playing a romantic lead for the big box-office pictures opposite Drew Barrymore or whoever) is that they use the feel-good template for structure, but there is patently no obligation on the part of the audience member to take that stuff remotely seriously either. In a late-breaking shock development in modern comedy movies, the Sandler Stupids are about making you laugh. I’m guessing it won’t catch on as a trend, but it’s nice to have them around.

In Zohan, the funny stuff is the running gag about the Israeli obsession about hoummos, anything else about foodstuffs, the gags about parents, Sandler’s wayward obsessions with toilet and groin-related humour, particularly anything to do with the rear-end, the running gag where he shags the Lainie Kazan character in front of her increasingly traumatised (fully-grown) son, (and Kazan is tremendous in this, as she has been in other comedy movies like My Favourite Year – you wonder why more comedy movies don’t sign her up), and the great stuff about the Israeli-run electronics stores in New York, which will produce gut-shaking bellows of laughter from anyone who’s ever run into recalcitrant, somewhat shady or less-than-helpful staff in this retail field. The basic premise is Sandler’s character is a brilliant Israeli commando who decides to retire and pursue his true ambition of being a hairdresser in New York City. You can see where you’re not meant to take this stuff seriously at all. John Turturro is also funny as his Palestinian counterpart, something vaguely in the eccentric line of his widely-enjoyed performance as the Hispanic bowler in The Big Lebowski. The gags about his fast-food franchise are a constant source of joy.

Don’t get the idea that this is great. It’s a dumb but enjoyable framework to support a lot of gags, a surprising amount of which are funny. Both its bizarreness and its sense of silliness are consistent, even if the quality of the writing isn’t, and that’s probably what makes it work. It kind of falls apart at the end, or, as is customary for movies these days, at its many endings. In the end, I thought it was feel-good, not because of the feel-good stuff at all, but because it made me laugh like a drain here and there.

Balls of Fury is a movie about a ping-pong playing FBI or CIA guy (I can’t remember, and I’ve just seen the movie, which tells you how vitally important the plot of stupid comedy movies is to me, and also how memorable THIS movie is) who due to some evil James Bond type villain’s nefarious schemes, has to defeat the latter at ping-pong, or something like that.

It looked ingratiatingly idiotic in the trailers. Well, once again we learn that with the vast majority of comedy movies, all the funny stuff is in the trailers, and it’s often funnier than when it turns up IN the movies. (Diverse as they may be, Spies Like Us and Muriel’s Wedding may hold the all-time achievement record in this field. In both cases, having seen the trailer, there is absolutely no point in proceeding to watch the movie. However Muriel’s Wedding is a rare case indeed – not only does the trailer hit all the major high points, but it’s actually a superior KIND of movie to the full-length version.)

There’s just nothing here at all, other than breathtaking cynicism. Once again it leans on the standard feel-good “We want the hero to succeed, get the girl, and defeat the creepy bad guy, but only when things get to their lowest ebb can he proceed to triumph” template, but can’t summon the consistency of tone to either milk it, Will Ferrell style, or pat it on the head fondly and generally place it carefully out of the way of the comedy, as in the Adam Sandler approach. It wants it both ways and gets neither.

The tubby guy (Dan Fogler) who’s the hero is kind of ingratiating, and that’s about all she wrote. He’s kind of trying for something in between Seth Rogen and Jack Black, and doesn’t have the sarcastic edge and delivery of the former, or the energy of the latter. I can’t recall him being funny in the whole picture.

The guy who is funny is Christopher Walken as the kind of Fu Manchu type villain. Any super-villain type who makes a grand entrance in full cape and villainous headgear and then makes the opening statement to the assembled masses, “Okey-dokey, Artichokey” is funny, particularly when played by Christopher Walken. It’s also funny when he concludes the same speech with the memorable farewell, “Toodles”.

Apart from that, he looks funny and the delivery is great, but I think he gets about one other funny line in the picture.

Basically, there’s good-stupid and bad-stupid, and Balls of Fury is just stupid. Diedrich Bader is a funny comic actor who gets too few opportunities to show it in general, and manages to be funny working with nothing in a minor role in this. There’s a couple of very attractive female performers in there, one of whom should consider investing part of her salary in the odd can of soup in my opinion. That’s about it. It pretty much works on the level of those parody Wiener Movies mentioned earlier.

The Love Guru was panned by pretty much every straw vote on the planet, (and I think some folks dropped in from Mars to make up the weight), and Mike Myers was written off into some sort of Andrew McCarthy/Emilio Estevez forgotten star netherworld, never to darken the doorways of mass consciousness comedy stardom ever again.

Having seen it, I couldn’t begin to imagine why people had reacted that way, right up until the point where I realised they probably just didn’t get it. Mike Myers’s schtick, in the pictures he really has some control over, is a kind of amiable but extreme eccentricity of point-of-view, grounded by the odd knowing depth-charge of show-biz satire. You go with the flow or you don’t. He doesn’t always pointer all the gags for you like other comedies do. In the Austin Powers movies, people could hang their hats on the James Bond deal. The accessibility of the Wayne’s World movies was provided by a routine familiarity with suburban bogans who were into old-school rock (you either were one, or you knew one), and/or 70s and 80s rock itself.

Myers’ genial obsession with self-help gurus of dubious provenance and insight in The Love Guru doesn’t have the same easy touchstones for a lot of the audience. Also, unlike the main characters in those other movies, his Guru is a little off-putting. The viewers were left to fend for themselves with his idiosyncratic, head-bent comedic viewpoint. They probably just didn’t get it. ***

The Love Guru is actually a fairly funny picture. It meanders all over the joint, despite maintaining a nominal nodding acquaintanceship with the stock-standard feelgood comedy picture template, or “The Ferrell” as modern researchers could now term it. (The Guru has to motivate a failing star ice-hockey player, for reasons which elude me due to both poor memory and not caring at all.)

Along the way, he flirts with a few rather MTV-inflected comedy takes on Bollywood musicals, rather funnier and more mildly berserk than everyone else’s Bollywood imitations. He manifests a funny running gag about his obsession with outdoing his rival, the real-life self-help guru Deepak Chopra, and thus his obsession with appearing on Oprah. Ben Kingsley turns up as his instructor, under a very Carry On movie name, which is a funny use for Ben Kingsley in itself. Myers’ Indian accent comes and goes like the proverbial Karma Chameleon (this is also a built-in gag). Various other real-life celebs wander in and out. There’s a very funny gag early based around Myers’ mantra which he blesses his Hollywood devotees with, capped off with another funny celeb guest appearance.

That’s a classic piece of “You get it or you don’t” Mike Myers comedy perspective. Possibly the keynote one, which is kind of the whole picture’s humour in a nutshell in a way, (well that, and the peek-a-boo nature of the Guru’s ethnic origins) and I don’t think is ever “punched up” during the movie, is that the star ice-hockey player is a black guy.

On the “ehh” side of the ledger, Mini-Me Verne Troyer is back, along with all the nut-punching gags, and midget-related humour, a minority of the latter being quite funny and some of it also broad and naggingly insistent enough to be verging on uncomfortable. The guy from The Colbert Report does a routine as an “inappropriate” ice-hockey commentator which should have been a lot funnier than it was, and maybe would have been if Fred Willard, whose role in Best in Show this was fairly obviously based on, had been hired instead.

In the centre-column, Jessica Alba is certainly decorative as the nominal female lead, and that appears to be about as much thought as went into the enterprise.

However, on the upside, the grindingly-unpleasant bodily functions material which “flowered” so insistently in the second and third Austin Powers pictures has, happily, largely gone missing here. It’s strange – with Sandler, that’s an integral part of his weird little comedy worldview and, kept to a dull roar, it works. With Myers, the gross-out stuff almost always seems extraneous, forced and laughter-challenged, and sometimes even in relatively small doses.

Anyway, The Love Guru, much to my surprise is as silly as a wheel in a good way, amiably loopy rather than a bucketing laugh-fest, but has just about enough gags to get you through. But if you just don’t like Myers at all, forget about it.

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On the industry-acknowledged, international smash-hit MPHOAH scale:

The Love Guru………………………………..6.5 out of 11 MPHOAH

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* (Yes, that’s true, and it was THOSE Academy Awards. It was the first of their “Dr Howard, Dr Fine, Dr Howard” epics. It also has a notably more anarchic approach than their more typical later “these guys are just screw-ups” short pictures.)

** (If all someone has to say about Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton is “I don’t like slapstick comedy” they’ve got nothing to say to me or anyone else about comedy movies or television. It’s like saying you quite like architecture, but you’ve never enjoyed design, concrete, glass, foundations, or buildings in general. Anyone who can’t see a difference between Laurel & Hardy (the virtual foundation for all character-tension based TV sitcoms) and, say, Abbott & Costello, and who pulls the “Eurgh - slapstick!” card to ward all of them away equally, has nothing to say about comedy at all, end of story. Everyone knows the saying about those who don’t know history being condemned to repeat it, but in this case if you dismiss the history, you don’t repeat anything - you pretty much wind up in an empty corridor, which you get to stand in for life. You might as well take out that personals ad where you talk about your “GSOH” and make it official.

*** (A classic example of the value of a touchstone in this kind of context - and/or some viewers flailing hopelessly without one - is in the Guest/Levy ensemble series of semi-improv comedy pictures. On a mass-market level, the most popular of these is, inevitably, Best in Show. Why? Well, probably because it was centred around cute dogs. Just about everyone gets cute dogs. To me, it’s not the best-balanced, paced, or, arguably, funniest of these movies. The stuff with Parker Posey and the guy playing her husband is tedious domestic squabbling, and not remotely funny. Although the movie is enjoyable, (hilarious when Fred Willard/Jim Piddock and Jennifer Coolidge are on), one of the central flaws is that Chris Guest’s role in it is meticulously observed and thoroughly portrayed, but it’s just not funny. He’s hilarious in Waiting for Guffman and For Your Consideration, and slyly funny in a ’straight’ role as a humourless pedant in A Mighty Wind, particularly when teamed with Michael McKean in the latter. A Mighty Wind gets a lot closer to the blend of comedic and dramatic elements, with a growing tide of irresistible underpunched humour, that they are shooting for than Best in Show does. It’s a better-constructed, funnier movie for mine. And For Your Consideration, they drop the boot into, and go openly for comedy more, with a torch’n'burn approach to show-biz satire which has both gusto and an evil eye for accuracy going for it. But people don’t ‘get’ the naff end of the 60s folk-scene, or the tragicomedy of small-town theatre, or the inherent cheese of fringe Hollywoodiana, like they do cute dogs and “Isnt it funny how dogs resemble their masters?” stuff. The other subjects, they have to be gently led to, flattered and pampered with a lot of developmental information, and then have the gags pumped to arena size before they come around. The Guest/Levy pictures don’t play that game, they lay the stuff out there, don’t punch the gags, and you take what you can get from the smorgasbord. Which is precisely why the cute dogs picture went over bigger than any of the others did.)

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LIKE EXCALIBUR IN THE STONE, DIGIT REMAINS FIRMLY LODGED

So, from what has been said in the media, Richmond is fully committed to Terry Wallace staying on as coach, but according to RFC president Gary March, has a ‘contingency plan’ in place for Season 2009 in case he goes.

In something that didn’t exactly come as the greatest shock since it was last revealed that ANYONE was having an affair with Senator Gareth Evans, coach Terry Wallace indicated he had no intentions of resigning. Given that an argument could be advanced that Terry’s greatest demonstrated abilities were, respectively, getting a coaching job and keeping one, this is hardly out of character.

So if Terry’s got no intention of resigning, and Richmond is committed to Terry Wallace staying on as coach, why would you need or have a contingency plan allowing for his early departure?

Verily, this is what Yul Brynner aptly described in the motion picture The King and I as “a puzzlement”.

The ever-thoughtful Mr March further allowed that in his considered opinion the Richmond team was playing poorly (four losses from four games, including a stunningly disoriented display against the previous consensus choice for 16th best team in a 16 team competition might, if anything, indicate a degree of understatement in Gary’s chin-stroking, judicious summation there), and that clearly “something” needed to change.

Well, if they’re stuck with the players (and they are), and they’re not going to change the coach, one wonders what he imagines that “something” might be. Incorporating more volleyball in the training sessions, to improve reflexes? Encouraging the players to drive to training via an alternative route to give them a different perspective on things? Sitting around hoping the AFL brings back the old VFA Second Division so that Richmond can find a level of competition appropriate to their currently demonstrated abilities?

All of these alternatives seem, err, ‘limited in scope’, to be kind.

The only more terrifying thought for Richmond fans than the notion that the coach has completely lost the ability to connect with players in any meaningful way (i.e. the “way” that results in improved on-field performances) and has nothing more to offer the club – a notion seemingly not entirely unsupported by the prosecution evidence of “Rounds 1-4, 2009”, especially when compared with results achieved by the same coach and player group in 2008 – is the idea that he IS connecting with the players and that this is EXACTLY what he has to offer the club.

Either way, I’m struggling to find any available alternative to the belief that if you were a fan of this football club – and I am, but I’m trying to pursue this logically, while a skerrick of logic still remains available to a defeat-addled brain – you wouldn’t want the hierarchy to just pull the finger out and pursue the only immediate ameliorative measure available, and replace the coach whose efforts patently aren’t working, with another one who might improve matters.

I might as well be honest and say if it were me, I’d ditch Terrific Terry right now, and put Wayne Campbell in there as caretaker for the rest of 2009, on a suck-it-and-see basis. He’s there already, he did some assistant coaching type stuff at Footscray, he was a smart player – not to mention club captain and a Richmond man, the latter always being my preference re Tiger coaches – who showed a good football brain, he seems a good communicator, and age-wise he’s about right for these days (i.e. in terms of being able to relate to the player group, without necessarily being best buddies). If it doesn’t work out, you fish around for someone else at the end of the year. If it does, you’ve found your new coach, and he’s already had the best part of a season to get up to speed.

Right now, there’s nothing to lose. Literally nothing. As in, wins-on-the-board, points from all available AFL games this season to date, NOTHING WHATSOEVER. Unless he’s the only person there who can operate the office coffee machine, I’m struggling to think of a single rational reason why you’d keep Terry Wallace on as coach at this point, and wouldn’t already have said, “Well, it’s been real, Terry - be careful with that door on the way out, or it can give you a real whomp on the buttock-region.”

Otherwise everybody sits around with their thumbs up their cabooses losing game after game while Gary March and the Marchettes try to come up with that elusive “something” that will turn things around, which going on the usual performance of the Richmond brains trust, will turn out to be “something” along the lines of changing the flavour of the sausages at the sausage-sizzles. Actually, that might be too precipitous for this administration. They’d probably just try to change the sizzle.

(The Hobart Mercury had a somewhat less expansive, but nonetheless pungent analysis of the Richmond coaching situation, as can be seen below.)

REELING IN THE YEARS – THE DENIS PAGAN STORY

Denis Pagan has put his paw up and said he’s ready to be an AFL coach again. Quick imaginary straw poll of everyone who thinks this is a brilliant idea. Likely positive response – 1 (D. Pagan). Size of survey – 20 million.

Denis Pagan is absolutely ready to coach again at AFL level, and to great success as well, provided the side he coaches is full of experience-hardened, high quality North Melbourne players who he’s known all of since pups, and every other team in the league commits to playing late-90s football with late-90s players. Putting a guy of Pagan’s age in charge of a current AFL team of young guys he’s never dealt with on a football or personal level – well this seems to have ‘genius’ written all over it, much like building a multi-million dollar new home and lacing it with asbestos.

How well did he go last time with a team of non-North Melbourne, non-proven, non-star players? How would he likely go now when we’re all a few more years down the pike, and football is as well? The most charitable interpretation you could put on it is that it’s hardly a safe bet.

I know this is the AFL where it’s always “Anything Can Happen Day”, and everyone ignored all precedent to give Carrara a second crack, but if we accept that, even in such a truly Bizarro World kind of context, there must be some sort of limit, I think we might have just about reached it here.

Maybe it’s a coincidence but you may have noticed that in the last five grand finals, there was only one coach even vaguely approaching Pagan’s age, and that was Leigh Matthews back in 2004, and his side lost. This may represent something of a trend.

(Before that, there were three grand finals in a row featuring older coaches, but one of them in 2002-3 was Matthews, arguably the best coach of the last 20 years at that point, and the other was Mick Malthouse, who lost. The odd man out was Kevin Sheedy, and he was in the middle of a dynasty type of situation at Essendon, in that he was on a McHale-plus length run and virtually unassailable as coach at the time. And in football terms, 2001-2003 is a long time ago now.)

