Falling Down While Standing Up.

From his hometown of Atlanta Georgia, filmed at the 4,600-capacity Fox Theater in November 2014, Chris Tucker regales us with the type of comedy that would be heckled unforgivingly in smaller clubs. It’s CHRIS TUCKER LIVE. I think. Knowing that comics like Carlin and Hicks and Pryor existed, and knowing current voices like observational powerhouse Louis CK and sociological jungle cat Chris Rock still prowl the comedyways, watching this watery, derivative, unfunny performance by a comedian who showed great promise in his youth, is… disappointing.

Tucker’s opening, where he notes the difference in your partner’s attitude before and after marriage (i.e. before marriage, they’ll fix you a sandwich without question, after marriage, they’ll snap at you to fix it yourself), is so beaten to death by the comedy community in general that it is exhausting trying to eke out a smile let alone a laugh. If this is the opening, how weak is the show? Our answer would come immediately, as the ballroom-attired Tucker starts describing his girlfriend taking him rollerblading. Uh… really? Like we care.

Distributed by Netflix, written and produced by Tucker, and directed by Phil Joanou (GRIDIRON GANG), the rest of this 90-minute show is as beige as the opening clunkers. Is it irony or tragedy that a comic’s first Stand Up Special arrives when he’s not funny anymore?

There’s an extended “Michael Jackson” segment where Tucker recounts his adventures hanging with The King of Pop and filming the You Rock My World video. Though there are funny snippets, Tucker has to end this segment importuning his audience, “Give yourselves a big hand!” – because the end of that segment was so weak he didn’t get enough applause to establish it as an ending! I can’t believe the director left this in.

Besides his childhood anecdotes, all sprinkled with intermittent high-pitched shouting (which worked when he was younger, but in this older, more sedate context, seem like desperate exclamation points in lieu of punchlines), Tucker does a passable Clinton and a terrible Obama. Even when he dips into political personalities, it is shallow impersonation guff, nothing biting, insightful or politically challenging.

Tucker was on his way to becoming the next Eddie Murphy; his cutthroat performances on DEF COMEDY JAM in the early 90s and his solid comedic turn as Smokey in FRIDAY (1995) cemented him as a force on the horizon. Alas, the sun has set. Whereas his early standup and filmic roles like THE FIFTH ELEMENT (1997) and MONEY TALKS (1997) were perfect vehicles for his shotgun delivery and frenzied demeanor, CHRIS TUCKER LIVE only highlights how much fire he has lost in growing up and growing old. There were also those silly-but-lucrative RUSH HOUR movies, but the less said about them…

Tucker’s only 44 though, and maybe it’s a case of too rich too quickly, or maybe it’s a case of From Rags To Riches and Not Wanting to Lose It so Dumbing It Down Fo’ Massuh, in order to stay on top.

Hey, he really is the next Eddie Murphy…

END

Couldn’t find the silver lining.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK is a teachable moment in filmic history. They showed us how to cure bipolar disease. You just need to get laid!

Two damaged people Meet Cute. They pretend to hate each other. By movie’s end, they love each other, which apparently means they’re not damaged anymore. Yay. All it took was sex.

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK is the single most overrated piece of romantic crap that I stepped in because other people were stepping in it and saying how nice it tasted through their shoes. Sure, gutterloads of frilly romcoms assault us weekly, but none so pretentious. Due to this movie’s plot revolving around bipolar disease, it acquires Oscar cred. And Oscar cred apparently connotes High Art, rather than Chick Flick bullshit. You lost me at White American Heterosexual Couple who should just screw and get it over with.

Mantoy Bradley Cooper is Patrick, bipolar, just out of hospital, lost his job, wife, house, moved back in with parents Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver. His temper is on a hair trigger, his meds intake erratic, his filters non-existent, as are his social skills. Manically believing that bettering himself by reading Hemingway and losing weight and looking for the “silver lining” in every situation will endear him to his adulterous ex-wife, he is painted as crazy. And he is. We all know crazy when we meet it, even if you euphemize it as “bipolar.” And Patrick is crazy. But – so the movie tells us – Patrick becomes Not Crazy after The Sex with Jennifer Lawrence.

