Are you there, Chelsea? It’s me, Funny. Hello? Hello?

Here's a TV review because that's the third word in the title of this blog.

Chelsea Handler is a comedian who’s made a name for herself as the host of Chelsea Lately on E!, a late night roundtable/talk show where comedians mercilessly mock celebrities that have shown up in E! News stories and I assume the Enquirer and People, and then Handler interviews a different one afterwards.  Some time later, a mock behind-the-scenes show called After Lately. Her humor is brash, sarcastic, sharp-tongued, witty, and at times very filthy, and this is what has made her popular.  So popular in fact, that she has been given her own sitcom.

            The (second) pilot aired last night on NBC.  Are You There, Chelsea? Is based on Handler’s autobiographical books “Are You There Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea,” “My My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands,” and “Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang.” The show initially had the title of one of the three aforementioned books, but can’t you just imagine some NBC executive looking down a long desk at Handler and the show’s producers and telling them, “We can’t have the word ‘vodka’ in a primetime show on this network.  Let’s play with the words a little.  And, while we’re at it…”

            Laura Prepon plays a younger Chelsea Handler, while Handler plays her older sister Sloan [yes, I’m serious].  Rounding out the cast are Ali Wong as the minority best friend; Lauren Lapkus as the dorky, virgin, cringe-eliciting roommate (cringe comedy is guaranteed to be funny, right, Office?), Jake MacDormand as the handsome bartender who Chelsea (Prepon) tried to sleep with one night, but it didn’t work because they both wanted to be on top; Mark Povellini as the colorblind little person barback; and Lenny Clarke as Chelsea and Sloan’s dad Melvin.

The show is more formulaic than anything I ever would have expected Handler to be involved with, and falls flat almost constantly.  Programs like The League, Archer, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on FX have taught audiences, as well as writers and television producers, something that I’ve known for years: crude, lewd, and dirty can be hilarious.  What the writers and producers of Are You There, Chelsea? did not learn is that having a character simply say or do something crude, lewd, and dirty is not automatically hilarious.  That type of humor takes a certain panache to pull off, which interestingly is something that Handler herself has, but this show does not.   Maybe that’s just something one should expect from a show based on Handler’s work but created by Dharma & Greg veterans Julie Ann Larson and Dottie Zicklin.    Are You There, Chelsea? seems to want very badly to be like one of those FX comedies, but I get a sense that it may have “needed” to be watered down in order to be shown on one of the big four networks during primetime.  Indeed the show was heavily reworked since NBC execs saw the first pilot, and I have to wonder if they toned down the crudeness, and in so doing, the humor and any real wit or charm the show might have had, as well.

One can kind of see through all the nonsense that Laura Prepon is still a very talented comedic actress, but she is very miscast as this 26-year-old television version of Handler who works at a bar, drinks a lot, sleeps around, gets arrested and kisses a very butch lesbian in jail to get out of being beaten up, actually prays to the deity known as Vodka, and delivers really clunky and probably unnecessary narration.  Handler’s character Sloan [I hope you’re not confused] doesn’t seem to work as the overly religious new mom (pregnant until the end of last night’s episode) she’s supposed to be, and has most of the wit, sarcasm, and lines that work reserved for herself.  It could just be that I’m a huge fan of Rescue Me and the man’s stand-up, but I found Lenny Clarke to be the only real shining light on the show.  Clarke isn’t given the best material to work with, or much material at all in that first episode, but his performance is so damn funny, anyway.  It seems like such waste of a comedian of that caliber to stick him on a mediocre and just kind of stupid television show as the dad.

I like Chelsea Handler, and I really really wanted to like this show. Hell, I even found something good about it (Thank you, Lenny Clarke), but the mediocrity and stupid far outweighs what’s good, and I doubt I’m going to give this another viewing.  Next week, another female comedian whose act I thoroughly enjoy and a good friend of Handler, Natasha Leggero is apparently slated to appear, and I fear watching her try to make the best of stupid lines in stupidly written situation comedy that’s about as edgy as a tennis ball.  Or she’ll get great lines, put her fantastic sense of comedic timing to use, and I’d wind up having to suffer through the parts of the show in between her appearances.  It’s not worth it.

