I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

I’m biting Jackie Clarke’s credit for introducing all you nerds to Forbidden Zone (1980), which is like the retarded half-brother to similar “high camp” cult film Rocky Horror. Richard Elfman made it as a vehicle to expand on the live cabaret shows he did with “The Mystic Knights of the Oingo-Boingo” (including brother Danny Elfman, who I was depressed to learn is a Scientologist). It features lots of topless women, black face minstrels, 70 year old Jewish man playing a kid and Hervé Villechaize.

Like most “cult films” most of it is boring. Either keep the hash pipe or your remote’s fast forward button close at hand for all segments that don’t feature a musical number. But the musical numbers (and some surprisingly good animation… sort of Fleisher Bros-meets-the-credits-of-You Can’t Do That On Television) are such specifically wonderful weirdness, like this one—

The bald boxers were a performance art (?) act called The Kipper Kids and as far as I can tell, this is mostly what they did (bronx cheers). One of them went on to marry Bette Midler. The “singer” was some kid they pulled in off the street and told him to lip sync to the track, but he got too nervous and just stood there. So then they had the screenwriter come in and do the mouth and they Clutch-Cargoed it on in post. And then the song gets cut off by pert-nippled toplessness… This is Forbidden Zone in a nutshell.

Netflix has the DVD (along with recent interviews with the cast, if you really want to depress yourself), but most of the musical numbers are on Youtube. Look for the delightful profanity(and disco)-laden retread of “Swingin’ The Alphabet” (a number done by The Three Stooges ), the delightful “Pico & Sepulveda,” and proto-”Oogie Boogie” Danny Elfman showcase “Squeezit the Moocher.” (Find the last one yourself)

In a final monument to selling out, I was alerted that the Dilbert cartoon (largely forgotten by pop-culture historians) used the Forbidden Zone’s theme in their opening credits (or Danny Elfman was too hungover to write a theme song and just passed that along) with lyrics and mumbling Sambo-screams edited out.

So, what’s been keeping me from hanging myself lately? Well, I’ve actually become terribly addicted to this British comedy/quiz show, which is of the model of those “Whaddya Know” and “My Word!” NPR crap. There’s hundreds of episodes on YouTube in 5-9 minute chunks and I’ve watched 3 season’s worth

I’m surprised to see the creator of “Sniglets” on this show (and many original Who’s Line players, now 15 years older and crappier looking), who apparently has become the toast of British comedy. I also learned that Matt Groening has commented in interviews that the character of Moe on The Simpsons was inspired by Rich Hall. (On Inside the Actor’s Studio, Max Azaria said the voice was an Al Pacino impression done with extra rasp)

My other apple-a-day keeping Final Exit at bay is the 1950 hit “A Smile and A Ribbon” by sister singers Patience & Prudence. It was a plot point in the comic Ghost World (and the movie as well, I think, but I don’t remember) and the flip of the 45 was the even creepier song “Tonight You Belong to Me” which was featured in The Jerk and also apparently is on John Water’s new CD. Anyway, “A Smile and A Ribbon” is the song for this pretty great British Lottery commercial and for the longest time, the only copy of the song I could find online… artificially crackled and tinny sounding as it is.

Shock Corridor is most insane movie I’ve seen this year and it’s already set a high hurdle for the next 10 months. In brief, this shit is bananas.

I just watched the first season of Creature Comforts, the UK version not the US one yet-to-be-released. It was fun… not really hilarious, but entertaining. I like the film short quite a lot. I wonder if it will be funny with American voices… all of the UK voices seem kind of “nice.” The worst of them just come off as dour or a bit full of themselves.

Americans are more aggressive in their hatefulness. They bully you into hating them. The one clip I saw of the US show (though Chad’s blog) I immediately wanted to throttle the people—

I look forward to the show though! I already know two of the people who did voices… and I only secretly hate them.

I just saw David Lynch’s Inland Empire. I don’t want to say I felt like I was being tortured, because that diminishes the suffering of actual torture victims, but I felt like I was being tortured.

