A few amazing scenes make King of Comedy worth watching

"The King of Comedy" is a minor Martin Scorsese work but has many of the incidental pleasures and astonishments of his best work, none the less - notably the gritty and dark urban realism of New York City in the 80s-90s for one thing and the smart, inside appreciation of show biz, TV, the comedy circuit, as seen and known from the inside, as well as another portrait of a very strange, alienated, troublesome, slightly frightening loser, once again played by De Niro but this time as would-be comic, Rupert Pupkin, certainly demented and delusional, but a bit more lighthearted and goofy than the protagonists in Taxi Driver and Mean Streets - he could at any point go off the rails and become truly dangerous rather than just annoying, but the movie pulls him back from the edge and toward a softer, somewhat ambiguous conclusion. De Niro is awesome as usual, and Jerry Lewis, as a a Johnny Carson character when Tonight was nightly in NYC, is excellent, showing he had potential for some serious dramatic acting - too bad he was so type-cast as a goofball. Sandra Bernhardt is one of the weaknesses of the film, her character poorly developed (not entirely her fault) and Scorsese much less certain when filming her uppercrust "town house" than he is in the grittier environments that he uses to such good effect elsewhere in the film. A few absolutely amazing scenes make the whole movie worth watching: De Niro in Lewis sharing a limo ride as De Niro tries to sell his routine to Lewis, De Niro (spoiler!) ultimately performing on national TV - great to see how well this pro can play an amateur, bumbling comedian.

What's the real message of Weeds?

On the one hand: One could say that the overall message of the Showtime series "Weeds" is that turning to a life of crime, even the hip and attractive and victimless crime of growing a little marijuana to supply the upper-class laid-back gentry of SoCal, will inevitably lead to death and destruction and broken homes and serious jail time, will entangle you with drug gangs and Mexican drug lords and worse, because that's what happens to the erstwhile Botwin clan over the course of the six seasons of the series - crime doesn't pay. On the other hand: That message is a super-downer, and the whole point of Weeds is to get us to root for the Botwins, especially the super-cute Mary-Louise Parker, the mom who started this enterprise as a way to keep their lifestyle afloat when she was widowed (I guess anything's possible, but it always seemed to me that a woman of her obvious looks and aptitudes would have had plenty of opportunities) - that no matter how rough the going, these people are great-looking and witty and devoted to one another and fun-loving, and the message received, and presumably intended, is that some crime does pay, that this is a pretty cool life and worth the risks. I'm not a moralist or a prude, but, come on, isn't this show, entertaining as it is from time to time, a pretty low form of pandering and dishonesty? Compare it with another show about a good guy turned to the drug trade - Breaking Bad - which is by no means perfect but much more sensibly conveys the horrors and dangers and the depression that ensues for a middle-class, educated guy who thinks he can step into this world and make a quick buck and get out. One show is a serious look at contemporary life and the other is a self-serving fantasy beheath a veneer of social conscience.

Dexter: the TV show that requires the most willing suspension of disbelief

"Dexter," on Showtime, requires more willing suspension of disbelief than any other show on television, probably (I haven't seen every one show on television), but if you are willing to buy the premise and accept the improbabilities of the plot the series is very entertaining and provocative and, at least insofar as the lead, Michael C. Hall playing Dexter Morgan, very well acted, too. The premise, simply, is that Dexter, adopted by a police officer, is damaged through childhood trauma and unable to feel empathy and drawn toward killing and destruction, and his dad teaches him a moral "code" so that Dexter, unable to stop killing, does so to avenge wrongs - he's a one-man vigilante, dispatching various abusers, kidnappers, et al. The premise I find very intriguing, but what makes the show ridiculous at times is that Dexter, who btw works in the Miami PD lab, is able to kill one person after another, many of them prominent, and never leave a single clue, never be caught - it's really preposterous, makes Miami PD to be the totally stupidest PD outside of the Swedish police in Stieg Larsson's world (but that's another story). Nevertheless, when I put that disbelief aside I'm fully entertained by the Dexter episodes - haven't seen all seasons but now watching Season 6, in which he takes up the case of woman played by Julia Stiles, who has been brutalized, and they set about finding who tortured her - turns out to be a new age therapist evangelist sociopath who's smooth and cleancut, the worst types, and doing them in - all the while being spied upon by a private detective hired by another cop - maybe he'll get caught at last? I doubt that.