I’m sure there are tons of discarded former coaches who would like nothing better than another crack at the top level, but most of them have the sense to keep their mouths shut about it, or more particularly the sense to sense when time has passed them by.

Denis Pagan is known for his work with young footballers (stemming from his very successful days as a coach in the old Under-19’s competition) and can probably coach juniors until he’s just too worn out to do it anymore, and decides coaching the roses in his home garden would be a preferable option. Why he’d even put his hand up to coach in the AFL serpents’ nest anymore is beyond me, but somewhat like the idea of a personal teleportation device to beat that morning public transport crush, it’s just doesn’t seem a realistic option right now.

VALIDITY OF POINT NOW DEPENDENT ON IDENTITY OF SPEAKER – IT’S OFFICIAL

When I went to The Age website early this week (Tuesday, 21/4/2009) I read this, by Caroline Wilson:

“[Eddie] McGuire was quoted in Friday’s Australian thus: ‘It is more a philosophical concern about the future of the game. We are not sure who is in control of the direction in which the rules and interpretations are taking us. Who is in charge? Is it the football department, the commission, the umpires, the laws of the game committee?’ He was speaking about his club’s agenda for tomorrow’s talks on his concerns for football’s future. Fascinating. It could also be described as Collingwood calling yet another meeting to whinge about umpires. Not that the Magpies are alone.”

I know Caroline’s gimmick * is personalising stories, breaking news, and, for want of a better description, not being entirely backwards in kicking up a stink. That’s all fine, of course – that’s her approach (and hardly hers alone), and there’s more than enough other parties in the footy media playing the straight bat, keeping untidy matters neatly swept away from the public eye, and otherwise showering the football public with a fair amount of blandness, eyewash, and a confetti of statistics.

However, it tends to mean that she’s not as focussed on a deeper or more meticulous analysis of the football issues raised as a result of the general uproar (sometimes one she herself has helped kick up), in terms of a detailed exposition of the various viewpoints raised, let alone evaluation thereof. This may be one example.

Eddie McGuire’s point about “the direction in which the rules and interpretations are taking us” is something that has worried me and plenty of other football fans (and probably commentators, coaches, pundits, players, ex-players, talkback callers, and maybe the kids who sell the ice-creams as well) for some time. “Who is in charge?” Good question. On the evidence to hand – i.e. the matches themselves and how they wind up being umpired as a result of “who is in charge” – WHY those people are still in charge is another valid question.
And Caroline, with nose firmly to the grindstone – and it’s particularly grinding on this occasion – determines out of all those possibilities, that the real issue can be summarised as:
“Fascinating. It could also be described as Collingwood calling yet another meeting to whinge about umpires.”

And, from the broad, sweeping possibilities of everyone finally getting their heads around the dismal blancmange of a miasma of a problem that the administration and application of the games’ laws has become, and maybe DOING something about it, we devolve to a little personal name-calling about Collingwood. **

Not that everyone other than Collingwood fans doesn’t enjoy a little of this practice, but to me this seems like the thin edge of the wedge on this occasion. Now let’s see. We could take on a major problem that’s blighting the game itself, and is urgently in need of addressing, or we could ignore all that and just bag Collingwood.

It seems like the easy way out, to put it mildly.

It’s not even a decent, solid bagging. Not when you follow up “Collingwood calling yet another meeting to whinge about umpires” with the classic each-way bet of “Not that the Magpies are alone.”

Ah, so it’s not a Magpie-specific issue now? Something fundamentally changed in between one sentence and the next, apparently.

Maybe if a lot of people are having a go at how the game is being umpired – and admittedly, this is a longshot – there could just barely be some sort of a problem with how the game is umpired.

Maybe instead of “whinging”, Eddie McGuire was raising legitimate concerns about both the process of how the rules and those vexed and widely loathed “interpretations” are arrived at, administered, and how they are allowed to play out in practice. In that, I’m going to take a wild guess that he would certainly not be ‘alone’.

But knocking the whole debate down to whether Collingwood is whinging again is certainly a handy way of stifling those concerns entirely.
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* [I use “gimmick” here not as a pejorative exactly, but more in the language of pro wrestling, to describe the extent and nature of a public persona or characterisation, and that person’s work, because it’s an exceedingly convenient piece of jargon which has ready application throughout the media.
Derryn Hinch’s “gimmick” is that he exploits news items to try and “get himself over”. (More pro wrestling speak, but I think you’ll gather what it means from the context. Or as John Blackman aptly put it in Hinch’s more prominent, and nominally more public-spirited days, Hinch’s gimmick is that he’s the “Fire-hydrant of the underdog.”)
Tony Greig’s gimmick, in the Channel Nine cricket broadcast context, is to act antagonistic towards the Australian team and inflame the fans.
Mike Sheahan’s gimmick in print is that he frequently raises various – and often rather odd, and/or difficult to define ‘major issues’, tries to put them over as ‘major issues’ apparently because he’s the one that raised them, and then ponderously comes to some supposedly bold and forthright conclusion, which is not-infrequently undercut and undermined by him having an each-way bet all the way through the article.
My gimmick is that I knock stuff and go for laughs.
I suppose I’m using “gimmick” as a jargon-oriented synonym for “approach”, but as, in its pro wrestling coinage – derived from the more general ‘carnie’ speak that most pro wrestling language is, no doubt – it takes in both the public persona and the resulting work, it does seem such a useful and apt term.]

** [I find the “Fascinating” there so tremendously cheesy and patronising. If you’ve got something to say about Collingwood, don’t leave it stuck in your muzzle, let fly with both barrels. If the points raised by McGuire were valid – and no matter who raised them, they were, and emphatically so – they deserved a little better than being squatted on firmly, and covered with a load of “Fascinating.”]
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DANCING THE LIGHT CHOOKTASTIC

Or

A WISHBONE TOO FAR

Or

SOME RUBBER AND DEAD CHICKENS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS VIDEO - HUMANS GET A PASS

In my real life job as a freelancer for The Age newspaper, I write a weekly column about the coverage of sport events and issues in the media, so let’s talk about one of those right here – the notorious North Melbourne rubber chicken simulated sex video.

Media coverage on this issue on this issue has involved a great deal of rapid-fire kneejerk reaction, and conspicuously less in the way of anything resembling considered thought.

The party-line assumption leapt to, whether rightly or wrongly, was that the video artefact concerned – featuring a rubber chicken dating, then having “sex” with, then “murdering”, and then having more “sex” with, a real dead chicken – promoted the degradation of women.

Well, it could be interpreted that way, absolutely. It could also be a particularly cloth-eared attempt at footballer humour which tumbled off the bus of good taste. It could be bored people with too much time on their hands having fun with chickens and parodying pop videos. Maybe all of the above. Such is the broad church of attempting to interpret ‘popular art’, or whatever you’d call the twaddle in question on this occasion. *

However, the response, also through the media, was all one-way, and very much the classic one of the day – a yammering clamouring for public repentance. So, first all North Melbourne FC gathered together in the media glare to express group contrition, and then the players responsible for the video appeared on “The Footy Show” to express more contrition. Public expression of contrition is football’s growth industry here, regardless of code. Wayne Carey, for one, has pretty much got his version honed down to a stage-show by now. **

One might wonder in this, chicken video-related, instance at least, whether the contrition expressed was of deep regret of having done the deed, or the even deeper regret engendered by being caught.

Much of the outrage, and perhaps most of the assumptions jumped to about the video’s content and intent, centred around the accompanying music – a song entitled “Move Bitch” by the hip-hop performer Ludacris. As columnist David Penberthy somewhat wryly noted in “The Australian”, “If they’d opted for Herb Alpert’s ‘Spanish Flea’, maybe none of this would have happened.”

What very few of the people who’ve busily launched themselves into this roller derby buffet of a debate seem to have done is consulted the lyrics of this icon of popular songdom, which are freely available all over the internet.

If they had, they would have discovered that “Move Bitch” is not about exhorting an inert or unresponsive female sexual partner to greater heights of performance, in an abusive or any other way, as seems to have become the common assumption. It’s the standard “I’m a young guy brimming with vitality going about my young vital guy business as I see fit, so EVERYBODY stay out of my way” song, as has been conventional in youth musical culture since “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis, all the way through “Anyhow, Anyway, Anywhere” by The Who, “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, “Anarchy in the UK” by the Sex Pistols, and now to “Move Bitch” by Ludacris, apparently.

Basically, had those tireless toilers at the coalface of pop commerciality, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, been young now, and tried to write an equivalent of “Theme From the Monkees” for an urban African-American audience in the year 2009, the lyrics would have probably come out something like “Move Bitch” by Ludacris.

The lyrics are offensive, invoke violence, and are demeaning to women, no doubt. That said, the song’s not exactly about what people here assumed it’s about – the essence of the lyrics stands firmly in the long-established pop music tradition mentioned above. And “bitch”, apart from the conventional sexist meaning, (which does also feature in the lyrics), is a term used in contemporary urban African-American culture to refer to both males and females who meet with the speaker’s disdain, whether one likes it or loathes it. The interpretation of even the most nominally offensive and commercial of “cultural works” is a trickier business than some people think.

So was the video misinterpreted? Maybe, possibly, arguably not, and not the issue, in that order. The point is, EVERYONE in this society has the right, in theory, to make tasteless, or distasteful, or frankly ’orrible, videos which are open to interpretation. Or radio and TV shows, or magazines, or movies, pop songs, or whatever. It’s basic freedom of expression, or what the American part of our brains calls our First Amendment rights, regardless of the fact that we’re not American. Incidentally, our attitude regarding First Amendment rights is somewhat similar to that of urban dwellers here to inside toilets – i.e. they may not have them, exactly, but they think they probably should.

Footballers don’t sign up anywhere to forfeit such rights. There’s some sort of bizarre chop-suey logic with regard to professional sportsman here – possibly based in some sort of grim diehard Protestant work ethic of the past – that if you play games for a living instead of having a proper soul-destroying job like everyone else does, you have to pay a serious penance for this.

For example, you are apparently expected to magically become a “role model” – an occupation hazily defined at best, and seemingly varying in particulars depending on who is saying it at the time, and to what situation it is being applied.

They also shouldn’t get “too much” money, regardless of the rude financial health of the sport which you participate in, and any reasonable estimate of the going rate for elite sportsmen in a vaguely comparable field.

And they are expected to forego all rights that regular citizens have with regard to being tested for “illicit” drugs. (Performance enhancing drugs are a different matter entirely – one which speaks to the perversion of the sport on a fundamental level. What used to be called “recreational drugs” are chiefly an image-control issue, as far as the sport is concerned.)

Apparently now the right to creative expression, of stupidity or otherwise, is to be appended to the growing list.

Well, the reality is, the North Melbourne worthies concerned have an implicit, if not explicit, right to make their stupid video, the same as anyone else in society does. There’s an issue about whether they should have done so effectively “on the club letterhead”, since, among many other shining examples of foolishness, it was plain to see that the material was shot on club premises. (Still small potatoes in the field of idiocy compared to the masterstroke of posting it on the internet.)

To that extent, they’ve richly earned any umbrage their employer may choose to visit upon them. They did the club no favours by involving the club, and by extension, did the organisation the club is a part of - the AFL - no great service either. On that level, there was a certain amount of fall-out due the perpetrators of the video.

That element of the equation to one side, did the folks who brought us this artefact deserve the condemnation of the general public? Well, I’ll leave that to the general public. I’d suggest that various pundits in the media, and nominal experts interviewed by same would be better off leaving that decision to the general public as well, rather than jumping to assumptions on that score.

Did they even have a right, as professional footballers to MAKE such a video? Well, that’s another question entirely.

FREE MAN’S INALIENABLE RIGHT TO PERVERSION OF RUBBER/DEAD CHICKENS

However any suggestion that, as people involved with an AFL club, they had no right to perpetrate this atrocity, or whatever we’re calling it today, is a nonsense that should be viewed with the deepest of suspicion. They do football for a living. The expectations on their public behaviour may differ for such workers, and both League and club may well expect certain standards of behaviour to be maintained while the player is actively representing them. However, otherwise they have the rights of all other workers and citizens.

Freedom of expression is something Australians readily champion in principle, and often go to absolute water on in practice, particularly when the instance under discussion is widely portrayed as disreputable, or, these days, politically incorrect.

The underlying and fundamental principle behind such freedom – “I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it” – under the pressure of the moment in Australia all too frequently seems to carry the implicit contract rider, “…as long as a majority of right-thinking people agree with it.”

This is obviously a direct contradiction of freedom of expression. You can’t have it both ways. You disrespect and erode that freedom – and very much at society’s peril – or you don’t. Freedom of expression is inconvenient that way. Realistic limits can, and must be set for the benefit of society – such as in the cases of child pornography, incitement to racially based violence, and blueprints for making bombs – but such limitations must be very carefully considered and monitored for essential freedom to remain unimpaired.

Conditional arguments like “But in this case, Item X is just downright horrible and should be banned” or, as was recently the case, “People shouldn’t be able to exhibit artworks like this so close to Easter” are contradictory to the interests of freedom of expression. They are also inherently contradictory to its nature. The underlying principle is not “I defend to the death your right to say anything as long as I agree with it.” It never can be.

Some also don’t quite understand that the erosion of such freedoms is always a slippery slope. It’s not the nature of governing bodies to take an inch when a mile is available, particularly when it comes to censorship. Something as puerile, inane and possibly offensive as a pornographic movie may be today’s item of contention, but, if the public lets the banning of that item skate by (because “In this case, Item X is horrible, and should be banned”) the same legislation may well be used to subsequently ban, say, a movie of controversial sexual content but fundamentally political intent, or a newspaper, or a website, or the music of a certain artist. In fact, I can all but guarantee you it will be. Viewed historically, that’s the way the censorship toboggan slaloms, right down the aforementioned slippery slope.

The pro-banning viewpoint also never takes into consideration that works of art – well let’s say creative works anyway, so as not to stretch a point – even on the lowest possible bottom-feeder level, are open to interpretation. There is no one definitive interpretation of the “meaning” of a particular painting, video, movie, comic or song. No creative production in any medium is inherently offensive, in that sense. It has to be offensive TO somebody to be DEEMED offensive. And the nature of human beings is that all somebodies are a little different from each other. If we banned everything that any individual found somewhat offensive, there’d be a lot of empty space on the newsstands, and we could convert all cinemas to bingo parlours. (Well, up until someone found bingo offensive, probably because of all that “Two fat ladies” business, and then they’d go too.)

If this is true of movie pornography, and it is, it’s also true of some knuckleheaded video about chickens having sex with each other. There is no basis in a society based on freedom of expression for the banning of such items, the prohibition of the making of such items, or the particular proscribing of certain classes of individuals within that society from the creating of such items.

So what do we actually learn from this experience?

Well, it may be argued that time has come due, and then some, to find other things to occupy full-time professional footballers who apparently have rather too much time on their hands when they’re not playing or training. Perhaps a chess tournament, or further study, or something of that nature.

However, there also comes a time, not to defend the indefensible, but to defend its right to exist, if not the absolute NECESSITY of that right, no matter how idiotic or downright horrible the particulars of the “indefensible” may seem. Even as puerile and marginal as the item in question may well be.

Regarding this issue, it may be that all of us, regardless of race, creed, colour, sex or gender, are the proverbial “bitches” who need to “move”, before yet another avenue of freedom is closed to general traffic, and we suddenly find we have nowhere left to move at all.

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* For the record, my own reaction was that you could call it inane or gross humour, but whatever this media bunfight has been, or was meant to be, the question was never an issue of aesthetic criticism. My feeling is that to call the video an attack on female dignity, or an excoriation of women, is drawing a very long bow indeed. It’s a stupid gross-out humour video featuring chickens. In the greater context of various codes footballers’ documented, err, “misadventures” with women, you can see how the over-reaction re the video was jumped to, but it was still a frenzy of over-reaction. They made a meal out of it, quite frankly. Given what happens to them in the video, it was never going to be a good idea to make a meal out of those chickens.

** (Just for the sake of absolute clarity and for the benefit of any readers not familiar with the particulars of this case, there has been no public suggestion whatsoever that Wayne Carey was involved in any way with the rubber/dead chicken simulated intercourse video project, and the reference above was not meant to imply this either. The reference is to the Wayner’s intermittent but highly polished run of previous contrite apologies in the media for various other, err, instances of ‘wayward behaviour’, none of which had anything to do with chickens or videos.)
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GRAN TORINO (2008)

Y’know, for a picture with a lot of extraordinarily serious themes in a deep newsreader’s voice – about racial tension, the legacy of old wars inc. returned servicemen, urban crime and the choices facing the Young People of Today, traditional values vs. modern lack of values, the difficulty of communication between different family generations, and did I mention racial tension at all – I can’t recall the last time I laughed so much at a nominally dramatic movie.