Lawrence is Tiffany, recently widowed, and with such low self-esteem that she banged the whole office after her husband’s death, even the women. She says she doesn’t do that sort of thing anymore, but it’s a part of her that she accepts and likes. I like that part of her too. Wanna get a drink sometime, Jennifer? That raven hair, those dark, dark eyes; swiveling that sexy little botty during her dance routine. So cute, the way she keeps darting out from behind a tree, to jog with Patrick – “Hey–!” That kills me!  And those cheeks! I just wanna pinch em pinch em pinch em PINCH EM! And the ones on her face are pretty cute too.

Tiffany also has no filters, which she construes as “being truthful” (which is correct), is well-acquainted with meds, and is as socially inept as Patrick, yet though she was previously married to a cop in a stable loving relationship until his death, now she is attracted to loser Patrick. For no reason other than the script says so. He’s a bad catch (bipolar, no prospects, unpredictable, unreliable), so her stalking reaction to him must be because he’s hot. But is a character in an Oscar film allowed to be that shallow? Or are we meant to regard her irrational pursuit as True Love? Then it’s okay to be a stalker. Meg Ryan tells us so in FRENCH KISS (and every other execrable piece of dogshit that she calls romantic comedies). Or are we to assume that Tiffany is still obsessed with casual sex to satiate her demons when she tells Patrick, “You can fuck me if you keep the lights off”? And – by your own judgment – isn’t casual sex a Bad Thing?

I know why *I* love her – because I like casual sex and I like sluts. And those cheeks. But that’s not what MAINSTREAM SOCIETY likes. Is it? Do you? Then why do you like this character? Are you vicariously living your own wet dreams through her? Shut up, hypocrites!

It’s not that I dislike PLAYBOOK. The film is funny in odd places, and the performances from the stars are stellar, as can be expected. Even the B-players are all reliably solid: Paul Herman (BEANSIE from THE SOPRANOS) as De Niro’s compulsive gambling buddy, Julia Styles as Tiffany’s sister, Paul Ortiz as Julia’s henpecked husband, Chris Tucker as Patrick’s friend, another patient from the hospital, constantly trying to escape. The only miscasting seems to be Dash Mihok as a policeman, that turns up whenever and wherever he’s needed to quell disturbances (shyeh, when has that ever happened? I mean, this guy is on duty 24/7 keeping tabs on Patrick, whether it’s a family disturbance at 3am or a Sunday football game). But PLAYBOOK doesn’t go nearly deep enough to warrant its claim as a beacon and boon to bipolar people; that for those who feel alone or depressed, they can take heart that someone out there understands their predicament. Well, someone out there just might – but it ain’t the filmmakers of PLAYBOOK.

De Niro’s character is supposedly obsessive-compulsive, and arranges his remote controls and folds his hanky a certain way, and believes son Patrick is a good luck charm for his football team. That’s not Obesssive Compulsive Disorder – that’s arranging your remote controls and folding your hanky and being a superstitious clod. Try dating someone with OCD and then get back to me on your understanding of it.

Which leads us to: Do the filmmakers know what ‘bipolar’ really is? Writer-director David O. Russell (from the book by Matthew Quick) plays Patrick’s situation like a fish-out-of-water tale: Pat’s back from the hospital too soon and trying to fit in with normal society again. Wackiness ensues.

Telling tall tales and having a tripwire temper, and going to jail for petty disturbances and having a cop check in regularly doesn’t mean you’re bipolar. It means you’re a fuckup. But waitaminute, you say, that describes ME. But I’m not a “fuckup”… okay, let’s go with the euphemism… I’m BIPOLAR! Yay. Soooo socially acceptable.

Movie doesn’t go anywhere near deep enough to make us truly concerned or disturbed. It’s two sexy white kids with no debilitating physical deformities verbally sparring until they have sexual intercourse.

And here’s where the bipolar express really leaves the rails: final scene shows an idyllic Sunday afternoon at Patrick’s household, parents, friends, Patrick and Tiffany in a cutesy embrace; there is not one shred of indication that Patrick and Tiffany are in an ongoing battle with their ids, their antisocial personas. For all intents and purposes, the movie paints a rosy picture of everyone being normal. And why? Because Patrick and Tiffany are an item. So that’s all it takes? The movie spends two hours setting up bipolar and OCD and self-esteem issues as the obstacles that these youngsters must overcome to find each other, then in its final frames, it tells us those obstacles were easily curable if only the youngsters overcame the biggest obstacle – taking down each others’ panties. Cos apparently that cured not just them, but everyone acquainted with them!