Hellraiser: Deader Review

Released in 2005, this movie is not at all new.  However, it is on DVD so it's bound to be new to somebody. Don't let that be you. Before even considering watching this dreadful excuse for a film, I would suggest reading this review first.  Or just read it anyway even if you aren't considering watching it, and hopefully it will never cross your mind.

 

Hellraiser: Deader Review

The Direct to video film Hellraiser: Inferno was a disappointing mess that hit all the wrong notes. I enjoyed the first four films to varying degrees, and I relish the Cenobite mythos and the disturbing charm of Pinhead, so I had hoped that somehow things could get better again.  After watching the next film in the series, the incredibly goofy Hellraiser: Hellseeker after it came out on DVD (directly), I told myself I wouldn’t watch any more Hellraiser films by its director Rick Bota.  In 2005, when I read that Hellraiser: Deader, the seventh film in the franchise, and third to go directly to video (dvd), was also directed by Rick Bota, I kept my distance for six years.  The other night, something in me decided to watch the damn thing, and while I can say that it was an improvement over the last two entries, as a fan I was still unhappy.  I suppose one can say that I seek out pain in the hopes of finding some pleasure.  Hellraiser fans will get that tongue-in-cheek reference, and they’ll probably groan (sorry).  Other people will just think I am either some kind of masochist (still kind of relates to Hellraiser) or that I just got really bored that night.

            Z-list overactress Kari Wuhrer plays Amy Klein, a reporter with tons of banal attitude, who is drawn to the seedy and sleazy things the world.  After taking some pictures of people doing various illicit drugs, high on various illicit drugs, or just unconscious, Amy returns from a crack house to the offices of the British newspaper or magazine at which she works and is told by her sleazy (sensing a theme?) editor Charles that she needs to watch a video.  Amy and an all too enthusiastic Charles sit back and watch the video, which chronicles a suicide cult’s ritual in which Eurotrash is brought back from death by a long-haired weirdo in a loose white shirt.  Charles then sends Amy to Bucharest (convenient that the package in which the video arrived had a return address) to investigate the world of the “Deaders.”  That’s what members of the cult are called.  Get it?  They die, and come back.  They’re dead…er.  The name is explained later by an English club rat and pussyhound with his own subway train on the rails under Bucharest.

            Once in Bucharest, Amy finds the apartment used as the return address, and inside, the dead body of the woman who filmed the ritual she and Charles watched.  She also finds Lemarchand’s puzzle box.  She grabs another package from the room where the woman has strangled herself and pries the box out of her rigor mortised fingers, only to cause her to briefly come back to life, shriek and reach out for Amy and/or the box.  Amy escapes by kicking the superintendent in the balls and returns to her hotel room to drink vodka and open the second package, which, tadaa, contains a second video.  And it just so happens to be a video of the now dead woman warning whoever is watching to not open the box. So…Amy then opens the box by mistake and is brought into a world of choppy, sloppy editing, blood, breasts, and stupid.

            Bota’s directing style leaves a lot to be desired (so does the acting, writing, production value, etc.)  He uses odd camera angles in combination with confusing choppy back and forth editing to ineptly convey confusion about what is real and what is not, and hopefully, in turn, some paranoia and even fear, as well.  Normally this would make sense for a film like this: Amy is confused and paranoid and afraid, so we should be, too, right?  Wrong.  The formula is not that simple. Better film makers, such as David Lynch or Jacob’s Ladder director Adrian Lyne, have used this technique to yield much much better results, and Bota has had three attempts (I have yet to watch the next installment in the Hellraiser franchise, which Bota also got to direct) to either get it right or to figure out that he can’t.

            I’m going to gloss over the rest of the “story” here and just kind of jump to the end.  This would normally be considered some kind of spoiler, it but really isn’t, especially if you saw the last two movies, and if you consider that the whole movie is already as spoiled as an apple that’s been left out in the sun and humidity of southern Florida for six months:  Pinhead (played by an aging and kind of chubby Doug Bradley) and other cenobites appear at the climax (can it have one if it’s all over the place, and the story is totally incoherent?) of the film, tears the cult leader to pieces with chains, kills the Deaders once and for all, and likely sends their souls to hell.