It’s not that the movie isn’t good, either. It’s real good. It’s just that Clint Eastwood, playing the ultimate aging grump is utterly hilarious, and you probably haven’t heard such a comprehensive collection of hand-crafted, traditional quality old-school racial epithets in the world of entertainment from anyone other than Don Rickles in around the last 30 or 40 years.

Trust me – they’re all there. He really knows how to put that little spin of extra grumpy old guy FEELING on them as well. Some nice elaborations on a theme too. I guess I should be all hand-wringing and brow-furrowing about people getting offended by this practice, except:
(a) It’s 100% valid in the dramatic context, without a skerrick of doubt; and
(b) I’m part of one of the racial groups that comes up for a good ol’ fashioned verbal pasting, and I thought THAT was hilarious as well.

So, anyway, once or twice per decade, at least, Clint makes this western where he’s the uneasy, long-fighting, man of action, usually with some dark, horrible secret buried in his past, who’s decided to settle down somewhere. Without intending to, he becomes embroiled in the lives and causes of some good, regular squaresville folk, of the kind he presumably never previously had much of anything to do with during his roaming days on the prairie, or wherever the heck it was he roamed, exactly.

Some bad guy or guys mete out some hideous injustice to the square-john neighbours, or they already have done, or they’re about to, and Clint is soon, reluctantly, and somewhat to his own surprise, back in action-man mode one last time (or from a career perspective, apparently any given number of last times) to put himself on the line to take on the bad guys, reverse the injustice, stand with the ranchers (or whatever it is they do for a living), and then die dramatically, or ride off into the distance, or make a dud like Firefox, or whatever.

Clint’s consistency in following this rigorous policy reminds me of the great popular culture writer Rick Johnson’s one-time review of an early 80s album by the US pomp-rock band Kansas:
“They’ve recorded 1974’s Album of the Year six or seven times now, and they’ve got it down to a skit.”

Of course, Rick didn’t mean that as a compliment.* What I’m saying about Clint is intended as a compliment. He makes that picture great every single time.

Clint made The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider, and The Unforgiven all pretty much out of the same bolt of material, and then he got so confident with the material that he made Gran Torino, and didn’t even have to put horses, prairies, ranchers or the 19th Century into it.

The new version is set in the current day, kind of a small town, or the suburbs of a bigger one, and Clint is a Korean War veteran, with some dark horrible secret buried in his past, whose wife has just died, and that was pretty much his only connection with broader humanity, other than his barber (they have a relationship based on exchanging highly abusive racial epithets to each other’s mutual satisfaction), his dog, and some of the old boys down at the bar he sometimes frequents. His grown son is a wet-end, the son’s wife is worse, the grandkids are horrible selfish meatheads, the local priest is some whiny, know-nothing tenderfoot fresh out of seminary college, the streets are crawling with shiftless, bored and amoral youth in gangs, and even worse, a large family of Asian people has moved in next door.

Clint plays the kind of guy who permanently flies a US flag from the front of his house, and probably has matching jockey-shorts, presumably starched for extra annoyance. He walks tall, wears an expression of permanent suspicion (of everyone) mixed with a certain amount of dyspepsia, you don’t even need to wait around for about twenty minutes of the picture to KNOW that he still keeps guns around the house and to KNOW that he keeps them in perfect working order.

He can fix anything mechanical ever made on the planet including some items that haven’t been invented yet, has more tools in his shed (both literally and figuratively) than any Bunnings Warehouse, and his pride and joy is his early 1970s Gran Torino, which is maintained in the exact condition it was in when it rolled off the Ford assembly line he was working on back then.

He drinks beer on his porch out of a cooler next to his chair. He both chews and smokes ‘baccy. He is the last of his line, and I guess that stands for the character and the bloke playing him. There is not one atom of anything politically correct to be found anywhere on his person. You’d think his kids and grandkids would have to be the stupidest people on the planet, because if any of us had this guy for a relative, we’d alternate between worshipping him and putting the odd couple of beers in the freezer ahead of time to make sure they were at the perfect temperature when he was ready for them.

The local Asian gang is trying to recruit the young guy from the house next door to their nefarious ways, even though he really wants nothing to do with them and would prefer to continue his studies. However, they’re persuasive, not to mention violent. Clint probably wouldn’t care anything much about this, other than the initiation task they set the kid is to steal Clint’s car, which is not exactly the brightest idea any character has had in a movie lately.

Eventually, through the feisty young girl next door (the kid’s older sister) and through the family forcing the kid to come and do odd jobs for Clint to make up for their disgrace at his failed car-heisting attempt, Clint slowly, and tremendously grudgingly, becomes involved with them and their problems.

Soon enough (using that expression in its broadest and most leisurely sense) Clint is checking the guns and riding out to protect the homesteaders, by taking on the ornery hombres who have meted out injustice to them.

You can pretty much fill in any narrow remaining blanks for yourself.

If it’s the same picture all over again, this is a pretty inventive, thoughtful and slightly revisionist variation on the theme, and more than enough of one to make seeing this worthwhile, even if you’ve seen Clint play pretty much the same tune at least three times previously.

Setting it in the modern day is the key – it means the solutions available are less pat, the moral landscape more complex, and the resolutions more impactful.

The slower pace, although deliberate, and even if sometimes leisurely is mostly a blessing as well. The most entertaining material in the film is Clint grappling in a state of permanent perplexity (and sometimes near-apoplexy) of trying to come to terms with the ways of his new neighbours, which are just as traditional as his, although apparently from a completely different tradition (which, of course, in some ways turns out to be not so different at all.) All subsequent developments in the film are based on this relationship, so the material is essential anyway.

But it’s a long film, and in terms of construction where it seems to drag a little is on the downhill run to the climax, where there’s maybe one or two too many additional plot hiccups, and it’s just taken maybe a little too slow. There’s one scene in there in particular, probably because the writer wanted to show the young priest character as, finally, a stand-up guy with his own rigorous moral code, as someone worthy of Clint’s respect, which adds nothing essential to the plot, is a little confusing besides, and would only have helped the shape and pacing of the movie by excusing itself, and later turning up on the DVD extras as a deleted scene.

Other than that, all good, you bet. Clint does it yet again, and does so with the same movie that all his Clintamaniacs have enjoyed so many times before, and perhaps thought they might not get to see him do again.

His direction is sure-handed and as reliable as those well-oiled tools in his character’s garage. How he does this on a schedule where he seems intent on knocking out roughly two movies per lunch-break these days is beyond me. I know Clint’s realistically on a time limit now, but only Woody Allen seems to turn out quite so many movies, and in Woody’s case, you’ve barely had time to remold your face from the look of aghast horror from the last one before the next clunker’s turned up in the arthouses to be inevitably praised by the truly clueless as “His best since Crimes and Misdemeanours” (as if that was any Woody Allen landmark to shout about). In Clint’s case, he’s fighting the trend and still making good movies.

But as fine as his direction is (and he’s probably STILL underrated as a movie director) what you’ll wander away from Gran Torino with is his portrayal of the main character lodged firmly in your skull locker. Clint’s long-since displayed his knack for deadpan humour, but there’s something truly unforgettable and iconic about this performance. That perpetual scowl of confusion and annoyance, that chewing up and spitting out of the words, the perennial irritation verging on an explosion of ill-temper, not to mention an even-handed spray of hilariously delivered foul dialogue for every race, creed and occasion. Trust me, it’s a barn-burner. This may be the funniest non-comedy I’ve ever laughed with, rather than at.

(9 out of 11 on the laboratory-proven MPHOAH scale)

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* (Rick Johnson also used to sometimes quote a similarly-oriented line from the weary schoolteacher character from some sitcom or other, directed to the regular class-clown character in that show, “Your material gets fresher every time I hear it.”
Of course, not everyone gets the humour in this. Once Rick was interviewing the band Loverboy, and told them that his magazine had received this “letter” from a fan of theirs (entirely fabricated), and then quoted them the line “Your material gets fresher every time I hear it.” Interestingly, the band’s guitar player took this as an enormous compliment.)

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Just a reminder that you can hear yer ol’ website Unc, Leaping Larry L, alongside my broadcast partner, Big Stew Farrell, on the radio catastrophe All Over The Shop.

It airs every Thursday afternoon, from 2-4pm on RRR. Those who aren’t in Melbourne can hear it via that live screaming kind of thing, on the RRR website

Otherwise, the previous five shows are available in podcast form at any time, via the same website.

Not forgetting for a second (although I’ve forgotten to mention it for weeks here) Leaping Larry L’s one and only book - Ad Infinitum - a collection of columns sending up TV advertising, which appeared in the “Green Guide” section of The Age newspaper between 2003 and 2006.

This is available for $25 over the counter at RRR (Cnr Blyth and Nicholson Sts, East Brunswick) during office hours, and also via the RRR website. (That will cost you extra for P&H, but they’ll let you know all about that there.)

Currently the book is also available (same price) at Chronicles bookstore in Fitzroy St, St Kilda, and Avenue Books in Albert Park. Buy one and amaze your friends. Or if not your friends, it will certainly amaze me.

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From a comment-post thingo I made under the article (or whatever you’d call it) headed:
10 More Off the Back Shelf:

You also may enjoy this comment I stumbled across, contributed by a blobbing person on the Sydney Sun Herald website, of all places:

Hmm, all I could say in its defence there is that there would be plenty of competition. Most people don’t remember “The Bluestone Boys”. Or “Bingles”. No-one much talks about the one with Jon English in it either. And I think there might have been one with Johnny Farnham in it that was even worse than the Jon English one, if such a thing is imaginable.

From the same comment-thread (or whatever you call it), a comment from reader Tony T:

Don’t forget Let The Blood Run Free, Bligh, Bob Morrison, Brass Monkeys, Hey Dad spinoff Hampton Court and… fanfare! the Aussie version of Are You Being Served.

On second thoughts, do forget them.

Tony’s list of classic Aussie inverse-entertainment gold in the sit-com category is impeccable.

A rock critic once made an observation, re progressive rock and/or fusion music, which went something along the lines of: To rock out in 11/8 time isn’t so much impressive or difficult as it is impossible.

I feel the shows under discussion, when considered individually, or all together (now), achieve much the same effect. Watching any of them, it’s easy to get the impression that producing comedy isn’t so much impressive or difficult, as it is impossible.

Incidentally, for completists in the field of trademark Aussie entertainment gold, the Jon English show was called “All Together Now” and the Johnny Farnham one was entitled “Bobby Dazzler”. In the field of immortal thespian tragedy, next to these, Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” comes over like “Spongebob Squarepants”. And you could make a case, if you really had to, that “Bingles” and others from the list were even worse.

“Bligh” for example, was astonishingly rotten, and featured the supposed cream of the then bold New Wave of Australian comedy talent. I remember seeing just my first three minutes or so of it, and just being frozen in my seat with the sheer appallingness of it, from conception to writing to acting to direction. I went back to it, just occasionally, in that kind of “can’t take your eyes off the car-crash” way, and had my initial impression richly confirmed. It’s a rare creative enterprise that so thoroughly defines its own creative DNA with such determined miniaturism. I mean, three minutes was probably twice as long as you really needed, and you just KNEW the whole show was like that.

“Let the Blood Run Free” is a valid, often-overlooked inclusion. (’Often overlooked’ most probably for the most valid reason - everyone’s comprehensively forgotten it, a distinction it went to great pains to genuinely earn.)

People went easy on it because it featured tried-and-true veterans of the supposedly ‘alternative’ stage comedy scene here who’d never got their big TV break before. But as colourful and energetic, and kind of kid-oriented (whether by accident or design) and nominally a soap-opera parody as it was, it was flat as a tack and never funny. It was a stage conception that needed a well-sozzled audience to generate any remote hint of laughter, and it died reliably and repeatedly in the clinical petri dish of television.

It should never have GOT to television, which brings up the whole area of who makes the decisions, and why what flies under the apparently merely generic description of “Australian TV comedy”, has, over lo these many years, so reliably reeked of stinkitude. (Thanks to the professional wrestling tag-team of Edge and Christian for that expression; and for being so much funnier during their relatively brief run as a team than roughly 97% of Australian TV comedy.)

One might well ask, why limit this to sit-coms? The only reasonable negative answer would regard the expenditure of time compared to the harvested value of further research in this area.

“Three Men and a Baby Grand”, (or was it two? - it’s so hard to remember, and even harder to care), “Fast Forward”, “The Comedy Company”, the possibly even more valueless versions of both shows that followed, “DAAS Kapital” (inventive in format and visual content by Australian TV standards, and still amazingly awful - the level of the fey, stilted, smug, private school/Uni humour of the enterprise being aptly indicated by the title), the sub-MAD magazine parody of that hopeless show on Channel 9 that was meant to bring sketch-comedy roaring back to life a few years back that I can’t even remember the title of, “The Comedy Sale” (two episodes of sheer disaster on Seven, and I’m not even certain that both aired), etc etc etc.
If anyone had any conscience, or the limitless quantities of free time that would be necessary prerequisite to research and confirm, or even care about, this claim, going back now and investigating the supposedly satirical (or whatever were the hopeful claims of the time) majesty of then-lauded items such as “Australia - You’re Standing in It”, “The Gillies Report”, or any version of “The Big Gig” (whether “Re-Jigged” or otherwise) would result in both a magnificently futile treasure-hunt, and the kind of profound embarrassment which would occasion the reddening of all available cheeks in a five-block vicinity.

(a) The writing was, much like the fabled contents of Al Capone’s vault, i.e. not so much disappointing or over-hyped, as just not there;

(b) Gillies as a comic actor was a theatre-restaurant level performer, of a subtlety comparable to a series of walls crashing on one’s scone, and it wasn’t like he had the flair to extract comically fulfilling “bigness” from this trait, like a John Belushi, or a Curly Howard, or anything, he just had the one gear, and that was it. If he ever “got” the difference of appearing on television, as opposed to the stage, I never witnessed that particular epochal moment.

(c) Mike Carlton used to send-up the politicians and featured notables of the day (as well as the standard methods of presentation of those stories, and their media hosts/presenters in a radio comedy segment of the day called “Friday News Review” and his portrayals and the writing were much more apt, surprising and hilarious, on material that wasn’t notably more subtle or less immediate, or really much different in intent, than the Gillies material. The key difference is that Carlton’s impersonations were funny in themselves, sly aural caricatures from an expert mimic, and Gillies was a guy who tried to get laughs by comic Bob Hawke hairpieces, bulging his eyes, pursing his lips, and wiggling hairy eyebrows. The man of a thousand face.

(d) Did I mention the writing? There were serious political reporters of the day writing material at least as funny about the exact same stories, and no less creative, innovative or subtle either.

Most of what’s been issued as “Australian TV comedy” (and I say that’s a purely generic description, because comedy generates laughter, and these didn’t - they’d be more honestly termed “Material presented with the hopeful intention of somehow being viewed as comedy”, although that would be wearing to have to type too often, and also would have expanded TV programme listings to telephone-book dimensions) were thuddingly-obvious, frying-pan-across-the-head, stabs at the comedy of pure recognition (i.e. they’re trying to get the reaction “I KNOW someone just like that” or “Aren’t those politicians JUST like that?”) in which the sheer naked desperation of the approach was only matched, and sometimes, miraculously, surpassed, by the quality and style of performance, not to mention the howlingly empty bucket of writing inspiration.

Folks will say I’m very much down on Australian comedy. Actually I don’t care where comedy comes from, only whether it makes me laugh, whether it came up with something new, whether it was well-performed, it has a definable perspective, it sustains a tone etc etc

As brutal and “unfair” as it may seem to others, to me it’s a fair reaction to what was presented as Australian comedy on television - it simply reflects the weight of the bad vs the weight of the good.

What perhaps brings this point of view into sharper relief is when you try to list the really good Australian comedy TV shows over, say, the last 25-30 years.

In fact, let’s have a bash.

- Mother and Son

A decent sitcom, with plenty of laughs, probably carried to a fair degree by an all-time great comedy characterisation by Ruth Cracknell, with a very solid and well-schooled comedy foil in Garry McDonald - it was overly stagy, to a degree that generated a certain level of cheesiness and a stilted, if not Stilton, quality, but it was sometimes very funny.

- Frontline

A great show by any standards, and one with an unusual amount of both satirical and comedic perspective - only one or two episodes maybe misfired or showed the seams more than was edifying, but the vast majority of it was exceptionally well written and acted.