You've never seen a movie like this, and good for you!: Songs from the Second Floor

This movie's going to sound better than it actually is as I describe it, which in a sense is typical of many works made for the intellectual/academic marketplace: they're full of ideas that we can enjoy talking about, but did we really enjoy watching the film/reading the book? Anderson's Swedish film ca. 2000, "Songs from the Second Floor" (I think a more accurate translation would be ...from Another Floor) is full of haunting scenes and images, and you can trace the lineage of Fellini and of course the compatriot Bergman: the oddity of a traffic jam filling a city and freezing everyone in place, crowds of self-flagellants marching slowly along the streets, vast empty corridors of hospitals and factories, a huge empty plain that suddenly bursts into population, a haunting scene of a man injured on a railroad platform and nobody is able to help him, a weird scene in which a young girl (bloom of youth) is sacrificed, a poet stunned into silence, a magician whose saw trick goes horribly awry, a man fired from a factory after 30 years bursting into insane sobbing and wailing, ashen people frozen in despair - so much, so beautifully crafted, often like a DeChirico painting come to life, filled with allusions that are strange and ambiguous and just beyond our comprehension to fascism, Nazism, corporate greed - and yet, and yet - by the end I found myself yearning for intelligibility and tired of the sameness of tone. It's a movie about several indirectly related characters and I hoped for a glance toward convention, some way to bring these lives together and to drive the movie toward a conclusion or at least a climax, but that never happened. It's a film like none other, and maybe it requires more than one viewing to truly get it, but I'm afraid few viewers will give it even that much.

Tara: likable though not really credible

"The United States of Tara" is another series, now in its third season, that thrives within the Showtime formula: a story about a seemingly ordinary family that in fact lives with and undergoes some kind of extraordinary experience, the series held together and built largely upon the skills and popularity of a lead actress. In this case, Toni Collette (Tara) is a mom in a family of four in suburban middle-class Kansas and all's pretty much normal in the fam - dad (John Corbett) a mildly successful landscaper, kids are all right with the usual angst, daughter wants to move away (to Japan) to discover herself, son has come out as gay and wants to make films or videos, Tara herself going back to college for degree she never got - but Tara suffers from DID (multiple personalities). That's the hook - and though the rapid changes of personality are never quite believable they do afford an opportunity for Collette to show her acting chops. Who doesn't like Toni Collette? She makes Tara worth watching, even if it had nothing else. Other than the highly likable cast, it doesn't have a lot else going for it, unfortunately. It's treatment of Tara's illness is completely noncredible - she just kind of flips out in public from time to time and the family just sweetly obliges her and nobody in the town seems to care, particularly. The causes, cures, treatments are not dealt with seriously - DID is just a springboard from which the series can jump. Some might find the writing good, and I agree - if you can accept that everyone in an entire extended family talks pretty much like an edgy 40ish screenwriter, i.e., like multiple versions of June (thank you, Diablo Codey) - and I have to say the producer/director's idea of what a Kansas middle-class family household and milieu looks like is ridiculous - in Tara everyone seems to be living within a Pottery Barn catalog.

Is Californication the most repulsive show on TV?

Is there a more repulsive show on TV than "Californication"? Let me think - forget about the stupid reality shows which at least know what they are, cheap, tawdry diversions. No, Californication has some pretensions of being a serio-comic drama about a sex-addicted writer who hits bottom as he becomes entangled in a charge of statutory rape and is cut loose by his wife because of that notoriety but at the same time his career takes off because of the success de scandale. The writer, played by the once likable David Duchovny, proceeds to have sex with many beautiful women who throw themselves at his feet (ah, the fantasies some screenwriters come up with! writers rule the universe!) as he bumbles through life in LA being crude and cruel to every person he encounters. This series manages to make sex look bad - seriously, a half-hour of porno would probably be more entertaining and certainly would be more believable than this nonsense. There are many horrible, narcissistic people in Hollywood - maybe more than elsewhere. But trust me nowhere in Hollywood or anywhere else do people speak entirely in obscenity-laden, crude quips. If there are people like Duchovny who bumble around like alcoholic, drug-addled louts but somehow manage to charm every woman they meet - well, you wouldn't want to be anywhere near them. Fortunately, there are no such people - they are screenwriter/directors concoctions, more exploitative than reality shows, more ridiculous than porn. California oughta sue. Fornication oughta sue.

TV's favorite topic: Itself! (Episodes)

One thing Hollywood and television generally get right is how to make a show about the making of a show - this goes back as far as the great Dick Van Dyke Show (of course it wasn't entirely about the making of a TV show, but was one of the first to give us any sense of the life of a TV writer) and more recently to such varies shows as Entourage and Extras, about the lives of stars and not-such-stars. Of course the studios and networks do this well - start with write about what you know, the old adage, and then add that we are insatiably interested in looking behind the scenes at the making of a show. It's amazing there aren't more self-reflective shows and amazing that any of them are bad (some are). "Episodes," which debuted this year on Showtime, is one of the really good ones - it's about the making of what's obviously a really crappy show, Pucks!, starring Matt LeBlanc (hysterical) as a hockey coach. Unlike some others about obviously crappy shows and stars playing themselves trying to make a comeback (like that other one with Lisa Kudrow, pretty much total garbage), Episodes has a great twist, in the that bad show is an Americanization of a British success, and the British writer-producers come to Hollywood to develop the new show. Much of the comedy focuses on their interaction with each other and, more important, with the narcissistic LeBlanc and with the (somewhat stereotyped and over the top) American producers - the clash of Brit and American cultures gives Episodes its edge and panache.