            The movie (in script form) started out as just another crappy horror film, but the producers decided to turn it into a Hellraiser film and apparently had the third act rewritten.  Pinhead, the Cenobites, and the Hellraiser mythos were forced in, and it’s pretty obvious.  Hellraiser was literally tacked on, and it has the feeling of something akin to shoving Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton into the last few scenes of the shark jump episode of Happy Days.  Alas, this series jumped the proverbial shark several movies earlier.

And yet, no matter how bad these movies have gotten, Bradley’s performance as Pinhead remains immaculate.  The man knows the character as well as Clive Barker by this point, he manages to do a stellar job with what he’s given, and apparently was even given the chance to work on Pinhead’s lines so as to better fit the character. He’s certainly the best thing about this movie, and since the sequels began skipping theaters and dropping numbers, his appearances have sadly been all too brief and even kind of harmless.  No wonder he retired.

If you’re bored, there are probably worse ways to spend 88 minutes, but there are also much better ones (sleeping, staring at the wall, squeezing your fingers with a pliers…), especially if you’ve read Clive Barker’s “Hellbound Heart” novella and/or became a Hellraiser fan some time between 1987 and 1996.  Barker, himself, was more than displeased with the direct to video sequels and I can’t imagine anyone liking this damn thing…not even the people who made it, really. Hopefully, next time, I’ll think of something better to do instead of watching Hellraiser: Hellworld.

Ghostbusters is back in theaters!!!

            Disclaimer: This is more of a review of an experience than the film itself.  Ghostbusters was released twenty-seven years ago, and I’m going to go out on a limb that most people who would be reading this blog have already seen it.

In 1984, my mother and grandmother took me to the movie theater to see Ghostbusters.  I was three years old, and I can’t remember the experience at all, but I have since seen the film on television, VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray at least  a hundred times.  It’s become one of my very favorite movies, and every time I watch it, I absolutely love it. It doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t get old, it stays just as funny. Like Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, and Airplane, Ghostbusters is probably as close to a perfect comedy as anyone can find.  The lines are funny and memorable, the performances are fantastic and hilarious, the story is engaging, and the supernatural/Sci-fi elements help the movie to be just plain fun. The script was deftly written by Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd and gives the audience one funny, witty, and memorable line after another, although a few were ad-libbed, woven into a really captivating story.  Ivan Reitman’s direction is immaculate and brings that script to life in a way no other director probably could.  The performances from Bill Murray to Rick Moranis to Steven Tash (the goofy student in Doctor Venkman’s lab) are all spectacular, the characters are endearing (Walter Peck and Dean Yager, excluded), and the main cast has a fantastic chemistry, playing off each other in a way that’s almost never been seen before or since.

The thing is, watching Ghostbusters on a 32,” 72,” or even on a 108” television screen is just not as engaging and immersive as watching it on the big screen at a movie theater, and it can’t bring the film to life in quite the same way.

Audiences across the country (at select theaters in select cities) were given a rare opportunity to see this incredible comedy the way it was meant to be seen.  Ghostbusters came back to theaters for three nights this October, a fitting month if there ever was one.  I went to the local AMC theater to see the movie again, this past Thursday, October 27^th.

While I can sometimes be a bit annoyed to see children coming into a theater, I was actually pleased that parents were bringing their kids twenty-seven years after my mother and grandmother brought me to see Ghostbusters. When the film started, I was a little disappointed that the picture hadn’t been cleaned up, but I quickly told myself that this is what I saw when I was three and can no longer remember—this was the experience I came to have.  The special effects, which were state of the art in 1984, still hold up very well today…okay, the stop-motion animated terror dogs look pretty cheesy by today’s standards, but I stand by my statement in regard to other effect in the movie.  In fact, many of the practical effects used in the film just look better than CGI we see in most films these days; nothing looks more like it’s actually happening than something that is actually happening.

Several more shows have been added this weekend, and of course, on Halloween, so if you’re a fan (if you’re not, you have a problem) and you haven’t seen Ghostbusters in the theater yet this month, I urge you to tomorrow if you can.  There is an extensive list of shows on the official Ghostbusters facebook page.

First Post

Here be the first post of my new blog.  First review coming VERY soon.