Me and the movie were playing chicken to see who was going to give first. I lasted the whole three hours, so I won but in actuality, no one won because I watched Inland Empire for three hours.

If you approximate what it’s like to see Inland Empire, get a 3rd generation VHS copy of Eraserhead and play it on a TV wrapped in cheesecloth 5 times in a row. I just saved you $11.

The best thing about Netflix is digging up 1-star and 0-star forgotten bullshit that for some reason have made it on to DVD. And (Unlike Kim’s, it won’t be some shaky 11th generation copy from VHS. I saw Superstar on such a bad dub you couldn’t tell Karen was a doll.)

To save you the trouble of actually watching a shitty (though impeccibly transferred) movie, I will give you the highlights of….

So, this was retitled to cash in 70s America’s love affair with all things “Smokey.” The original title was “The Last of The Cowboys” and the content reflects that a little better… a hamfisted, snail-paced ellegy for the past. With hookers.

The movie starts with a completely black screen with a quivering line and offscreen grunting. One of my biggest peeves with movies of the 70s and 80s when I was a kid was how night scenes would be too damn dark. Maybe it was our shitty TV or VHS tapes, but TGSR has the black-for-night jazz in spades.

Into the darkness steps a glowing Henry Fonda—age one million (but before On Golden Pond)—shuffling in a hospital gown holding giant wire cutters to a barbed wire fence. He liberates an 18 wheeler, “Eleanor.” The camera lingers on the name and then on a headshot glossy of the First Lady on the dashboard so we “get it.”

And then the credits, including this stunner—-

That’s where her Rocky Horror check went.

Flashback to the least restful hospital room ever.

I mean, this wallpaper could give you cancer. And it has. Hank Fonda is “Elegant John,” the world’s most reliable honest on-time trucker until cancer made him hock his truck for chemo. He’s wasting away and dreaming of one last great haul.

Luckily, his roommate, mustache guy here, advises him in a thick community-theatre-Yiddish-accent just how to sneak out and cut the wires on the truck impound etc. Basically, he describes the scene we just saw in exacting detail.

So, Elegant John drives around. Meets evil rival trucker and eventually needs gas. Enter Beebo, played my Robert Englund aka Freddie Krueger, a Mennonite (?) who is trying to get to Florida to go to motel management school. Beebo becomes his sidekick after Hank tries to rob him and drop him the desert.

(I got bored and stopped taking screenshots at this point, so bear with me)

Cut to: a wacky Anniestyle brothel where a variety of healthy, fun whores are prepping for a big night of fucking truckers. Like the Spice Girls, there’s one in every flavor. There’s a Southern belle, a dumb blonde, a zaftig Jewish intellectual, a complainy bitchy girl with a weird cartoon voice, and Susan Sarandon. Watching over them is world-weary Eileen Brennan (Mrs. Peacock from Clue, the Colonel (?) from Private Benjamin). Then suddenly, the truckers arrive and we get a very long softcore segment of The Great Smokey Gang Bang, also featuring the “comic relief” of the cross dressing john being mocked by kitty-cat voice .

Immediately after the sex, cut to all the hookers getting arrested by the johns, who were all undercover cops there to bust them. (They had to have sex with them first to make sure they really were hookers I guess.) They’re given the order to leave the state ASAP.

Meanwhile, Elegant John and Beebo have discovered that with Eleanor reported stolen, they can’t get a “load” to haul, cramping the plan for John to make one last delivery before he croaks from his cancer. They decide to go visit the whorehouse where his old flame is the madam so he can get his cancer rocks off.

Once there, the hookers all make a lavish dinner for the visitors and with Porky’s style subtlty, make the virginal Beebo (and the audience) extremely uncomfortable. Elegant John and Eileen have implied sex (we only see “after”) and talk about this crazy world we live in and how things used to be better. John agrees to take the hookers on as his “load” (usually its the hookers taking the load, ba-dum-dum) and he will deliver them to North Carolina… where prostitution is legal? Where prostitutes roam free? Never explained.