- The Games

I find these “behind the scenes of the headlines”/”how things REALLY work politically” shows, inc “Yes Minister”, “The West Wing” and a few others, to be inherently somewhat smug and creatively jury-rigged, which to me is somewhat off-putting, but in “The Games” (and the various flavours of “Yes, Minister”) the results are sometimes undeniably funny and apt. “The Games” was flavoured with the more colloquial, laconic approach of John Clarke, and seemed more improvisational and slapdash (it may have been the former, but probably wasn’t the latter) and that made it more digestible to me. (Co-writer Ross Stevenson undoubtedly also deserves credit, as do the other regularly featured performers for adjusting themselves to the style, but it certainly feels like a John Clarke project.) You could say that the area of Australian management of an Olympic Games (or any big sport/entertainment communal project) is/was an easy target, and it’s possibly true, but I think the way comedy works, you get points for generating laughter, and and for the show as a whole “feeling right”, if you know what I mean, and not so much for degree of difficulty. The latter might come into play in aesthetic considerations if the other factors are also present and working like the proverbial clappers, but not if they’re not.

- The Late Show

The D-Gen and friends one - plenty of loose-brained, generally well-performed fun, vaguely disrespectful in tone, and sometimes less vaguely, the kind of mix of inventive tonight show presentation methods and sketch-comedy that suggests “This is TV and we can do anything here”, a philosophy that I’m particularly susceptible to. Some of the linking “hosted” material was a little stiff and some of it didn’t work, but the show had the advantage of the viewer knowing that if something flopped for them, there was something better coming pretty much straight away. It also had an unusually high strike-rate for good material, and a good range of varied comedic approaches within the team. The kind of playful disrespect underlying proceedings had apparently completely dissipated when some of the same principals (and none of the same principles) were later involved in the stridently unimaginative coffee-table chat show-cum-Young Libs/Labor meeting, “The Panel”.

- Hey, Hey It’s Saturday

Almost exclusively a reference to the original show of this title which aired on Saturday mornings. Some long-term showbiz pros (and one younger one, albeit also a showbiz maven of the extremely traditional school) found themselves with a kids show and presumably nobody watching, and made up a show as they went along, apparently deciding that this was the perfect opportunity to ignore all the rules they (and the rest of Aussie showbiz orthodoxy) had previously rigorously followed.

Although words like satire and parody were presumably a million miles from their minds, their idiotic sketches, often shambolic presentation, wisp-thin regular “characters”, and general air of circumstantially-forced improvisation resulted in something very like a parody of kids shows, and conventional Australian variety shows in general. Much like the three pre-Monty Python guys involved with the English kids show “Do Not Adjust Your Set” had independently decided in the late 60s, it seemed like HHIS was made for the sensibilities of those on the programme (and those in the audience who got the gag) rather than any conventional presumption as to what children’s entertainment should entail.

As a result it garnered an audience rather larger, and less demographically confined, than Channel Nine had probably expected, and the kids were laughing right there along with the adult audience.

Greater acclaim was to come with its move to Saturday nights, as Australia’s most successful TV variety show of a time, and also it becoming a genuine institution of Australian television. Its early years as a night time show were still pretty good, and it handily survived the addition of a conventional female foil in Jacqui McDonald, as she was very good in the role, and added spark at a time when increasing conventionalism and the falling away of genuinely innovative ideas was slowly but surely hardening the show’s arteries.

As time oozed on, HHIS perhaps inevitably shed all the aspects (in particular the bizarre, threadbare regular characters) and “Anything Can Happen day” attitude that had made it such a welcome shock to the system, added more and more dull nominally “celebrity” guests and conventional and largely unnecessary segments, and became a part of middle-Australia, instead of what had made it work in the first place, which was that it was APART FROM the middle-Australian entertainment mainstream.

This coincided with, and was probably inherently married if not welded to, the increasing perception of his own star status, conservatism, and apparent self-importance of its host, Daryl Somers. People more familiar with the latter years Somers, and who never saw the Saturday morning run of the show would probably be extremely dubious about this (I can assure you from anecdotal evidence of many, many conversations with people younger than me on the subject) that Daryl Somers was once an extremely engaging, quick-witted, open, amusing and generous TV host, who could, when circumstances permitted (which usually meant when everything went wrong at the same time) be the funniest thing on the show.

The stiff, stodgy, formal compere/admiral that Somers became in the show’s later years, as its success solidified, and congealed the show, was almost unrecognisable from the earlier version. By the time he welcomed Billy Joel, as if a god, to (and I’ll never forget this outstanding cringe in Australian television history) “Our humble little show”, that show was long since a museum relic, albeit a popular one. It had become as Aussie as the proverbial meat-pie, and with all the same entertainment value, not to mention nutritional content.

But the original conception of the show (from when Daryl joined, until it went to nights), and in some ways the conception was that there was no conception to speak of, remains unsullied as an example of just what people can do when they put no mind whatsoever into it, and just go out and have fun, flying by the seat of their pants. At this distance down the track, and looking around at what’s happened in Australian TV since, and now, it seems like it must have been a complete miracle, if not accident.

- League Teams

Put three ex-footballers in charge of a Thursday night show listing team changes for the then Victorian Football League in the 1970s, and you might expect something a little rugged around the edges by pro TV standards, (ex-Aussie Rules players then weren’t all perfectly coiffed, groomed and mannered wannabe media professionals) but you didn’t expect an accidental comedy cavalcade. The show, which seemed to have no clearly defined time-limitations, featured craggy ex-champion footballers and long-time media residers Jack Dyer and Lou Richards, alongside the only one of the three who even remotely had the inclination or ability to host the show and remain vaguely aware of format, Bob Davis. (And, in all fairness, the ability was remote and the awareness certainly appeared to be vague.) It was one of the most entertaining shambles ever to appear on Australian television, and over time grew into a late night monster in which the actual team listings and changes were a barely noted McGuffin, and the show was actually all about the interplay between the three principles, along with Lou’s ancient jokes adapted to rubbish Jack Dyer, Bob’s similar but less frequent ones adapted to rubbish Lou Richards, Lou’s ever-expanding recipe segment which probably never finished a recipe in its history, and came to exclusively feature any foodstuff with the word “balls” in the title (meat balls, fish balls, rice balls, prawn balls etc), Bob’s ill-fated attempts to control the others and keep this mess vaguely resembling a television show, and Jack’s lifelong pitched battle with the English language, any proper names of a non-Anglo-Saxon derivation, and his astonishing, rusted-on, lack of any understanding of a medium he’d already been working in for at least a decade when the show started, much less when it finished.

What was said and implied on this show in casual asides was not-infrequently stuff you couldn’t even refer to in any mass medium of the time in Australia. (Mr Dyer’s casual reference in passing to a Footscray player of the time being known to the cognoscenti as “Jack the Gripper” was an unforgettable example, as was Bob and Lou’s reaction when they realised what he’d said.)

No-one apparently ever informed Jack Dyer from beginning to the very end of this show’s run that that thing over in the corner was the monitor rather than the camera, so Jack perennially sat on one end of the desk staring at a 45-degree angle to “camera-true” over at something none of us could ever see, and his comments would emerge, irrespective of the timing or content of the rest of the show, from the side of his mouth, in a kind of disembodied manner, made apparently to no-one in particular. To plug sponsors Carlton Draught, rather than merely parrot some slogan, Jack would sip away at the old seven-ounce glass right there on camera, while intermittently pursing his lips and grunting “Beautiful” with a fervour that bordered on the pornographic.

As much as it was Bob Davis that kept it vaguely approximating a show, and Lou Richards who kept the energy going and the proverbial volleyball in the air, it was Jack’s disembodied comments delivered from a very strange angle, (and often after five or ten minutes of near-silence) that most frequently popped the home crowd. Even at a distance of decades it’s impossible to forget the night an indignant “Captain Blood” refused to believe that the first name of Melbourne’s Sean Wight wasn’t pronounced the same way as that of the actor who only Jack, in the known world, believed was pronounced “See-Ann Connery”. Bear in mind, purely by way of additional disbelieving comedy value rather than ethnic humour, that Jack, of course, was of Irish extraction himself, and yet had apparently managed to live his entire life without becoming aware of how the name “Sean” was pronounced. And then there was the night he was trying to remember the name of the show his grandchild watched all the time, and finally pronounced, in ringing triumph, “See-Same Street!”

This was basically anarchy nominally disguised as a football panel chat show, and a darn good thing too. It still stands as probably one of the funniest shows in Australian TV history, and one of the most influential too, even if that was completely by accident. (And it was.) It gave rise to all the later “variety-style” footy chat shows, including Nine’s much-later Sunday “Footy Show”, its much more mainstream and successful Thursday night sibling also known as “The Footy Show”, the Sydney rugby league motion cave-painting, also known, with unbridled innovation, as “The Footy Show”, and via extension the one that people inexplicably watch on Channel Ten on Saturday nights which is nominally a humour-based footy show, which isn’t called “The Footy Show” but I’m so filled to the brim with enthusiasm for that I actually can’t recall right now what its name is. Not to mention, (and preferably one wouldn’t) the many and varied attempts by Channel Seven to replicate the success of the Nine “Footy Shows” during the five year period when Seven didn’t have the football coverage, the one thing all of which shows had in common was that they were hopeless. The only thing entertaining about any of them was purely conceptual - i.e. that Seven would have wasted all that time trying, and hopelessly, to ape a format from another network, when that format entirely owed its existence to a show that was from Seven in the first place.

There had, of course, been footy panel shows long before “League Teams”, (Pelaco Footy Inquest comes to mind), but what the various “Footy Shows” were attempting to knock off, and still do to this day, was the mix of personalities and cack-handed, knot-headed banter that “League Teams” had brought to the format. Incidentally, Sam Newman’s first appearances “playing himself” as it were, i.e. the seeds of the characterisation that became familiar on Nine’s Thursday night “Footy Show” were also on “League Teams”, when his peculiar sense of sarcasm and then off-kilter rather than off-the-planet humour became apparent during a couple of fill-ins for an absent Jack Dyer in the show’s latter days, Jack by then being apparently committed to an almost bi-weekly schedule of car accidents. In the style of the show, Jack’s bingles were treated with appropriate concern and respect, by means of the sound-effect of a police or ambulance siren being played whenever Jack’s name was brought up.

That’s about it, at least that I can think of right now. I might have left one or two significant ones out (”Aunty Jack” much as a lot of it doesn’t fly so well these days, definitely would be in there as a genuinely innovative ground-breaker, because of its lack of regard for Australian conventions of the time, and because enough of it is still funny, and it sure was a poke in the eye back then, but this is outside the time-frame I set, of the last 25-30 years. “The Norman Gunston Show” (original ABC run of shows only) - an outgrowth of “Aunty Jack” incidentally - would absolutely be in there, and is again, outside the time-frame. Basically 25-30 years is plenty of time to allow a country to come up with significant comedy shows of any type, without going back to what would now seem pre-historic or antediluvean times to many. (Bearing in mind that to have seen “Aunty Jack” or Norman Gunston in the bloom of their first airings, you’d have to be at least 40-45 years old in one case and not far under that in the other, which excludes a lot of people who presumably also feel they’d like to experience the occasional decade which includes a genuinely funny Australian TV comedy.)

A couple of the shows in the list started at the same time as those shows, but they continued into the 1980s, so fit the bill for time-frame. (You could make a case that Hey Hey, It’s Saturday wasn’t the same show lauded above by the mid-80s, but memory suggests that it still had a spark or two earlier in that decade.)

Seven’s “World of Sport” could “have claims” as the horse-racing fraternity are wont to say, but it was, in intent, a serious show about sport which naturally tended to comedy due to the personalities involved, the mostly happily indulgent approach to encroaching chaos of its avuncular host, (Melbourne) Ron Casey, that inevitable chaos itself, and the palpable lack of caring about hiding its inherent Sunday morning casual lay-about nature. While it undeniably regularly generated a lot of unscripted laughs, the intent was different from its effective spin-off, “League Teams”, where, ‘eventually if not sooner’, it seemingly became apparent to all concerned with the show (with the possible exception of Jack Dyer) that its actual appeal lay in the humour generated, rather than the transmission of information concerning football team composition, which was its nominal reason for existence.

The fact that that’s pretty much all the shows I can come up with, and that “World of Sport” although not a comedy show in intent, induced innumerably more genuine laughs over the years than all of the Australian comedy shows which don’t appear on the list of “the good ones” above, pretty much tells the story.

Australia has by and large, and to put it poetically, been pox at producing good comedy TV shows. A few random strays I may have left out by accident (there was that sort of private eye comedy-adventure show that I think John Clarke may have had some involvement with, that was at least watchable, I just remembered) don’t really change the overall result.

There’s one outstanding plotted/scripted comedy show in there, a couple of pretty good ones, a solid sketch comedy show, and a few happy accidents in the chat/variety show area. The other side of the ledger is filled with a landslide of, not just less successful shows, but amazing garbage that cumulatively most amazes in that it got made in the first place, much less actually got to air. (Admittedly fleetingly in a few cases.)

Interestingly, the middle ground is almost non-existent, or so closely tending to the landfill side of the ledger than any distinctions seem hardly worth their cost in imaginary electrical typeface. Some hail Kath and Kim. To me it’s Kingswood Country 20 years down the track, only with not quite the same general butcher-shop approach to performance, style and direction, and sausage-factory approach to episodic comedy writing. I say to the Kath’n'Kim fanciers, have a look back at it ten or fifteen years down the track, if you dare, and then prepare to be as heartily embarrassed as those tomb-silent folks who raved about The Comedy Company or Fast Forward at the time, and then have had the sad misfortune to revisit them since. But you could make the case that Kath and Kim isn’t as immutably crappy as, say Bingles or Hey, Dad. It would even be true. Personally, I say why waste the typeface.

What do we learn from all this, other than some of you concluding, via impeccable if possibly misleading inductive reasoning that, in the famous words of the boss from Herman’s Head, Leapster is a “bitter old crap-hound”.

We learn what we should already know, prairie pardners.

We learn that for all the excellence Australians may have achieved in the performing, technical, and creative areas of film and television, that our achievement in producing writers hasn’t matched up.

We learn that the executive types who oversee and ok the comedy content for television have no earthly idea, apparently.

We learn that, with very rare exception, innovation in Australian showbiz largely only occurs by pure accident.

We learn that dragging nominally successful comedy theatre-restaurant performers from their natural habitat of the stage, bong-tinged dressing rooms and drinkies-affected audiences, and plonking them within the confines of a television screen isn’t exactly a guaranteed formula for providing limitless TV comedy gold.

We learn that, with regard to scripted shows, having funny TV comedy without the prerequisite of funny TV comedy writing is not so much difficult or impressive as it is impossible.

We learn that, flying in the face of all probability, the opportunity of watching decades’ worth of successful movie and TV comedy from around the world can be entirely wasted on people who either refuse, or have a complete psychopathological inability, to extract the basic principles of what worked and why, from this massive body of examples.

(And placing at their disposal a heaping pile of comedy that didn’t work from the same media and time-frame would clearly be a waste of time for the exact same reasons - they couldn’t extract the key principles from it if they had a detailed instruction manual, with diagrams. To paraphrase another pro wrestling comedy great, the Honky Tonk Man, they couldn’t grab it if it had HANDLES on it.)

We learn, as we do from so many other fields of cultural achievement, that Australians too willingly, too wilfully and too damn early, abandoned the concept of the cultural cringe. Perhaps nowhere more than in the field of comedy, although the general area of Australian movies would probably richly earn a silver medal position in there.

If there’s one thing we learn above all else, or should, it’s the principle that until the industry, all individuals who sail in her, the kneejerk defenders of tripe, and/or good ol’ Aussie viewers, accept both the fact and the degree of failure in Australian TV comedy, then any improvement remains impossible.

Or to put in another way, if you endlessly defend, or idealise, the half-baked, then the production of the halfway-decent becomes improbable, and excellence becomes effectively unattainable.

And did I happen to mention the writing at all?

————————————————————————————————————————————–

In a needlessly generous contribution to my ongoing file of teeth-grindingly irritating instances of popular culture abuse in the mainstream media, New York Times film writer Manohla Dargis has waded in for the proverbial basinful, with her amazing adult fantasy piece about the overwhelming brilliance of Jerry Lewis, prior to his collection of the Humanitarian Award at the Oscars.

While the article isn’t exactly religious about avoiding contentiousness – in particular in the area of arbitrarily-defined “truths” that could conceivably cause spirited debate, if not flat-out belly laughs among both film enthusiasts and regular human beings – it’s the accompanying audio sidebar, in which Ms Dargis attains even more dizzying heights of crackpot romantic whoopsie in eulogising her hero, which really goes for all the marbles and comprehensively loses them.