But Tiffany has a problem so deep rooted that as soon as she believed Patrick was not with her psychologically, she turned to drink and a quick lay. She did this at THE most important moment of their lives up to that point. What’s to say she won’t do it again when she feels him drifting? And Patrick’s temper is supposedly so out of control that he can’t be trusted not to get into a fight at a football match. Both of them have no filters when we meet them. Are we to believe that they have now suddenly grown filters on their big mouths? If you rationalize that both their anti-social behaviors were only manifest because they were still seeking their soul-mates, that in itself is an argument against their supposed serious conditions of bipolarity. That way lies the kingdom of fuckup. Not clinical depression or bipolarity or obsession.

So you know those times when you hit the roof and throw things at the wall and one of your friends says, “Dude, you need to get laid.”

Turns out they’re right.

END

“I can’t hold her much longer. She’s getting too sexy.”

Slammin’, Glammin’ and Hammin’.

THE FIFTH ELEMENT has spawned so many negative reviews (even whilst admitting to enjoying it) that I get the feeling critics are jealous that Euros can pull off an action blockbuster with as much brainless flair as Americans – with twice the guilty pleasure.

Plava La Poffy

In a future society realized in eye-fatiguing detail by writer/director Luc Besson, a race of aliens who are half Guardians of the Universe and half turtle, entrust a secret to generations of human acolytes – four carved stones representing the four elements of Water, Fire, Earth and Air, which, when combined with a mysterious Fifth Element (fiery Milla Jovovich), will keep Ultimate Evil at bay. This Ultimate Evil apparently threatens the Earth every 5000 years, the most recent attack being in 1987 when Jethro Tull won the Grammy for Best Heavy Metal Album.

Never mind that of the 116 confirmed elements, the fifth element is boron (its atomic number being 5, denoting it has 5 protons in the atom’s nucleus – sorry, I forgot the majority of people still believe in angels and astrology and in superstitions dating from 500 BC which identified only four elements that constitute the cosmos – didn’t mean to bring science into a fiction based on science…), in a world where supermodel Milla Jovovich fights evil whilst being 96-percent naked, I’ll run with her being the Fifth Element. Ian Holm and Charlie Creed-Miles are the discomfited acolytes entrusted to help Leeloo (Jovovich) keep evil at bay, apparently through stuttering and slapstick.

It’s up to THE SLAMMIN’ Bruce Willis, playing Korben Dallas playing Bruce Willis, an ex-army, devil-may-care flying-cab driver, to keep half-nekkid Fifth Element Leeloo out of danger and out of clothes. Hitching a ride to Planet Phloston – for seemingly no reason other than to flex Digital Domain’s special effects muscles – he must battle aliens that look like bulldogs, put his hand into the innards of a singer who looks like a vacuum cleaner and try to avoid –

THE GLAMMIN’ Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker), an interstellar DJ who looks like a transsexual Chris Rock, intent on interviewing Korben for his intergalactic radio show, while moisting all the siren stewardesses who overtly ache for a taste of his ruby rod. Dallas and Leeloo and Ruby being pursued by –

THE HAMMIN’ Gary Oldman… He’s done a junkie Pistol, he’s done a gay playwright, he’s done a deaf German composer, he’s done a blood-drinking undead version of Brad Pitt; here, he is Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, an interstellar black market arms dealer with a Bible Belt drawl – is there anything this thespian can’t do? To bring about the end of existence as we know it, The Ultimate Evil must work through Zorg’s company, for which Zorg charges the usual agent’s fee of 10-percent of the end-of-existence-as-we-know-it, which works out to about Canada.

Even though the mysticism of a prophecy engines this movie, Besson has unabashedly crafted a popcorn-and-bullets action-adventure comedy and obviously regards it as such, never for an instant threatening to tread philosophical, scientific or preachy ground; paradoxes, non-science, plotholes and cheap neoprene monster makeup flying hither and thither.

There’s something for everyone here: for the religionists, there are the acolytes blindly following their prophesy; for the atheists, there is nihilist Zorg selling WMDs to end the world; for futurists, there are flying cars; for comedy, there is Lee Evans; for the kinky, the octopussyian Plavalaguna; there is Bruce Willis for the ladies, there is Leeloo for the guys, and there is Ruby Rhod for everyone else who’s unsure.

END