So, hookers in the back, Beebo in the front, our heroes take off on the cross country journey. But, the evil trucker is still in the backround stirring up trouble and the APB on the stolen truck is spreading.

Enter the cackling, bumbling small town sherrif (played by Dub Taylor, the Larry the Cable Guy of his day) and his dummy son who catch Elegant John in a speed trap and then cart him and the hookers back to their small town jail. The hookers remove their duds and string them up on a clothesline in their cell (I’d take that out of cells to prevent suicide) and lure (literally with crooked fingers) the sherrif and his son into the cell. Now, in a normal movie, once they have them in the cell, they’d knock them out or otherwise trick them and lock them in. In TGSR, the hookers lure the cops into the cell, fuck them and then lock them in. Why give them a freebie? Because it’s the 70s and this is a crappy movie.

So, now it’s time for fun—

They stop off at a truckstop/bar where the hookers cut loose to “Still The One,” Elegant John and Eileen have a heart to heart and Beebo… does something. I don’t remember. The focus shifts to these guys—

The Lennon-glasses dude believes he had been abducted aliens and his sister is trying to convince him to come back east with them so he can kick his drug habit. Then the blonde dude turns around and said “I used to be an awesome DJ but the man kicked me off the air; I bet we could become a crazy duo… like some kind of white Cheech and Chong.”

Then the movie completely stops… the cops, the truck, the hooker, Elegant John are all gone and we watch Glasses and ex-DJ have this inane 100% realistic weed conversation outside the honky-tonk for like 15 minutes. I mean, at least Eleanor is in the background there to assure us that we’re in the same movie.

And then we’re back on the road. Suddenly the titular “roadblock” appears. A bunch of cops decide that if they block this bridge , they can stop elegant John. It’s 4 fake cop cars… a mere appetizer in a big-budget trucker movie chase. Ex-DJ and Glasses get on the CB and summon all the truckers, loggers, and blue color types to “help” Elegant John get through, though his 18 wheeler rolls over the 4 cars with pretty much zero effort.

Now over the bridge (but not yet in North Carolina), all the trucks full of strangers we’ve never met before all get out and dance ring-around-the-rosey. We’ve won! But… there’s 20 minute left in the movie. Back in the truck, back on the road.

Driving along, Beebo in the back with the whores. Suddenly the truck stops. Beebo races to the front and throws open the door, revealing…

...Elegant John’s still-warm corpse being snuggled by a weepy Eileen Brennan. Krueger takes over driving, the body crammed between him and (lady) in what I can only imagine is a very crampt, uncomfortable, and smelly position as he finished the “perfect run.” Switch to helicopter shot of Elanor driving along the seaside (?) as mournful Spanish guitar music plays.

Hooray for movies!

Neil and I went to see The General yesterday. We both had seen it before, but I was a frownie-face for the lacking of “more jokes.” That’s what I will say about all film classics… needs more jokes. We both appreciated Buster’s unmotivated “baseball slide” whenever he was running up to something.

The General is a comedic (well, slightly comedic… more jokes!) take on an actual event of the Civil War where a Confederate train was stolen by the Union to disrupt supply lines. Buster was a life-long train enthusiast and got the idea to make a Civil War set comedy after seeing the flashback scene in Grandma’s Boy... that’s right, the Adam Sandler produced granny-fucking “comedy” (more jokes!). (Actually, I wonder if Sandler named this piece of shit with the same title as Harold Lloyd’s movie to get back at his estate for suing him over plagurizing The Freshman in The Waterboy. Full disclosure: I hate Adam Sandler.)

Neil also mentioned that The General is a primary (or primary-and-a-half) source for Civil War research since it’s made in living memory of Civil War battles, while the photographs of the time only depict aftermath(s) of battles.