During this epic pronouncement, we are informed that Jerry Lewis is a “cinematic genius”, that he and Dean Martin first teamed in 1956 and broke up in 1956, and that director Frank Tashlin (who directed some of the Martin & Lewis pictures, and a number of Jerry Lewis’s solo movies) “created” Porky Pig.

Ooooooooohkaaaay.

Err, let’s calm down a little, take a deep, refreshing pill or two, shake the shreds of tattered stratosphere out of our hair, and gently float back down to our Planet Earth for awhile.

(1) JERRY LEWIS THE “CINEMATIC GENIUS”

Well, he wasn’t. Just look at the pictures he directed. While you’re looking, you may well notice that he had a definite, raw talent for making movies, or at least assembling interesting shots, sequences and perspectives from a visual point of view. He came up with stuff that looked and felt different from the typical studio picture approach of the day to similar material. He was ahead of his time in some aspects. In a way, he was an early formula-comedy precursor to Tarantino, in that he was schooled in the movies (albeit comedy ones in Jerry Lewis’s case, and he also had a solid grounding in other forms of entertainment), and he took what interested him from there, but in a way that reacted to (or against) the standard way of presenting those aspects, resulting in a form that was different. *

But it’s a RAW, innate kind of talent, and not one that was ever conspicuously diluted by the diseases of development, progress, or improvement, much less the confidence or ability to subsume a fully achieved style to the cause of telling a story, thus keeping all that style out of the way of the movie.

Look at the movies he directed for yourself and try and decide:
- did he get better at telling a story as he went along?
- did he get better at making the comedy “register” as his career continued?
- or did he just jump giddily from idea to idea and technique to technique like a hyperactive kid (or like his frequent on-screen persona) as the mood took him, on a continual basis?

As a director, his most telling, if not fatal, flaw was his indulgent love of his most frequent (actually, almost exclusive) star, Jerry Lewis. A different director, or even a different editor in charge of final cut, wouldn’t have allowed Lewis-the-star to bring the picture to a crawling halt for minutes on end, mugging and chewing on material that just wasn’t worth the effort. (The scene in The Patsy, with Lewis fumbling around with ice-cubes for what seems like seven or eight lifetimes, while character actors the calibre of Peter Lorre have to stand around looking bored in reaction shots in the background, comes rocketing to mind in this category.) Director Jerry thought that the movies needed everyone to love Star Jerry to “work”, (which may or may not have been right), apparently thought that everyone did love Star Jerry, (which definitely wasn’t right), and, personally, loved Star Jerry so much that he could never shut him down even when he’d traversed all the lines of being simply grotesque rather than remotely funny, and vastly overstaying his welcome in a particular set-up (which would be exactly where the flaw becomes fatal).

I think it’s probably true of comedy that, as an audience member, you love someone a little when they make you laugh. At least at the time. And if they made you laugh a lot of times, after the movie/performance/TV show (or, perhaps, career) maybe you love them then too.

For all the arguments about what French critics, US critics, the general public, you and I, did or didn’t “get” about Jerry Lewis, I think that may have been the one thing he didn’t understand. The important thing was not that the character was pathetic, or sad, or a precursor for Ringo’s on-screen character in the Beatles, or an inheritor of the Chaplin mantle for pathos-in-comedy – the real important thing was for him to make us laugh. And even his most dyed-in-the-wool champions would be hard-pressed to deny that, perhaps outside of The Nutty Professor, there tends to be a lot of stuff – a lot of TIME – in the Lewis-directed Jerry movies, when you have to indulgently forgive or forget a fair old proportion of tiresome exposition, body-clenchingly, cringe-inducing sentiment, and dreary, failed, and obvious comedy attempts, to get to the good stuff. (Let alone come out at the end convinced that that was a rip-roaring movie you just saw.)

As to whether he’s funny or not, that’s a separate issue, and a difficult one to discuss on any sort of rational basis anyway, because the appeal of comedy is not rational in the first place – it speaks to instinct and individual personality, or at least mind-set. If taste in movies, music or any other part of mass entertainment/popular culture is a highly individual matter, “taste” in comedy is even more fraught from the point of view of rational comparison or evaluative discussion, because it’s not really about taste. It’s about what makes you laugh, and there are probably few things more individualistic than that. **

On the surface of things, it’s not really relevant to a discussion about whether Jerry Lewis was a “cinematic genius”, but, more realistically, it’s the whole ball game. Manohla Blahnik Whatserface from the New York Times wouldn’t be writing an entire article about what a maverick artistic tearaway Jerry Lewis is/was if she didn’t laugh like a drain at his pictures. Obviously. Plenty of people don’t find Jerry Lewis funny at all. They won’t be queuing up to write doctoral dissertations on the brilliance of Jerry Lewis’s directorial career. Obviously.

For the ones who fall in between those two poles of appreciation, I suppose the key question on the issue of whether Jerry Lewis was a “cinematic genius”, would be, that, as he was engaged in the production of comedy movies, and the aim of comedy movies is to get people to laugh, did his application of his directing techniques result in better comedy value from his routines, and more laughs.

This is the other area where I think the claims of “Jerry Lewis – Cinematic Super-Genius” fall down in a screaming heap. The most interesting exhibitions of technique in the Lewis-directed movies are usually, if not always, expended on non-comedy material, and the funniest instances of comedy are often in spite of the technique, or just plain “shot flat”.

In the best work of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, or their strange colourful lineal descendents, the Hollywood cartoons, the camera unambiguously served the comedy. In the pictures Lewis directed, the camera serves the whim of the director, and the comedy has to fend for itself. If he wasn’t a great comedy director, then as a maker of comedy films, he wasn’t a great director.

In the really great comedy movies – and I mean “to you”, not even some sort of even vaguely general “consensus choice” – you probably don’t even notice directorial technique, partly because the whole thing just “works” and partly because you’re probably laughing too hard. The last thing you’d think about is that some other director could have done a better job. In Jerry Lewis’s movies, it is possible, if not probable to notice the director’s technique, and not remotely difficult to imagine a less wilful and fanciful, more selfless, impartial, and perhaps even journeyman technician of a director doing as good or a better job of making a comedy movie with the same material, sets and stars. Was Jerry Lewis the best director Jerry Lewis ever had, or was it Frank Tashlin? (The latter a definite non-journeyman, by the way.) Or were some of the many other Hollywood long-termers who fronted Lewis movies not at least as effective in directing such films as Lewis was?

Not to attempt to deny even one person one solitary moment of genuine joy they’ve honestly derived from those movies, (including me), but there’s your answer, as near as there could ever be an empirical one, about “Jerry Lewis – cinematic genius”. He wasn’t one.

As a comedian? He’s got stronger claims there, you’d still get plenty of argument, but, at the end of the day, that IS a separate issue.

If you were game, you could further research such claims by looking at the couple of movies he directed in which he didn’t star. Or you could check contemporary movies in which he was the star, directed by other hands. It all comes out the same in the wash, I think. His movies were individualistic, different, and he had some flair and plenty of ideas behind the camera. A Hitchcock he wasn’t. A Chuck Jones or Friz Freleng he wasn’t either.

(2) DEAN AND JERRY

Our Manohla clearly misspoke in saying that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis first teamed in 1956. That’s when they broke up. There’s no point suggesting that they had a career both as brief and as memorable as most of Australia’s delightful and stentorian run of “quirky” comedy TV series, particularly as produced by the ABC and pay television. But a slip of the tongue is, as the poet hath it, no big whoop. They got together some time in the 40s, and Leonard Maltin’s Movie Comedy Teams book suggests they first met in 1946, and frequently appeared on the same shows before teaming officially, so you can work it from there.

However to discuss at length Jerry Lewis’s career and not to substantially discuss the non-movie exploits of Dean’n’Jerry leaves the kind of gaping hole that even Australia’s #1 Motor Sport Hero/Lunatic, Robbie Maddison, would think twice about trying to jump a motorcycle over. Movie critic Andrew Sarris commented (in his book The American Cinema): “Martin and Lewis at their best – and that means not in any of their movies – had a marvellous tension between them.”

Leaving the ‘marvellous tension’ in the hands of a convenient masseur for a moment, the key suggestion there, and Sarris is not Robinson Crusoe in raising it – is that to see the essence of both them as a team, and Lewis as an unfettered comedy performer, you had to see them outside the movies.

Apparently they were amazing on stage. Well, despite the best efforts of General Motors, CSIRO, and Triple-M FM’s astonishing dedication down the years to a handful of songs by Midnight Oil, Hunters and Collectors and “Great Southern Land” (etc) no-one has succeeded to this point in manufacturing a working-model time machine to bring the past into the present, or, alternatively, to sling us pell-mell into the past. If you weren’t born in the right time or place to see Dean and Jerry on-stage, in their element – and most of us weren’t – then there’s no way of checking such claims.

However, their television appearances (especially on the Colgate Comedy Hour, which they frequently fronted) DO survive, and give – both on their own evidence, and the testimony of others who saw them live and on TV – some feel for how their act might have differed on stage, and certainly a different, broader and wilder perspective on the nature, extent and abilities of Martin & Lewis as a team, and as individual performers.

Boiled down, there’s plenty of weight behind the contention of Sarris (and others). The movies trimmed, diluted, and constricted the extent of what Martin and Lewis did on television, and by likely extension, on stage. They had other priorities, like plot, love interest, imposing characters on Dean and Jerry that had nothing to do with their “natural” stage characterisations, production numbers, and what-have-you. It was a watered-down version. Trying to learn about Lewis’s capabilities and range as a comedian from movies – even a lot (if not all) of the solo ones and certainly the “team” movies with Dean Martin – works about about the same to trying to watch a widescreen movie on a standard ratio TV screen in the days before letterboxing: you only get to see part of the picture. It’s just the same as trying to assess the extent of various key Saturday Night Live alumni’s talents – you actually get a much better idea of their range from watching them stretching their talents (even if sometimes ill-advisedly) week to week on the old TV shows than you do, at least in most cases, from seeing them shoe-horned, if willingly, into restrictive movie characterisations with even more restrictive “things get to their absolute worst for our hero, but then he prevails” standard Hollywood plotting. (See pretty much any Will Ferrell movie by way of example. Or pretty much any Saturday Night Live cast-member’s movie turns, with a very few honourable exceptions.)

The point is, the Lewis & Martin TV stuff is available, and cheap, on DVD, and readily accessible. It shows the knowing, improvisational showbiz side of the performers, (what someone, I think Andrew Sarris, referred to as Lewis’s “Borscht belt hipsterism”) and is immensely aided by the men peeking playfully around the edges of their characters, and sometimes flat-out bolting into the spotlight, if momentarily. It’s something they rarely, if ever, got to do in the movies (although something like Martin’s performance in Kiss Me Stupid and Lewis’s as “Buddy Love” in The Nutty Professor – both arguably as Dean Martin parody figures, interestingly - give at least something of an inkling) and it gives a different perspective on their talents and abilities.

To substantially ignore this area is to distort any discussion of Martin & Lewis, and Dargis NY Times article skated over the entire stage/TV period of Martin & Lewis like she was double-parked. As a comic talent, you can’t discuss Lewis without having seen some of this material. From the article, I’d have no idea whether she has. ***

(3) FRANK TASHLIN “CREATED PORKY PIG”

This is isn’t a little slip of the tongue whoopsie. This is your classic mainstream media “Blow up the libraries, kids!” Stalinist revision, located right on the corner of No Research St and Couldn’t Give A Flying Fudgesicle Blvd.

It’s just wrong. Tashlin was an important figure in the ongoing codification, or definition of the Porky Pig character, and made some extremely stylish pictures with him. A character first identified as Porky Pig appeared in the Friz Freleng (mostly) musical cartoon I Haven’t Got a Hat in 1935. The pig looked different and was not as streamlined in design as the better-known later version, but already had the stutter (voiced by a vaudeville veteran named Joe Dougherty at this stage, before Mel Blanc later took over and refined the vocal characterisation). Over the next few years, a number of Warners directors, including Tex Avery, Jack King, Frank Tashlin and Robert Clampett, featured the character in cartoons, in both the more unwieldy earlier version, and gradually, the cuter, shorter, more familiar version still recognisable today, with transition stages in between. (Elmer Fudd went through analogous changes a little later on.) Frank Tashlin came in around halfway through 1936 (well, thereabouts, his first Porky cartoon was released in August 1936) and doubtless made his contributions to the Porky character as well, along with many memorable cartoons. But he didn’t originate the character, for starters.

The Jerry Beck/Will Friedwald book Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies sez, re Tex Avery’s 1936 cartoon The Blow Out: “The first real Porky Pig cartoon.” Since, in the introduction to that book, they casually mention that they saw every single one of the Warners cartoons in researching it, I’m probably going to go with their estimation, over the casual trouser-scratch type guess of Ms Dargis.

Avery first presented Daffy Duck in a 1937 Porky cartoon, and presented what is generally recognised as the first “finished” Bugs Bunny appearance, in the Bugs/Elmer cartoon A Wild Hare. **** He “had form” as they say, on both refining existing characters, and defining new ones to produce a working template that could be profitably mined for years (and decades) to come.

In his few, but significant years at Warners, Tashlin made probably as many Porky’s as anyone at that time, although Avery made plenty, and Clampett probably made at least as many, although his directing career started a little later on. Both of those would have had influence on Porky Pig’s development, not to mention others (animators/storymen) at the studio, and Ub Iwerks (Disney’s animator/director who some suggest contributed at least equally if not more to the credited Walt Disney on the early Mickey Mouse cartoons) also directed a fair amount of the early Porky cartoons. Tashlin would have been a significant part of that process as well, not only in defining the character, but in making arguably the most significant run of Porky Pig starring one-reelers in his brief mid-late ‘30s heyday as Warners’ unchallenged star character.

But Friz Freleng first presented the character, before Tashlin was even at the Warners cartoon studio (aka Termite Terrace) and Avery had already defined him on screen, possibly before Tashlin had produced so much as a single frame there.

In the actual article, (as opposed to her audio comments, which I’m mostly writing about) Manohla Dargis notes of US critics and audiences, “It doesn’t help that comedies, cartoons and children’s movies rarely receive the respect they deserve here.” Yeah, I know exactly how she feels. Some folks can’t even be bothered to look up a history book before writing about that stuff.

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* [Entirely parenthetically, this is the exact same approach that the Ramones (or the Cramps) took to music in the 70s. They took the elements that interested them from the past, ‘reacted’ to/against the more conventional presentation of that past, and expressed them in a fundamentally different way, which you could make a grandstand claim “suited the temper of the times”, and it might even be true, but the truth is, it probably suited their own temper. Actually, you could say the same thing about Sam Phillips and Sun Records 20 years or so earlier, except that Greil Marcus already did, in the book Mystery Train.]

** [I guess I deliberately avoided pulling the trigger in the main body of this piece/response/thingo on the obvious subject of whether I find Jerry Lewis funny, because I thought whatever I said would distort the main issue, and lead off to various side-tracks. Now I guess I’ll prove that.

“Sometimes” is the true, if wishy-washy, answer to the question. I’m neither a dyed-in-the-wool fan, nor someone who never-eh-eh-EVER finds him funny. In terms of extremely obvious comedy, I find someone like Curly from the Three Stooges, or Lou Costello (of Abbott fame) more “naturalistic” for want of any better word, because to me their mugging feels more like a natural outgrowth of their on-screen character. Lewis was more versatile than those guys, which is both an advantage and a curse. You can’t really imagine Curly or Costello as anything but those characters. That’s limiting, I guess you could say, but it means everything they do “feels right” for the characters, which within the area they’re working, means they have total conviction on their side. (And whether or not you find their respective kind of schtick funny, the one thing beyond dispute is their total immersion into the character.) Lewis you can sometimes, if not often, see “trying”. (“Don’t…try…so…hard!” is something the very funny Kathleen Freeman repeatedly hisses at him between clenched teeth in The Disorderly Orderly – a motto the real life Jerry could have arguably profitably adopted.) What he’s doing is often so infantile, there is an inescapable, very recognisable divide between the character he’s trying to portray and the 30-something professional comedian/director who’s playing it. He’s often funnier, to me, doing vaudeville “bits” like his punchdrunk fighter routine, or the occasional shrewd-eyed, parodic, showbiz in-stuff, than he is doing the physical comedy that was his supposed stock-in-trade. To me he’s not one of those guys who’s “just funny” like Peter Sellers, Chevy Chase, Stan Laurel, where I’m already laughing before they even do anything. He had a whole scene to mug and carry-on and be Jerry Lewis in the comedy-movie-about-comedy Mr Saturday Night, and it was wild, but I thought Billy Crystal’s one underplayed killer line in that scene was way funnier than all of what Lewis did. I think he’s spent a lot of his career coming determinedly from the “More is Less” school of comedy. But you’d have to be an idiot, or at least venomously partisan on the issue, to say he wasn’t a funny man. There’s plenty of stuff in the films, and certainly on the TV tapes, to show he was funny. And if he wasn’t a Chaplin, or a Keaton, or a Groucho or a Harpo, or a W.C. Fields, well, outside of those guys, who was?

