Monday 11 October 2010

The King of Comedy (1983)

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHO DISCOVERS WHAT?)

[Now for a bust that resulted from trying to explain one of the many cultural references that the animated show Family Guy made in the episode Barely Legal.]

The King of Comedy (1983) is an American black comedy directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott and Sandra Bernhard.

In the end Robert De Niro discovers that the only way to break into television is from behind the barrel of a gun.

Middle-aged living-at-home-with-his-mother stage-door autograph hound, De Niro, plays an aspiring stand-up comic with obsessive ambition that far exceeds his actual talent.

A chance meeting with famous comedian and talk show host, Jerry Lewis, leads De Niro to believe that there is a place on Lewis's show for him if he really wants it.

However, De Niro's attempts to collect on Lewis's apparent offer are continually rebuffed by the show's production staff.

Along the way, the wanna-be star indulges in ever more elaborate and obsessive fantasies where he and Lewis are colleagues and friends, until finally, Lewis is forced to shatter De Niro's dreams, after De Niro invites himself and his would-be girlfriend, Diahnne Abbott, to stay at Lewis's weekend retreat.

Nevertheless, convinced that he is destined for greatness, one way or another, the humiliated and frustrated De Niro hatches a kidnap plot, with the help of obsessive Lewis-stalker, Sandra Bernhard.

The ransom is for De Niro to be given the opening spot on that evening's show (guest hosted by Tony Randall), and that, before Lewis is released, the show must be aired nationally, as usual, so that Abbott can see that De Diro wasn't just some crazy fantasist.

To the surprise of the show's producers and the police, De Niro's exaggerated autobiographical stand-up routine goes down well with the audience. Even his confession that he is only there because he has kidnapped Lewis gets a laugh.

In the meantime, between the show's recording and broadcast, left alone with her idol duct-taped to a chair in her parents' Manhattan townhouse, Bernhard attempts to seduce Lewis.

But the seduction only allows Lewis to escape, just in time to catch the end of De Niro's routine in which he explains that "Tomorrow you'll know I wasn't kidding and you'll all think I'm crazy. But I figure it this way: better to be king for a night, than schmuck for a lifetime."

And perhaps he had a point, because a news report covering his eventual release from prison, featuring shots of storefronts piled high with his "long awaited" autobiography, King For A Night, reveals that De Niro now has an agent with whom he is considering several "attractive offers" one of which turns out to be an apparent live TV special in which an excited announcer introduces him to an equally enthusiastic audience.



Scorsese has made a career out of depicting madness in it various forms. De Niro's celebrity obsessed fantasist is perhaps the least dangerous of his many creations. And the movie is a wonderful exploration of the dangers of the modern cult of celebrity, and a welcome break from the usual corruption and brutal violence that perfuse so much of his output.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_of_Comedy_(1983_film)

Saturday 2 October 2010

The Chumscrubber (2005)

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHETHER UNRESOLVED GRIEF LEADS TO FURTHER TRAGEDY)

[After a very extended busting hiatus, now for a bust that out Darko's Donnie. Possibly one of the smartest and most misunderstood-by-reviewers movies or recent years.]

The Chumscrubber (2005) is a darkly comic American film, aimed at a Resident Evil/Left 4 Dead audience, conceived and directed by Arie Posin, starring Jamie Bell, Camilla Belle, Justin Chatwin, Lou Taylor Pucci and a host of Hollywood a-listers, it explores the problem of youth disconnect in the Californian suburbs, where both teenagers and their parents rely on different forms of chemical medication to deal with life's problems.

In the end Jamie Bell comes to terms with the suicide of his best friend and class-mate neighbour without the crutch of prescription drugs.

When loaner, Bell becomes the first person to discover the suicide of his class-mate and supplier of happy pills to their high-school, not only does his celebrity psychiatrist father see it as an ideal opportunity to further publicly analyse his son, but the main high-school dealer and resident bully, Justin Chatwin, sees him as a means of acquiring the pill stash of his former supplier, the suicide victim.

To this end Chatwin initially recruits Camilla Belle, Bell's attractive and rebellious classmate, to sweet talk him into recovering the pills on their behalf.

However, when Bell refuses to cooperate, Chatwin and his drug dealing footsoldier, Lou Taylor Pucci, hatch a plot to kidnap Bell's younger brother as a bargaining chip. But their plans fail at the first hurdle when the hapless pair grab the wrong boy, the son of the local sheriff who is persecuting his ex-wife's new fiance ahead of her remarriage.

Despite not having Bell's brother, Chatwin figures he can still be persuaded to recover the drug stash to ensure the boys safety. Indeed among a sea of self-obsessed and self-absorbed adults, Bell is almost the only person apparently interested in the young lad's whereabouts or safety, although Belle, who was only reluctantly drawn into the plot to begin with, is increasingly protective of their young hostage.

It is her concern that eventually persuades Bell to recover the drugs hidden in the wall of the summer house, in his neighbour's back garden, where he originally discovered his class-mate's body. However, his efforts to exchange the haul for the young kidnap victim are sabotaged when his actual younger brother, secretly swaps the drugs for vitamin pills that their mother peddles as a new life system. The ensuing fight between Chatwin and Bell lands Bell in the sheriff's custody, where once again the adults totally fail to understand what is really going on.

Realising that the drugs are now lost to them, Chatwin and Pucci decide to bring their scheme to a murderous conclusion by stabbing the young boy to death. But in the ensuing struggle, Chatwin has one of his eyes slashed, and on staggering half blinded into the street is run down by the sherrif, at last desperately searching for his missing son, and momentarily distracted by the sight of his ex-wife in her wedding dress. Chatwin at last achieves his life's ambition of becoming a fly-boy as his body is flung high into the air by the impact, only to have his fall back to earth broken by the hood of the sheriff's patrol car.

In the aftermath of this near fatal tragedy, Bell at long last realises how much he misses his best friend, and regrets not recognising the signs of his impending suicide, while his friend's mother (brilliantly played by Glenn Close) finally accepts that her failure to get to know her son better may have been the real reason for his suicide.


The greatest hurdle to appreciating this movie is the inclusion of the Chumscrubber video game narrative device, which probably only appeals or makes sense to the gamer generation. The device does little more that provide a title and narrative bookends for the movie. The decision to include it may have simply been an attempt to differentiate it from other movies dealing in the same stock, like American Beauty (1999) and Donnie Darko (2001), the two movies against which it is most often measured.

Whereas Donnie Darko, with its time-travel theme, is a modern fairytale, Chumscrubber shares more in common with the real world based modern morality tale told from a middle age perspective, that is American Beauty.

In contrast Posin presents an archly distorted view of reality, where children behave like adults, and adults behave as children. Whether you prefer its approach to that of American Beauty largely depends on whether or not you buy into this distorted view, which in turn, no doubt, depends on whether you are closer in age to teenagers or middle aged adults.

That the movie succeeds at all in exploring the twin problems of teenagers being ignored by adults, and adults increasingly behaving like children, in a chemical fix dependent society, is down to the very imaginative script, some very well conceived conceits and performances from both young and old that are pitch perfect.

But there is no doubt that the movie suffers from having a conveniently pat ending, and from rather stumbling over probably the most dramatic scene in the whole movie; where Chatwin in accidentally blinded. Had these problems been addressed either before production started or later in the final edit, Chumscrubber might have garnered the plaudits it almost deserves.

Personally, I am very grateful to the person who brought this movie to my attention, because had I relied only on review hype, I might never have sampled its quirky pleasures. Which is exactly the point of these Movie Plot Busts.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chumscrubber
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donnie_Darko
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Beauty_(film)