I still had Movie Crazy at home and thought it was retarded. Kirk was into it and had seen it before. But I discovered a weird connection… the credited director of this was Clyde Bruckman, who also directed The General, who also did gags for the Three Stooges and was considered this great gag writer back in the day(I also read that Buster Keaton wrote gags for the Marx Brothers after the sound era, but that’s neither here nor there), but by the ‘30s was an out of control drunk and the only person who gave him work was Harold Lloyd, who insisted on giving him credit even when he was too wasted to actually do anything. Ironically… or tragically, his last film job was contributing gags to this other movie but all his material was lifted from Movie Crazy and Harold sued him (a family legacy of lawsuits).

Broke and bottomed-out, he borrowed a gun from Buster Keaton, ate in a restaurant and realizing he couldn’t pay the bill, he went into the bathroom and shot himself (other versions have him shoot himself in the phone booth).

His name was used in an episode of The X Files (Peter Boyle played him), but the character isn’t meant to be him, as far as I can tell.

You can now buy food on Amazon, which seems like a pretty terrible idea. What is funny is they’re using the same template from their book/music/other crap so fucking bananas have “product features” and “If you like _, you’ll like _” only it’s a fucking avocado because you gave lettuce five stars. [I’m seethingly furious and hate everything in the world]. Check the reviews before you buy, friend.

I also got too much glee out of this online mag of cinema review, for one article on silent comedians for referring to the party where Fatty Arbuckle allegedly raped an actress with a bottle as “...little more than a one-man orgy featuring Fatty and half a dozen naked whores.” Elsewhere in the article, a footnote states “It was always difficult to imagine why a woman would want to mate with Harry Langdon,” which also makes me laugh. I think I like sex jokes at the expense of the long-dead.

I’ve also been obsessively watching silents lately, working my way (via Netflix) through 9 disks of the Harold Lloyd box set and catching Buster Keaton Mondays at Film Forum for the next two months.

Today I went to the nominally “dramatic” Douglas Fairbank’s Mark of Zorro... which was pretty much physical comedy seperated by wordy screen-filling intertitles and constant denouncement of “oppression.” Zorro was less a master swordsman in this incarnation than a master jump-over-a-lot-stuffs-man.

(Next I will write about the most specific downside of seeing silents in a live audience… there’s less distraction from the horrible rude/senile old people in the audience.)

I answered the weekly Film Forum trivia question without googling and kinda weirded myself out for instantly knowing it.

On Friday, we open our 3-week SUMMER SWASHBUCKLERS series with a double bill of THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL (1935) and CAPTAIN BLOOD (1935), starring Errol Flynn as the original pirate of the Caribbean and based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini. Name a famous play of the 1960s in which one of the characters uses “Rafael Sabatini” as one of several pseudonyms.

I saw the movie based on this play once on TV when I was in high school. The pseudonym is mentioned in a list of other pseudonyms pretty casually in one monologue in the movie if I remember. But for some reason, it stuck with me.

My mother had mentioned the movie was playing in her town when she was growing up and was held over (for popularity) week after week and she saw it a dozen times… just because they went to the movies every week.

Thanks to Subway Cinema’s Asian Film Festival, I have been able to do the impossible—see Sakigake! Cromartie High School on the big screen (fans of this journal will remember by delight at finding the trailer online last year). Basically, the movie is Rock and Roll High School if you took the Ramones out and replaced them with awkward pauses and references/parodies to Japanese shit you’ve never heard of*. The Cromartie anime was basically an “Adult Swim” show—stilted “no-mation” cartoons speaking non-sequitirs, 1/20 which is the most hilarious thing ever, the other 19 shrugged off. I think for American audiences , it’s trapped on the mobius moving sidewalk of a comedy catch 22—to enjoy it, you have to be really fucking stoned, but if you’re stoned, you can’t read the subtitles and follow the plot. So, target audience is Japanese-fluent potheads. Have at it.

typical Cromartie anime episode. Key points: robot juvenile deliquent, excessive swearing, idiocy, Freddie Mercury

If this at all sounds appealing to you, there’s an encore showing on June 23rd.