*** [My best guess would be she hasn’t. How could you have seen that stuff and not commented on it? Again, as time wears on, and the standards get lower and lower, you increasingly find people writing whatever they want about the movies/television/music/whatever of the past and getting away with it, because their readers don’t know any better (which is understandable), the writer him- or herself doesn’t know any better (which is inexcusable), and the people/publications who employ them don’t know and don’t care, because it’s popular culture, and, unlike finance, general news, politics, sport or anything else in a newspaper, it’s all opinion and nobody cares if you get that stuff right or not (the exact nature of the problem, and a cast-iron guarantee of uselessness.) A prime example of all the above is the audio sidebar to the article which prompted this rant by me, not to mention the article itself – largely a pile of hosanna-festooned, insubstantial horse-hockey, often miles off the point and deeply in need of a long taxi-ride back to reality, which is largely an extremely indulgent attempt by a Jerry Lewis fan to turn work she enjoys into some sort of monument to creative, iconoclastic, ground-breaking cinemaaaaah. Which it isn’t. She’s working harder for less return than he used to.]

**** [As with many animated cartoon characters from around that time, the genesis of Bugs Bunny (and Porky Pig for that matter) is not as clear-cut as the late-comer, tin-pot, “I’m a film expert, so it must be true”, tenderfoot types would tell you. A prototype for what kind of became Bugs Bunny appeared in a cartoon called Porky’s Hare Hunt (1938). There’s a Bugs-type mock-death scene and the weird little white rabbit in it even says the trademark “Of course you know this means war!” line in it, apparently. (I can’t recall ever seeing it.) In voice and characterisation it’s apparently a fair way from even the earlier “finished” version of Bugs Bunny. That cartoon was directed by Ben Hardaway, whose nickname was “Bugs”, hence the studio description “Bugs’s Bunny”. (Not particularly difficult to see how the name evolved from there.) Hardaway co-directed a 1939 cartoon with Cal Dalton, called Hare-um Scare-um, which also featured a hunting theme, and this time, a two-toned goofy-looking little mad rabbit, and already included a scene of the rabbit mock-begging the hunter not to shoot him, and another where the rabbit cross-dresses as a female dog to confuse the hunter’s male dog. Early 1940 saw the release of Elmer’s Candid Camera (directed by Chuck Jones), which had a recognisable Elmer Fudd, in an unusually non-bloodthirsty switch, pursuing a rabbit with a camera. The rabbit looks a lot like the pre-War Bugs Bunny design they were soon to arrive at, is more of a wise-acre and wise-cracker than the completely lunatic (and more Daffy Duck-derived) earlier versions, but probably doesn’t have quite the same speech patterns and delivery as what was to come, nor is there quite the definition of the roles of the two main characters. But it’s a recognisable prototype of Bugs Bunny, and the Bugs and Elmer cartoons. Later that year (still 1940) brings us A Wild Hare, the Tex Avery version of similar material, and the one that everyone hangs the shingle on as the official first Bugs Bunny cartoon. (The Beck/Friedwalder book sez: “The classic cartoon that solidified the personalities of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd and became the blueprint for their future encounters.”)

About the only thing we do know for sure after all that is that Frank Tashlin didn’t create Porky Pig.
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As someone who grew up reading comics, I’ve enjoyed the run of superhero movies ram-raiding the megaplex box-offices over the last ten years or so. *

Well, I’ve enjoyed the idea of it, at any rate. I don’t go and see every last attempt to bring the Marvel and DC comics legacy of the past to a broader audience.

(a) I don’t need to, because I already read the comics the first time around (or for older, mostly 1960s ones, in reprint) and the impact of those combined stories and images worked just fine for me on low-grade paper and four-colour printing. Adding in big money name actors, millions of dollars of sets, the latest hi-octane computer-scribbled effects etc etc doesn’t necessarily “bring them to life” for me, it’s just more of a pleasant reiteration, at least when it is a pleasant one.

(b) Some of those comics weren’t that great **, and/or some of the movie adaptations of them sent out a clear warning odour that kept me well clear of the danger of actually spending money – and more critically, the time – on seeing them.

One would think at some point, this cycle of superhero movies will come to an end. For one thing, that’s what cycles inherently do. The suspicion lingers that there will always be the occasional superhero movie regardless, because “comic-book superheroes” *** have now been subsumed into the mass culture, as yet another genre, or sub-genre, that movies can readily sell to the general public. And, if this cycle does die away, probably assisted into oblivion by the proliferation of less careful, more rote, and generally underwhelming superhero movies amidst the fewer solid ones, there will probably be another run of similar movies somewhere down the track.

Hollywood rarely completely discards previously successful genres, regardless of how anachronistic they might seem at a given time. We’ve had a run of successful pirate swashbucklers in the recent past, and the odd western (such as 3:10 to Yuma) still pops up from time to time. What the unshakably media-clueless now insist on basically defaming as “Sci-Fi” had quiet times after separate runs in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but always seems to come back, and is probably established as being about as mainstream as any other genre now.

What we learn from the present superhero picture cycle, if anything, is that the comic book creators and fans of the past were right, and the mainstream (of entertainment, and its largely and happily comics-ignorant consumers of the time) were wrong – i.e. this style and content of storytelling, concerning super-powered (or at least “preternaturally-abled”) heroic adventurers saving the world while wearing elaborately designed underwear – WAS viable as a mass entertainment. There was nothing inherently limiting it to a particular audience, usually if not invariably caricatured as pimply pre-pubescent males, loner teen wallflowers, and, in the 60s and 70s, bong-addled US college students. Whether the appeal of this kind of material works on a level of appealing to the pimply pre-pubescent male within all of us, is a heady strain of deep thought I’ll leave to attention-seeking TV psychologist types. (And it’s something I don’t really buy for a minute, incidentally.)

The key point is that what artist/writer Steve Ditko (and perhaps editor/packager/publisher/dialogue editor-adjustor Stan Lee, to a degree ****) conceived as concepts, stories and approach for the early 60s revisionist superhero Spider-Man was proved to still be perfectly viable to appeal to a general audience when the characters, story arcs and inherent tensions he/they generated way back when, were strip-mined (along with the work of others ++) for the three Spider-Man movies of the 2000s.

The entertainment mainstream was slow on the pick-up. Perhaps it could also be said that this genre more than many others needed the special effects capabilities of movies to catch up with the imaginations of its original creators.

That’s one thing we learn from the last ten years (or so) of superhero movies.

One that we perhaps don’t exactly learn from this cycle – although it’s a perception that this run of movies has heightened, at least for me – is that the mainstream of entertainment in general, and movies in particular, finally tapped/drained/subsumed the last genre “native” to comics that hadn’t already been exploited.

Within its own mainstream, comics had largely followed genres popular in the movies. Going back in time to when comics (and I’m mostly talking comic books, rather than comic strips – the latter by dint of the nature of their publication, i.e. in newspapers, always being inherently “more mainstream”) were read by a larger proportion of the population, they included pirates, cowboys, science-fiction (generally of the space-opera variety probably familiar to most via the Star Wars pictures from many years later), crime, romance, etc etc – all genres which were familiar via the movies, television, and going far enough back, radio serials.

The things comics had to themselves, or at least generated to be aped by other media, were basically “funny animals” (i.e. humour-oriented strips or books featuring anthropomorphised animals), and superheroes.

They didn’t have funny animals to themselves very long. “Krazy Kat” by George Herriman may have set a template as far back as the 1910s – an undeniable precursor to Tom & Jerry, the Roadrunner and Coyote and so many others of the same ilk, not to mention being paid dutiful, direct homage in Itchy & Scratchy from The Simpsons – but almost as soon as there were animated cartoons, there were funny animals there, and realistically that was the mainspring of the genre after that. (Comic strips are, again, a somewhat different case. Also, there were some very talented people – Carl Barks’ work at Disney on Donald Duck titles being as obvious an example as any (he invented the character of Unca Scrooge, among others) – who created memorable, worthwhile work for comics in this genre. However the reality is that nobody thinks of Donald Duck as a comic book character FIRST. It’s an animated character from the Disney movie shorts. Actually, these days, it’s a highly profitable design that appears on babies’ plates and drinking utensils.)

The great comic strip creator Winsor McCay already saw animated cartoons as the perfect vehicle for his Gertie the Dinosaur character as early as 1914.

The funny animals continued to be a popular and viable genre for comics for decades, if not most of a century afterwards, but it was no longer “comics’ own”. The time when it was pretty much boils down to a decade and a half near the start of the 20th Century.

Speaking of genres, it’s difficult to “type” the early comic strip series, which go back to the turn of the previous century. (Although this is simplifying, comic books per se weren’t really established as a successful publishing vehicle until the mid-1930s.) Many of them were effectively the precursors of what became, in movies and television, situation comedy. Wilder, perhaps, and less restricted in terms of content by the limitations of the medium, but recognisable templates nonetheless. This was not a genre that comics ever really had to itself, at least not for any length of time.

Others were certainly wild and fanciful, and as inherently “of their medium” as any done since, but even something as off-the-charts and flat-out amazing as Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in Slumberland” has its precursors in illustrated children’s books, particularly in the fantasy genre. In subject matter and even to an extent, approach it’s not something that was unique to comics. (McCay’s particular expression of it was, absolutely, but not the raw – or, if you like “canonical” content, considered in purely generic terms.)

This pretty much left superheroes. +++

What became the generic comic book superheroes were born of the pulp magazines, some of fantasy/science-fiction pulps, (Superman’s creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster were SF pulp readers) and others of the crime pulps (Bill Finger and Bob Kane’s Batman is the obvious comics prototype here). Characters like “Doc Savage” and “The Shadow” were obvious influential precursors of the (initially comic strip and then…) comic book superheroes.

It’s a historical thread that you can no doubt read about elsewhere in copious, and multiple, detail on the electromophonic interweb, and would take up far too much space to go into here, not to mention that it’s been far more thoroughly delineated by other hands. (There’s also the whole Buck Rodgers/Flash Gordon stripe of primal superhero types, which I tend to regard as a juvenile – in a publishing designation sense, not a pejorative one – science-fiction outgrowth, rather than the comics superhero mainstream per se, but both undeniably came to fame as comic strip entertainments, prior to their movie serial immortalisations, and I’m sure they were influential, at least to a degree.)

Intermittent, fitful, and sometimes highly successful adaptations of comic book superhero material to radio, movies and, ultimately, television go back almost as far as the superheroes themselves. But in terms of a consistent, sustained and successful approach to exploiting the comic book vision of the superhero genre to the widest possible mass audience by another medium, the current ten-year cycle of superhero movies is pretty much “It”.

Comics, as in what we now know as the comic book, will doubtless continue as long as there are still entertainment media, and whether they do so on increasingly ritzy paper, soaked in eyeball-bending (and to be honest, not always that appetising) 3D-modelled colour and visual effects which weren’t even a publisher’s most insane dream in either the Golden (‘30s/40s) or Silver (60s) Ages, or whether they do exactly the same thing exclusively via computer monitor and/or portable electromophonic reading devices, they will still be comic books.

But unless someone comes up with another one in the future, ++++ they won’t have a genre that they “own”. Desperate wannabe pop culture “pundits” in the newspaper arts sections might not have realised yet, but everybody else does – comic book superheroes have long-since flown off to join the mainstream now. It may also be the case that the last medium-specific 20th Century genre hold-out in existence has finally come in from the cold.

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* [The 70s/80s Superman movies and the 80s/90s Batman ones don’t count as part of the current cycle, by my reckoning. Not only due to chronology and creative approach (although I think both of those provisos are probably true as well), but because these weren’t part of a general trend of bringing a genre previously somewhat cloistered from the entertainment mainstream to a mass audience, as Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man and the later, “new era” Batman movies were. Superman and Batman are both characters which long-since transcended their medium and genre to enter the mass consciousness. They are, and were, the perennial strongest survivors among the original comic book superheroes, with a time-tested mass appeal that others had not manifested. (For example, Captain America dates nearly as far back as both, being a Joe Simon/Jack Kirby creation of the late 1930s, but failed to ever make a similar impression on either movies or television to Superman/Batman, and at times has not been viable as a success in comic book form, which was certainly not true of Superman and Batman.)

In other words, the 70s/80s Superman and 80s/90s Batman movies were exploitations of an already proven commodity, in a manner in which viable comic book properties were “improved”, bent, adapted, warped, to fit the accepted mainstream adventure movie format of the time. (i.e. “Plus or minus so many degrees ‘Roger Moore James Bond movie’”, as us movie meteorologists like to put it.) They weren’t adaptations, in the sense that, say, Sam Raimi & Co. attempted to get the essence of the Spider-Man comics they’d clearly read and understood from one medium to another without compromising the inherent appeal of the original work. They were exploitations of commercially viable character/s that, if they’d even read any of the key comics medium works, were basically interested in extracting a few bits and pieces of ready-made business to incorporate in their Hollywoodization (and “improvement” as they no doubt saw it) of the product. Admittedly this is probably more true of the Batman movies than the Superman ones. But the later cycle of movies is patently more comics-centric than these ever were.]

** [The 70s “Incredible Hulk” comics, featuring our “ever so loveable, favourite monster-clown” endlessly bounding around the desert and bouncing US Army tanks off various cactus plants was, by and large, screamingly dull to start with, and never seemingly offered bounteous and unlimited entertainment as a movie concept. I’ve been unable to force myself to watch either recent adaptation. Ghost Rider never seemed to promise undiluted pure gold as a movie concept either. Daredevil and Elektra both had solid comics source material, but you didn’t have to look beyond a trailer (and casting) to see that they’d comprehensively “80s Batmanned” those, and, just to rub Affleck into the wound, apparently done so on the cheap as well.]

*** [This is also mentioned later in the main article, but characters drawn from comics sources, even heroic ones, appearing in movies or other non-comics media, is absolutely nothing new. Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers appeared in movie serials, and certainly entered the mainstream consciousness of another era. There were 1940s movies made featuring Dick Tracy, a huge comic strip hit character of the time. Other movie serial protagonists were either genuine comic book superheroes (Superman, Batman and Robin, Captain America) or featured heroes and/or supervillains that seemingly owed a debt to comics. But these were, again, attempts to exploit aspects of the comics characters within a much more conventional movie framework. What the 2000s run of superhero movies brought to the table was an attempt to present the comic book superheroes AS they’d been presented in the comics – it’s a fundamental difference of approach.]

**** [Regarding the superhero comics of yore, “Who did what” is an ongoing and blizzardly poop-storm of contradictory apocrypha which perhaps may not make the task of researching the “truth” behind the gospels of the New Testament pale into insignificance by comparison, but it will eat up a lot of living time if you let it. In this case, Steve Ditko both drew and “plotted” (provided all story detail) for the character-defining, and at least somewhat genre-redefining, first 39 issues of the original “Amazing Spider-Man” comic, and some if not all material in other titles which predated the advent of Spider-Man appearing in his own dedicated comic book. At that point, the “Marvel-style” of creating comics (as it became known in the later 60s and in particular 1970s), in which the basic plot for an issue was provided by the writer, the story was then broken down into panels by the pencil artist (or sometimes a layout guy, and then completed by a penciller, but let’s not even get into that), and then dialogued by the writer – may not have been put in place, and I certainly doubt it was for “Amazing Spider-Man” and “Fantastic Four” back then.

As a moderator of their less customer-friendly excesses he may have had a telling impact in honing their work. Some later solo work written by both Kirby and Ditko suggests that this may have been the case, at least to an extent. Whether it was as true at this early stage (early 60s), I have no real idea, but my sneaking suspicion is that, in the Spider-Man/Fantastic Four cases, Ditko and Kirby were the primary creators of the work, and in sporting terms, Lee was perhaps more the coach or club president than the player. Incidentally, and not entirely germane to this issue, Kirby did an early cover illustration of the Spider-Man character (the first?), and I believe I’ve read it suggested that he may have done the first visual designs of the character. It’s not out of the question. Anyway, it became Ditko’s character.]