I’m going to make a point to catch Takeshi Miike’s Yokai War and possibly the girl rock band story Linda Linda Linda before the festival’s out. It fills in the time before the latest Billy Wilder festival at Film Forum (their third in so many years… is there a discount in bulk on these films?).

The festival seems pretty cool, though. They gave away prizes (and made fun of them) before the show started (t-shirts and “girls in bikini with guns poster”) The enthusiastic host (who might be an organizer, I’d wager to guess) enthusiastically listed all of the wrestling-themed shows in the program (3), thanked the many liquor brands sponsoring the fest, and then cheerfully described the sponsoring McDonald’s ad replacing the short film that was supposed to preceed the movie (until somebody locked the DVD in their office) as “racist.”

The biggest downside to the showings of the festival are the unsubtitled trailers before the movies for the other in the fest… most of which seem to feature Old Boystyle torture and gore in lingering closeups. I was surpressing the gag reflex for Art of the Devil 2... I can only imagine what’s going on in the heads of the sick fucks who wanted to see a full 2 hours of skin being peeled off, lizards errupting bloodily from inside the body, iron hooks ripping through hands. Thanks a lot, Thailand. I expect this shit from Korea, but I’m really disappointed in you acting out like this.
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*I was horrified to “get” a 2-line reference to the 1981 pilot episode of Urusei Yatsura. I think this is the information taking up space in my brain that makes it difficult for me to do simple mathematics anymore.

I finally got around to seeing Howl’s Moving Castle, which I’ve had sitting around since the Netflix came last week and with that, I have now seen all the 2005 Oscar “Best Animated Feature” nominees. All three of them.

There are spoilers here, but if you waited longer than me to see these, you deserve spoilers.

Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Wererabbit is very cute in an unexplainable stodgy British way. Much like the bow-tie wearing creators accepting their Oscar, it’s refreshingly unhip and somewhat embarrassing for the fun it seems to be having without consequence.

I love how there are echos of classic (‘30s-’50s) film genres in all the Wallace and Gromit films (Trousers: heist film, Close Shave: suspense/’Rebeccatype thriller, WereRabbit: Universal monster/horror), flavoring them, but the essential feel and nature of W&G is consistant between them. I think The Wrong Trousers, the second W&G short, is pretty much the pinnacle and neither subsequent offering comes close to its action, suspense and humor. I liked Were-Rabbit and it didn’t feel “long” despite it being a feature. I also thought it was interesting, after watching some of the bonus features, that even as it was being animated they were changing the plot and trying to figure out where it was going… there were at least 5 different endings at different points.

The downside, alas, Curse of the Were-rabbit felt a bit predictable at parts and seemed trying to “redo” bits from the shorts in a less effective way—“Hutch” the Rabbit was much less endearing than “Shawn,” the airplane chase at the Manor was very similar to scenes in A Close Shave, and Gromit looked constipated/depressed most of the film.
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Howl’s Moving Castle was certainly interesting, but not nearly as engaging as Spirited Away. I’m pretty lukewarm on the Studio Ghibli output… I love their intentions but if I were to tar all of their output with an overly simplistic slam-brush I’d go for “boring.” Their plots seem to ramble along without any direction for a lot of the time. Despite the very “Japanese” mileu for Spirited Away (matsuri, public bath house, shikigami, dragon-river spirit, ) it seemed to me to have the most ‘Western’ plot structure, falling lockstep in with the model of Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz.

Howl is an adaption of a British fantasy novel, which I’ve never read and know almost nothing about. I’m curious about it actually and might want to pick up a copy (but I went out and bought The Golden Compass at Strand instead… close enough). According to Wikipedia—“Roughly the first third of the plot is similar, after which the movie branches off into original territory, flavored with many of Miyazaki’s familiar themes: airships, redemption, cute non-human sidekicks.”