++ [70s Spider-Man writer, and later creative editor and multi-teleplay-writer for Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Gerry Conway conceived the Gwen Stacy character arc, and I think the character itself, as seen in the third Spider-Man movie. The Venom character featured in Spider-Man 3 was a later creation, from the mid-1980s. (Wikipedia credits David Micheline (writer) and artists Mike Zeck and Todd McFarlane.) I was vaguely aware of that development, but wasn’t reading Spider-Man by that stage. I don’t believe the character of Robbie Robertson (the “Daily Bugle” editor, not the guitar player/songwriter from The Band) was a “Ditko original”. Wikipedia sez he was a Stan Lee/John Romita Sr creation, which sounds about right. (Romita took over the artwork after Ditko left.) I presume there are other examples as well.]

+++ [The Underground comix of the 60s really changed the game, as far as what comics could include, both in satirical intent, in terms of content (in what you might call a “censorship classification” kind of way), in terms of visual approach, and also, it could be said, in a generic sense. However, it could also be said that they tended to reject or refute the notion of genre, at least as that was conventionally understood in a comics sense. Equally, you could say that they opened the doors for the development of new comics genres. Eventually some of the comix’ values were subsumed into the more mainstream comics world, and they also were a strong creative influence on a more idiosyncratic personal kind of comics storytelling that emerged, along with an explosion of “independent” publishers (basically originally meaning not Marvel, DC, or other smaller conventional comics publishers) in the 1980s. In generic terms some of these later developments have been incorporated into movies, at least on a widespread arthouse level. The adaptation of Dan Clowes’ Ghost World is an obvious example. Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor straddles both the 60s Underground era and survived as a progenitor and exemplar of the later style, and of course it was also successfully adapted as a movie. Whether you’d “type” the 60s/70s undergrounds (which contained multitudes in terms of styles and approaches by wildly different, if vaguely like-minded artists) or the 80s-and-beyond “personals” as genres in a conventional sense is kind of a borderline area. I don’t know whether what, say, Peter Bagge (“Hate”) or Dan Clowes did in comics could be described as a genre, exactly, as say “horror” is a genre. And yet there was a definable similarity in approach to some of the indie material which emerged in the 80s in comics, and there were plenty of people doing it. I think it was really a case of taking a different approach to storytelling (and story content) in the medium. It’s perhaps more accurately characterised as a reaction or a movement, rather than a genre.]

++++ [Tastes change over time, and you read it here last. The look and content of superhero material in comic books now is a lot different, in some immediate ways, from what it was in the 70s and 80s. Some might dispute that in terms of essential content, but just looking at the comics now as opposed to then tells a story.

Comics have provided the fodder before which ultimately altered the constitution of the mainstream of entertainment in other media. It’s a unique medium which in some ways is as immediate and impactful than any other, if not moreso. Whatever a writer’s mind can conceive or an artist’s pen can create is right there on the printed page, full-blown (and admittedly sometimes fly-blown) uninhibited and unhampered by 736 television or movie executives’ watering-down/”improvement” processes, not to mention passing through the hands of 1137 technicians/actors/directors/key grips/etc before reaching an audience, or the inherent limitations (whether budgetary, logistical or technical) of those media to physically represent such creativity. Boiling this hi-falutin’ navel-lint hockey right down, if there’s going to be an existing entertainment medium which spawns a new approach to storytelling, or genre, it’s inherently as likely to be comics as any other, if not moreso. Comics are built that way. As a medium they have less issues which block the creation of a fundamentally new approach. I’ve already read material from, say the last ten years, and including right now, which seems on the verge of getting somewhere new. Actually, for all I know, it’s already been done. If the superhero example is anything to go by, I guess we’ll be seeing whatever that new genre or direction is on movie screens sometime in the next forty years.]
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As if designed to underscore a couple of points made below, and at length, (in the post-its entitled “B-Draggled, B-Nighted, B-Gone” and the “Leapster’s Movie-A-Day Plan” one with the particularly unfeasibly long title that starts off “I Say Algy, the Chap in the Blouse and Dress is a Bit Queer…”), no less a news service of record than CNN today delivered an Oscars preview segment that was so completely off its trolley that I can’t even do my usual “pig-biting mad” schtick about the mainstream media’s incredible sloppiness when it comes to covering popular culture, because I’m still laughing too hard to hold the angry-stick steady, much less beat them with it.

So the multi-promo’d premise is, the Oscar nominations are being decided, and CNN is going to give you their authoritative insiders’ guide to the likely front-runners. Now, I’m pretty interested in where the experts see Mickey Rourke’s performance in “The Wrestler” as sitting for these awards (he already won the Golden Globe, I saw the movie, and I think he absolutely deserves Best Actor at the Oscars, and for that matter, at the Tony’s, the Herbert’s, the Wayne’s, the Fred’s and I’d thrown in a Gold Logie just to give him something to use as a paperweight on the hall table for utilities bills. Whatever you think of the movie - which I think is pretty decent incidentally, if not a “great movie” - this is a performance for the ages) so they’ve got me hooked.

Anyway, several ad breaks and world traumas later, when they finally get to the segment, some angular blonde, groomed/tailored thing with a nice clipped English acc’nt blows into the guest’s chair, and the Punch’n'Judy hosts have a bit of a laugh about her being the new CNN movie buff, or some jocularity to that extent. She says, “I wouldn’t say ‘movie buff’ haha”, which is around the time you realise that they’ve just grabbed the nearest person to survive the make-up chair and put them in front of their “authoritative” Academy Awards preview. Just to grind a little extra Drano into the abrasion, she then pipes up brightly “But we all love movies, don’t we?” or similar words to an extremely dim bulb effect. Sure, lady, and, with the possible exception of diabetics, we all like cakes too, but I don’t think they’ll be sacking Nigella Lawson to give me the job.

This is It in a nutshell - exactly how the “serious” media thinks about popular culture. Any oik can do it. Don’t worry about that whole business of putting in years of studying, comparing and analysing movies and absorbing film history. We all like movies after all. Jesus wept. You know, every time I’ve ever been in a pub when a big boxing card was on, the bar was always packed with instant experts on boxing, even if they’d never heard of the fighters in the main event before. By the same token, you wonder why newspapers, radio and TV stations don’t sign them all these drunken bums up as boxing experts on the spot. After any five minutes of Olympic coverage, every Australian blot on a couch can and will tell you that the judges in the parallel bars section of the gymnastics have got the scores wrong, because they didn’t correctly account for the quality of the Flabbernovsky Dismount, even though that person hasn’t watched a minute of gymnastics for at least the preceding four years, if ever, and previously thought parallel bars was a reference to an architectural feature in a licensed premises. No doubt the relevant TV stations should be breaking limbs in their haste to sign these people up as special commentators as well.

Anyway, the segment that devolved from that premise was a hilarious debacle from whoa to more whoa. Basically they banged on about the chances for “Slumlord Millionaire” or whatever it’s called for winning Best Picture, (actually they supplied no real information about what its chances were, other than you got the impression that they were pretty keen on it winning themselves) and whether Kate Winslet was set to win the award that apparently has been cruelly denied her in the past. (Is there a Best Nice-Looking Actress who Plays a Pleasant Person Oscar now?) You’d never guess that two of the three presenters in this segment were English and that the whole segment was coming out of rain-speckled London. Not ‘arf, anyway.

Then in a nice show of trans-Atlantic balancing, they got onto whether “The Dark Knight” would win some awards, and maybe even “Best Picture”. (And if the entire Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had its brains fall out, that would have to be a top possibility. Mind you, this is apparently not an unprecedented phenomenon, but they’re usually a little more, err, careful these days. I doubt “Iron Man” is getting a Best Picture nomination, for example, although that’s undoubtedly a better picture of the exact same type.)

Continuing on with the drivel-storm, Blonde Stalk and the Cut-Up Crew wondered breathlessly whether Heath Ledger might win a posthumous Oscar for “Dark Knight”. (Well, actually the way they put it was “Dark Knight” winning a posthumous Oscar for Heath Ledger, which is hilarious. The one thing about that movie, technical considerations to one side - and audio mixing considerations so much to one side that they’re way out in the carpark and can’t get access to the building - that might deserve any sort of Oscar is Heath Ledger’s performance, which is also pretty much the only reason that anyone could be thinking for even half a second about it as being worth a Best Picture nomination.)

Isn’t it screamingly obvious to everyone (CNN staff-members drafted in to being instant movie experts not included apparently) that Ledger must be a solid-gold short-priced favourite to win the Oscar, given a showy, attention-grabbing role and performance, and a certain amount of sentiment attached to the fact that he died soon after and very young? The time for speculating at this level whether he might get an award for it was about a year ago, or whenever the movie came out. That’s all a long-standing given that everyone and their pet poodle knows about. Right NOW, what we need is some insider sense of which way the Academy members might be feeling about voting. That would be some sort of update. What this segment gave us was pure semolina.

Mind you, they weren’t too sure about exactly who was in the Academy, or what their function was when it came to these awards. The jolly-joker ass-clown in the suit airily threw out that he felt the critics had far too much say in deciding the awards, and the public didn’t have enough. Apart from the fact that a case could be made that in some regards, the public demonstrably doesn’t know its clacker from its elbow, and the vote they get to make is called “box office”, the critics don’t vote in the Oscars, as such. Members of the Academy do. It’s mentioned in all the Oscars shows, every year, and multiple times. That’s why they’re called “The Academy Awards”.

And, perhaps, just as predictably by now, but they still managed to wow me with this one, the important factor of exactly which category Ledger was nominated in - i.e. Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor, and you could easily make a case either way - was never mentioned once. Mickey Rourke’s chances for winning Best Actor and 100% completing a career turnaround as monumental as Andrew McCarthy’s or Rob Lowe’s, only in reverse, are quite possibly heavily dependent on whether Ledger is nominated in the same category as him, or whether they fudge it the way they did in the Golden Globes, and define Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker as a supporting role. (Which, to be honest, in effect, and design, and promotion, it probably wasn’t.) Just repeating this - CNN, the most authoritative and respected news source in the Milky Way galaxy did a whole segment on likely winners at the Oscars, and omitted to mention at any point exactly which award one of the main chances is nominated for, or even speculate about it, or mention it as an issue at all. Now that’s old school comedy gold.

And the capper - which I bet most of you will see coming now, but I remained blissfully unaware of at the time - despite winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, and every tinpot showbiz cheese-stick perennially saying that the Golden Globes are the most indicative guide to likely winners at the Oscars (which I think is at least partially a demonstrable crock if anyone bothered to check it out and “do the math”, because there are nearly always winners of major Oscars that everyone foofs and splatters on about being a surprise if not a complete shock) neither the movie “The Wrestler”, nor Mickey Rourke were shown or even MENTIONED at any point during this comprehensive guide to the Oscars.

To put this in context, before and after this segment, we’d had literally up-to-the-minute updates on the sentencing of all those charged in the Chinese milk-tainting case, from a guy who was actually ducking in and out of court, and filing via phone from the steps of the court-house south of Beijing, we’d had exclusive footage of the exact extent of the destruction in Gaza, with fairly comprehensive background detail in narration, and interviews with those who’d had their homes destroyed, we’d had weather reports and weather patterns from everywhere from Athens to Berlin to Sydney to blizzardly cold Minneapolis, and summary and updates on what anyone in North America called Obama had done, said, worn, eaten, driven, or frowned over, accompanied by any number of layers of screamingly detailed expert analysis.

And then we get to the bit about the movies, and it’s cue the prop girl or the parking validation lady or whoever’s handy and it’s all systems go for five minutes of Chuckleheads ‘R Us. Someone was embarrassed or circumspect enough that when Blonde Stalk Lady came on, they didn’t even bother with the charade of a graphic announcing her as a movie or showbiz expert. It just somewhat shamefacedly mumbled in print, “CNN Correspondent”.

And why not? It’s movies - we all love those. Anyone can talk about that stuff. Here we have Wretched Wilkins. Well, I think I’ll probably continue to fight the tide and deg to biffer. The thought of consuming a little actual expertise rather than the usual general gruel of pure unsubstantiated opinion and thunderously uninformed verbal confetti doesn’t make me violently ill at the prospect.

As a favourite rock’n'roll band of mine, The Upper Crust, once so sagely and accurately noted:
“Everyone is equal - to a greater or lesser degree.” Although it wasn’t intended as such, when it comes to media folk’s opinionations on popular culture matters, this increasingly seems a searingly accurate commentary.

On a parenthetical, but not entirely unrelated note. The great, dominant principle of Australian life has apparently become “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion.” This has become such a borderline matter of near-religious faith here now - at least to knotheads, and maybe a lot more generally than that, when you drink about it - that apparently the worst insult you can give to anyone in Australia these days is to disagree flat-out with someone else’s opinion - even if they clearly know absolutely nothing about the subject matter in question and are talking more bollocks than a urologists convention.

Well, out of that attitude, you get about the level of public debate, media analysis and consequent cultural enrichment that you deserve. Or expressed more bluntly, you’re on a kick in the trousers to nothing.

Put it this way - I have no problem with everyone having a right to their own opinion. I just am more selective about who I want to hear expressing their opinion. In fact, I’d go further in a somewhat frankly fascist sounding direction, and say I don’t think everyone SHOULD have an equal right to express their opinion in a public forum. Some expertise in the subject matter is always a help, I reckon. Yeah, everyone has a right to an opinion, but when a fire breaks out, I reserve the right to ignore yours, the fat-arse pundit on the radio’s and Kelvin from across the road’s. I only want to hear from the guy in the helmet who pulls up in the fire-truck. As the Upper Crust also rightly put it, “Everybody’s equal - some more than others.” Some say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. When it comes to hearing people’s opinions, I’ll happily risk that danger, if the alternative is no knowledge whatsoever.

————————————————————————————————————————————

More movies I think deserve a little more attention than they probably get these days.

There’s no connecting theme to any of these, except I think they stand out from the general custard of more conventional films, and would strongly suggest to people who love movies that they’re worth a look. All the footnotes in italics are just extra information, and can be skipped if you prefer to get to the next movie in a hurry.

GHOST BREAKERS (1940)

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)

Despite the name of Bachelor #1 above, these are both zombie movies of a kind, and they’re the kind you could conceivably call the best zombie movies ever made, maybe including the Romero Living Dead pictures.

Ghost Breakers is extremely atmospheric, creates a memorable feeling of creeping unease, and has some decent shocks in it, which is all what you might call unusual for a prime era Bob Hope movie. It has what the horse-racing fraternity would call “serious claims” to being the greatest comedy-horror movie ever made. Hope is in line-exploding form in his alternating coward/hero persona, has great comedy support from Willie Best (who, unforgettably, and not inaccurately, describes himself as “the family detainer”), and if you like your female leads vulnerable, plucky and eye-blearingly lovely in approximately equal doses, I always thought you could do a lot worse than Paulette Goddard at the height of her stardom.

The basic story is that Paulette has inherited a spooky castle somewhere in what Mrs Slocombe from Are You Being Served routinely and authoritatively described as “The Caribbeano”, and Bob, as a fellow shipboard passenger gets drawn into the intrigue against his better judgement, and inherent on-screen inclination towards knee-knocking cowardice and self-preservation. Actually, Hope’s character is slightly less flighty and slightly more a regular leading man than usual in this one, not that gets in the way of the laughs.

Once they disembark, the local atmosphere may not be rigorously authentic, but it has a quietly queasy conviction in its acceptance of the paranormal that heightens the effect of both its scares and its laughs.

I Walked with a Zombie avoids working the comedy side of the street, but goes a step further in its sincere acceptance of voodoo and zombies as a part of the local atmosphere (also in the Caribbeano), in a way that completely gets the audience on side with its intentions from the beginning. It must be one of the least-frenzied in tone of all horror movies, or those of the zombie sub-genre. Much like some others in the series of horror movies Val Lewton produced for RKO at this time and subsequently, in a way it’s more of an extremely engrossing adult fairytale, or strange fantasy, than a more typical genre movie that routinely goes for shock effects. It’s kind of an “acting-out” of various irrational bits of psychology we retain as adults, despite our better intentions, in a way. (Curse of the Cat People more unambiguously pursues this approach, but is also oriented more to a child’s eye perspective, as it features a juvenile central character.)

In terms of maintaining both tone and atmosphere, director Jacques Tourneur did a great, and unforgettable, job here. It’s a movie that will stay with you.

Ghost Breakers is more pure entertainment, but as such, also a great picture. It’s probably the best one in the long, loooong career of director George Marshall.