So, the stuff that I thought was great about the story—the plain but practical girl heroine (such a rarity in most kid flicks, save Miyazaki’s, of course) who becomes an old woman (a crone as the hero of a kid flick! Not since The Peanut Butter Solution!)—were undercut by “airships, redeption, cute non-human sidekicks.” Miyazaki also flopped the gender of the main antagonist to a woman for an unknown reason. Disney seems to do that too… the hero and villian are usually of the same gender. A lot of stuff happens that doesn’t seem to matter (Howl freaking out over his hair turning orange and then melting into green slime, the penultimate villian is vanquished and then invited to live with them for no reason as a senile invalid) and the ending just… happens.

So, I guess the pattern with my reviews is… these were OK, but go see the earlier stuff from the same people. Now, watch me throw a curveball—
The Corpse Bride was almost unwatchable. There’s a great internal balance in film-goers for Tim Burton’s output that waffles between “creative visionary” and “Hot Topic hack” and a 16 ton weight was dropped on the latter, neatly atop Ape-rham Lincoln. It goes without saying that Nightmare Before Christmas is a huge thing to follow in the frame-by-frame animated footsteps of and I fully expected Corpse Bride to be in some areas difficient—crappy story, great visuals – fine; slower pace, more mundane setting—ok; fewer songs, bad ending—I’ll suck it up.

I’m hard-pressed to find one nice thing to say about this stop-motion turkey. The character designs were awkward—buggy “shocked” eyes, tiny un-expressive mouths, unbalanced bodies. The way they moved was jerky and stiff. The background characters were poorly cribbed from the waiting room of scene of Beetlejuice. The mercifully few songs sounded like word-heavy rough-drafts of the “Oogy Boogy” number that managed neither to explain what was happening, be pleasing to the ear, or distract from the crude day-glo “dancing” that accompanied them as the film expected them to do all three simultaneously. One nice thing…. there weren’t any Smashmouth songs.

The worst offender, as is usually the case, was the writing. Aside from not being “funny” when joking, the basic thrust of the plot doesn’t make sense. Victor, a bland simp, has been arranged to marry a girl he’s never met (Victoria) but immediately after meeting her for a five word scene, he’s tricked into marrying The Corpse Bride, who he also has barely said five words to either. So, it’s a love triangle between three strangers. Why do we care?

There is also a green worm doing a bad Peter Lorre impression.

Since getting Dragon Quest VIII, I’ve really been letting my Netflix gather dust. I was on a roll for a while… sending them back the same day I got them…

I’ve been sitting on The Lost Weekend for a month. Finally got around to it and enjoyed lines such as “”It’s all he gives a hang about.”

Some observations:

-You can go on a drunken bender in NYC for $10 in 1945.
His brother’s name is… “Wick?” Is he a shoemaking elf?
-His problem doesn’t so much seem to be his chronic alcoholism but his chronic speechifying.

I spell “Valentines Day”—C-O-L-M-A-N.

The Ronald Colman Pages

Last week I was all a twitter over One, Two, Three, so I added the similarly-themed, early Wilder-scripted Ninotchka to my Netflix. Oddly, I’ve never seen it. The director, Lubitsch basically “invented” the romantic comedy and the world has suffered ever since. His legendary (and to be fair, solidly aggreable) Shop Around The Corner was remade as You’ve Got Mail, so even if you’ve never seen one of his films, you get the idea. Not so much “ha ha” and a lot of “meet-cute” to use a contemporary term of cinema slander.

The entire movie made so that they could slap the tag line “Garbo Laughs” in the ads… seriously, that’s historical fact. And it’s that super fake Old Hollwood “room full of drunks” laugh as well. At least once in many old movie there will be a loud assault of “HAW HAW HAW” group of people laughing that bears absolutely no resemblance to real laughter. At what point did that go out of fashion? Some NYU student should write a thesis on that.

Ninotchka’s premise three comic-relief Communist agents (played by German Jewish character actors, natch) who come to wonderful backlot-Paris to sell jewelery to raise money for the country. They get seduced by the luxury of the west so mean no-makeup Garbo comes from Russia to close the deal. Then she falls for a Parisian gigilo, puts on some make up, buys a hat that looks like a dunce cap mated to a plunger and we’re solidly in rom-com cliche land with “can opposites attract” bla bla bla and so on.