(So as not to leave out the usual annotative folderol on these movies, in case anyone hasn’t come across them before, I Walked with a Zombie is allegedly loosely based on the novel Jane Eyre. I’m not completely convinced this was what Charlotte Bronte had in mind during the planning stages, but I imagine Shakespeare would have also got a bit of a shock if he’d ever found out The Tempest would turn out in the movies as Forbidden Planet. Let alone had he witnessed the famous musical adaptation of Hamlet, (incorporating musical themes from Bizet’s famous opera, The Geelong Football Club Theme Song), as staged by the noted theatrical impresario Harold Hecuba (Phil Silvers) in an episode of Gilligan’s Island.
On a slightly less lofty cultural note, Ghost Breakers was later remade as the Martin and Lewis comedy, Scared Stiff, with the same director, George Marshall, in charge.)

UNMAN, WITTERING AND ZIGO (1971)

If you needed one, here’s a movie about a teacher and his pupils that could be considered the ultimate anti-Mr Chips.

Perennial slightly withdrawn everyman of many somewhat off-kilter movies of the time, David Hemmings, comes to teach at a private school, but there seems some degree of mystery as to exactly what happened to his predecessor, and he starts to get the strong impression that the boys may have had something to do with it, and if he doesn’t let his class proceed in the manner they see fit, the same kind of thing might happen to him.

The kind of tricksy plotty nasty suspense movie of the time (there was one called Games, a few others just as obscure in vaguely the same vein, and sub-branches like the psycho-whodunnit Sleuth, and later a Sleuth knock-off called Deathtrap) that plays with its food a bit, in terms of running its characters and viewers through various devious and somewhat sadistic obstacle courses. While it’s a little repetitive, and wouldn’t have lost anything taking the tailor’s shears to the running time, it does hold the attention, and gets a good head of the creeps going.

It’s kind of a combination of the ritualistic, inexplicable atmosphere of something like the original The Wicker Man, combined with elements of If and Village of the Damned. It’s not as sustained or involving as The Wicker Man, but it stands out from the pack nearly as well, and on the rare occasions it surfaces, you should take the opportunity to see it. The credits on IMDB.com suggest it was based on a stage-play. I have a feeling that the audience members probably didn’t exactly leave the theatre snapping their fingers and whistling the tunes.

THE END (1974)

Definitely the odd one out in Burt Reynolds’ run of starring pictures in the early-mid 70s, and for such an oddball black comedy, surprisingly little known. Reynolds has a terminal illness, and hires an insane guy to kill him (Dom DeLuise, at his most characteristically unhinged). Reynolds then changes his mind, but can’t convince DeLuise, who keeps trying to kill him. Sends up just about everything conventional in contemporary-set relationship pictures of the time, and Reynolds’ own movie persona of the time. To say it’s uneven in the quality of the gags and pacing is a gross understatement, but it probably wins out on sheer giddiness and idiocy. Reynolds, as director, did a pretty fair job of maintaining an unusual comic tone. Even by the standards of his Mel Brooks movie appearances, DeLuise is completely out to lunch here. This is the movie in which he tellingly reveals that he had to kill his own father, because he was, and I quote, “Sooooo Polish.”

(I’ve read a story or two that Woody Allen was initially offered this movie before Reynolds picked it up.

Apart from the fact that, in the 70s, Woody Allen hardly ever appeared in a movie he didn’t write or direct, (the only exceptions I’m aware of are Play It Again, Sam, a Woody Allen-starring movie directed by Herbert Ross, written by Allen from his own play; and The Front, a great movie neither written nor directed by him in which he also starred, but the evidence of the movie strongly suggests he had a hand in his own dialogue), this just wouldn’t have particularly suited him. It’s a scenario which kind of demands someone who looks as though they might not have been a squirrelly neurotic mess before the events of the movie started up, and the latter was Allen’s regular on-screen characterisation of the time. It would have been interesting had he directed it, though.)

BACKROADS (1977)

Probably the most underrated Australian movie there is. (There sure aren’t too many of those.) I’d say it was one of the two or three best ever made here.

Road movie featuring Bill Hunter and Gary Foley (yeah, the guy who became an Aboriginal activist down the track) and the various types and attitudes they strike, with some crime along the way. It depicts a baseline of Australian language, behaviour and humour that’s rugged (tending to rough as guts) which was rarely presented as such in the movies of the time. (The earlier Wake in Fright emphatically excepted.) It’s dynamic, quick as hell (an hour sees Backroads out), and has a lot of raw material in there, in both a thematic sense and pretty much all other senses as well.

Elements of racial tension are kind of presented “as found”, i.e. treated kind of naturalistically, rather than being heavily punched up or dwelled upon, but that’s in the picture too, for sure. One of their travelling companions along the way is Julie McGregor, the same one who played Betty in Hey, Dad, although I daresay she might prefer to be remembered for this performance. Hunter is alternately blustering and taciturn, all believable Aussie working class guy of the time, with a hint of a heart, and Foley is also really good as his slightly more shrewd road partner.

Phil Noyce did a pretty great job with this. You can smell the sweat, taste the grit, and it feels like the truth.

THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1991)

Stuart Gordon is generally remembered, if at all, for his stylishly sick, somewhat showy and stunty, but highly entertaining H.P. Lovecraft “expansion” Re-Animator (1985). He should be remembered for this rather more painstaking, but ultimately just as grabby adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum. An unambiguously Italianate horror movie with an interesting mix of human grotesques and a determinedly historical dwelling on aspects of the Inquisition, Gordon’s Pit, like the better Corman adaptations of the past, captures the chilling or grisly essence of the Poe story (if not the detail), and elaborates in a way that adds to the atmosphere and effect, (remember, those were SHORT stories), in this case using a backdrop of surprisingly convincing and thorough Catholic Church political intrigue. The performances are probably better than you’d expect too, particularly Oliver Reed in one of his best, in a supporting role. Very solid and unusual horror movie.

THE BLACK CAT (1933)

One of the few 30s horror movies that’s still actually scary at all, not to mention pretty darn gruesome, albeit not in a graphic manner, given the times. Edgar Ulmer directed this pretty dark, sometimes black-humoured, and slightly malevolent rumination on the unquenchably violent and irrational sides of human nature. The fatalistic “between wars” feel of the picture is no accident, as witnessed by Boris Karloff’s castle being built on grounds covering the bones of thousands. Karloff is perhaps the most purely evil heel in horror movies, heading a Satanic cult (apparently because he can) with every formality of pleasantry possible, and approximately no morals whatsoever. Bela Lugosi as the hero (!) is as humourless, pitiless, and uncorrupted by any hint of humanity as any horror movie good guy yet seen. Next to him, Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing character is a twinkly eyed loveable cove who’s a complete bucket of laughs. (Actually, the only funny thing about Bela’s character is its name – Dr Vitus Verdegast. I always get a laugh out of that one. It sounds like some sort of herbal dietary supplement.)

Not diminished by extremely stylish visuals which have a lot more in common with the German silent expressionist movies than most of the Universal horror pictures, The Black Cat gives off a tremendous whiff of humankind hoist on its own petard – a haunting by the past which will see violence return to triumph again and again. Fittingly it’s one of the few horror movies of the time in which all the monsters are human. From memory, it claims in the opening credits to be based on the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name. Rest assured it has about as much to do with Edgar Allan Poe as King Kong has with Donkey Kong.

HISTORY OF THE WORLD PT 1 (1981)

Probably the last solid Mel Brooks picture, and now somewhat forgotten, underrated, and probably completely misunderstood. This is a revisionist movie, in which all world history (well bits thereof, but it’s a broad enough canvas, and could you just go along with the gag) is recast as old-fashioned, gag-heavy vaudeville of the old school. If you watch it at home, without an audience around, you can even see where he left the pauses for the laughs, i.e. as stage performers working a live audience would.

Conceptually, it’s kind of a bold, not to mention winningly cracked idea, and, in execution, I think he gets the boot into most of it. Memorable moments include Sid Caesar doing some pretty funny pantomime stuff as a caveman (Brooks was a writer on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows in the 50s – also firmly in the vaudeville tradition), Dom DeLuise’s hilariously vulgar turn as Emperor Nero (with support – and that’s some support – from Madeleine Kahn, to me the flat-out funniest of comic actresses, along with Cloris Leachman), the Spanish Inquisition musical production number, the trailers for upcoming films (Jews in Space is a favourite there), and the French Revolution sequence, containing both Brooks himself (“It’s GOOD to be the King”) and Harvey Korman’s misadventures with the servant responsible for the urine receptacle (“Wait for the shake.”)

Old-fashioned farce taken in, when you think about it, a pretty original and sly direction – a complete burlesque on mankind’s history has a certain audacity to it – studded with gags and performers who really know how to handle this kind of material. On the downside, not all the gags are great, some sequences drag a little, it lacks the goofy cohesion-generated goodwill of Brooks’ “story” pictures like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, and the handling of some transitional material is a little starchy if not sloppy. (And some of the folks in minor roles, particularly the effective “chorus girls” are no great actors.) But on set-piece stuff alone, it gets there, there are killer incidental gags around as well, and the basic concept is, ultimately, effectively unifying, even if it kind of peters out rather than ends. Now that it’s most likely playing in people’s homes rather than theatres, it might be able to stand a quick edit to tighten up some of those laughter-pauses, and maybe shave some of the dodgier transitional stuff as well, but it’s very funny just as it is.

MR ARKADIN (1955)

Another underrated Orson Welles picture, in this case, probably partly because there’s nothing surviving that is anything like a definitive “director’s intention” version of a final print, and it’s at least questionable, based on both the evidence of the film as it survives, and the way he was working then – on bits and pieces of money, and scrips and scraps of film stock, shooting stuff when he could – that he ever even shot everything he had in mind for the movie. (Even if he did, any idea of a comprehensive Welles-supervised post-production or director’s edit basically never happened.)

That said, it still works for what it is, and stands out as being a lot more intriguing and entertaining than some of the better regarded Welles films, and arguably sticks closer to some of his central concerns as a movie-maker as well.

It’s a little bit of a Citizen Kane in double-reverse, in a way. It’s about a very well known European millionaire (Arkadin, played by Welles) with a mysterious past. An adventurer/ne’er-do-well type gets tangentially involved with Arkadin’s (less well known) business, falls for Arkadin’s daughter, and is then hired by the tycoon to investigate his own past, which Arkadin claims not to remember.

It also recalls the structure of Citizen Kane with a wink and a twist, starting with a fatal air-crash, and being narrated by one of those involved with it, in retrospect.

You don’t have to look any further than that to see Welles, as director, playing with the very forms he established, and Welles, as showman, playing Arkadin, teasing us to get hooked in his farmyard combination of shaggy dog story and wild goose chase.

Whatever it doesn’t have (a decent lead – the main actor’s a bit of a brick – and a certain sense of completion, given some of the lurches and jolts occasioned by the non-existence of transitional material), it has some fantastic, full-flavoured individual sequences enlivened by some memorably fanciful performances in character roles (Michael Redgrave is the unquestionable stand-out, as the cheerfully cracked proprietor of a bric-a-brac store that looks more like the indoors version of the local tip, but Akim Tamaroff and Mischa Auer are very enjoyable as well.) Welles’ own performance is one of his most enjoyable as well – an endearing piece of sly showbiz flim-flammery steeled judiciously with the right amount of menace when necessary.

Actually, even in the chopped-liver public domain version I first saw, it entertained and stood out as a movie with a unique take on human corruption, and something of a mordant examination of post-WWII Europe. There’s more than an element of Citizen Kane meets The Third Man about it. That’s not a bad element to be hanging around with, when you think about it.

[If you want to see all there is to see of this movie, strip-mine the bank-balance, and purchase the Criterion Collection version, The Complete Mr Arkadin. This contains 3 separate DVDs, all versions of the one film – the originally released Spanish language version of the movie, (which was edited after Welles left the project), the later worldwide release version entitled Confidential Report, (which accompanying notes suggests Welles had a hand in editing) and a further version Criterion put together themselves, which runs about quarter of an hour longer than the others, and presumably includes any surviving material that the others had left out. Bearing in mind that we have very little idea exactly what Welles would or wouldn’t have wanted to leave out.)

He might well have appreciated the irony that the mystery at the centre of the movie’s story is the character “Mr Arkadin”, whereas the mystery at the centre of the movie as a movie is either the movie itself, or to look at it another way, Orson Welles. Alternatively, he may have just preferred to have enough money and support to be able to finish Mr Arkadin.]

THE 7 FACES OF DR LAO (1964)

Of all the timeless “children’s movies that also appeal to adults” this is perhaps the least known and remembered of the really good ones. The expression in quotation marks in the previous sentence is an approximation tending towards sales pitch, incidentally – what we really mean when we say that is movies that pull out the rug of rationality, and jolt adults (in a pleasant manner, if you can jolt in a pleasant manner) back into a child’s way of seeing the world. That’s the magic of movies like The Wizard of Oz, or the Disney Snow White, or whatever. *

A circus comes to town late in the days of the old West. A sly dog of a cynical, wealthy rancher type (Arthur O’Connell – the kind of character actor who’s been in approximately half of everything, who you know by face rather than name, but this may be his best role) is trying to buy up the whole town, because the railroad is coming through, or whatever this week’s variant on that standard plotline is. The townspeople themselves are easily manipulated – unprincipled, money-obsessed, tired and jaded.

Pitted against him is the idealistic newspaper guy played as a likeable but characterless bedsheet by John Ericson, whose love interest in slow development is the local schoolmarm type (Barbara Eden, still strangely off-kilter and sexy as heck draped in the latest season’s hairline-to-toenail gingham fashion) who has a young son, thank the good Lord, or we’d never get all this story out of the way and get on with the movie.

Anyway, the minute the circus has pitched its tents, Dr Lao (pron. “Low”, played by Tony Randall) hits town and starts mystifying the inhabitants with some unusual, and perhaps supernatural, feats and a fair amount of comedy double-talk, and in particular young Son of Eden (Kevin Tate).

It transpires that Dr Lao’s circus is really more of a series of carnival sideshows, featuring various curiosities of history (Merlin the Magician, the Abominable Snowman, Medusa, Pan, a snake with the face of Arthur O’Connell etc.) In each case when the individual townsfolk confront one of them, they learn something about themselves, and not necessarily something pleasant or anything they wanted to learn.

Meanwhile Dr Lao is trying to teach the wonder of real life to the young kid, and the plot-thread about Arthur O’Connell trying to buy out the whole town (partly to prove his own sour opinion about human nature) grinds inexorably on.

Tony Randall is the soul of the movie, as the snappy, quirky, unreadable Dr Lao. The way he and his circus is “played” in the movie – it’s never quite made 100% clear how much is supernatural and how much is pure touring show charlatanism, at least not until fairly late on – is essential to what makes The 7 Faces of Dr Lao work so well.

However, the real magic that makes the movie work is Tony Randall, who plays each and every one of the sideshow exhibits (and, out of make-up, a cameo as an audience member at one point) and for all he’s been great in other things, this is his stand-out performance/s. He’s funny, and chilling, and tragic, and all at the same time, and you pretty much just have to see the movie for that, although it’s the story derived from Charles G. Finney’s novel, and Charles Beaumont’s impeccably judged screenplay adaptation, and George Pal’s direction which provide the apt context that takes this from being a vehicle for a great performance, to a resonant parable about the wonder inherent in life, if not what makes life worth living.

It’s a show which says life is more fantastic than showbiz, about a show which says life is more fantastic than showbiz. It’s an unusually sophisticated mechanism for a fantasy kids’ movie to put it mildly.

George Pal was renowned for his stop-motion animation shorts the Puppetoons before he came to feature pictures, and this movie contains an unusually apt blend of the European coldness and fantastic nature of those with a more humanistic viewpoint. Thanks to the life Tony Randall brings to it, it has humour and spark to balance out the somewhat stark and cold viewpoint here and there, and visual effects which are probably somewhat clunky by computer-era FX standards, but still convincing/effective in context, and somewhat scary from a kids’ perspective. (The special make-up effects by veteran William Tuttle – who won a special Oscar for his trouble – are also off their chops.)

It’s a difficult film to know how to categorise, which actually speaks volumes for it. In a way, it’s The Wizard of Oz in reverse – this time Oz comes to Kansas. In another way, it’s the most unusual Western ever made, possibly including The Valley of Gwangi, which had dinosaurs in it.

All you need to know is, out of the thirteen or so billion movies that people claim have magic to them, this is one of the couple of hundred that actually do. It’s really something. Even if that child’s view of the world stuff means nothing to you at all, because life has beaten you around the head until you ARE one of those pudding-like townsfolk depicted in the movie (and after a certain amount of Boxing Day sales spent on the planetary surface, we all probably are to a greater or lesser extent) still see this for the seven or eight Tony Randall performances. And then you can thank me later.

* (Actually, I’d put Terry Gilliam’s The Time Bandits in there as well – another somewhat unappreciated movie in this area, although not as forgotten as The 7 Faces of Dr Lao.)

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