I was trying to figure out why the leader of the Russian trio looked so familiar. Since I keep my laptop on the coffee table, I looked him up in IMDB —he’s the villian in Night at the Opera (among other things) —he’s the owner of the Opera who beats the crap out of Harpo at the top of the flick (and then is the butt of their mayhem). I ignored pretty much the last act of Ninotchka because I kept looking up other actors.

I have to say, the love interest for Garbo was pretty fucking goofy in this—Melvyn Douglas. He has kind of puffy cheeks and buggy eyes and when he’s rattling off all this love garbage—real Attack of the Clones caliber crap (but it’s 1939, so I’ll let it slide)—his eyes kept bugging more and he’s raising one eyebrow in a way that looks more jerkily nervous than seductive. Bill even asked, what’s this guy’s deal? Is he just like another William Powell or something? I said I remembered seeing him, or at least his name, in other stuff but the details escape me.

Looking him up too, I got a couple of interesting facts. He was the husband in Being There. He’s the grandfather of Illeana Douglas. And he was married to Helen Gahagan, the politician who ran against Nixon for senate (Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady), later was in Kennedy’s cabinet and gets referenced in a Tom Leher song. His life story is actually pretty interesting, check it out.

The most noteworthy thing in Ninotchka happens pretty early on and at the time was probably a throw-away gag. The trio are at the station to meet Garbo, coming from Russia, but they know know she’s a she. They just know some superior officer is coming to close the deal for them. So they’re looking at everyone getting off the train and a bearded man gets off. “That’s probably him” they say and they walk behind him. “Heil Hitler!” he says to a woman waiting at the station “Heil Hitler!” she shouts back, and the man and woman embrace in a kiss. “That’s definately not him” the Russians say, shaking their comic-relief heads in synchronized weariness.

Now, I get the joke was supposed to be “ah we thought he was Russian but he’s actually German.” But a man GREETS HIS WIFE after a train trip with “Heil Hitler” and then they start making out. Sieg Heil + Tender Kiss just seem totally not compatible… unless you were making out with Hitler. At least do the kiss first. Like, “I missed you honey, by the way… we’re both Nazis.”

I watched about 20 minutes of Simon Birch on TV.

What the fuck?

First off, if you live in New York, get your ass to Film Forum and see One, Two, Three. It actually was at Film Forum a couple years ago (I just checked… 2002, yipe!) when Billy Wilder died (at age 95! double yipe!) and now it’s back for his “100th Birthday.”

This movie is pretty terrific and pretty gloves-off for the time (1961-2).... and it made me laugh at Nazi jokes again. It was drubbed mercilessly by critics when it came out for being tasteless and Cagney’s difficulty with the material convinced him to retire from movies for 20 years (he required 52 takes for one of his monologues… but he talks nonstop for about 10 minutes).

There’s some dud scenes in it, granted—Cagney’s wife is a useless character who feels kind of tacked on and changes her mood randomly as it serves the plot and there’s some tedious shit where a guy wears a dress and the US MPs are after him. The strong presence of Coca-Cola and PanAm Airlines is weird; I read somewhere they provided the funding. They probably wouldn’t today based on how satirical (and casually Nazi-friendly) the script is. The man playing the president of Coca-Cola is doing an Anthony Atamanik Georgia accent. See it, see it, see it!

We submitted two scripts to Comedy Central on Monday, and they very quickly got back to us with changes…

Overall, the scripts were well received and they requested a third script that “explains” the show which initially they wanted to skip. We don’t want to do an “origin” story, we’re pretty firm on that, but we have to do a basic script that tells you who Jim, Rosalie, Sally, and the neighbors are. There was a specific request from our executive producer for scenes of wife-beating. It’s a classic.

I took out the script for our first 102 show and we’ll probably jump off from there. Jump off a bridge I mean!