|
** (out of ****) "The Aristocrats" is a movie with only one move. It's the documentary-version of a 90 minute shoot-out, or a 90 minute monster battle, or a 90 minute car chase, or 90 minutes of the same explosion. Or how about an entire symphony that's all loud, all fast, and all in the same key signature. Even in pornography people change positions every so often. But not in "The Aristocrats," which is one joke (known as The Aristocrats) for 89 minutes. Actually, it's just an 89 minute barrage of obscenities. The result is relentless and quickly dull. It's a 30 minute cable special stretched beyond its limit. There are some amusing bits, some revealing parts of the comedian's craft, and some lore of stand-up but, good Lord, not enough to fill 89 minutes. The one joke told within "The Aristocrats" isn't really a joke at all, just an excuse for comics to string along as many obscenities as possible. Rape, incest, murder, slavery, fecalphilia--nothing is off limits. You have probably never heard the joke told because, as the movie explains again and again (and again and again, as if someone had a stopwatch with only one mark: "feature length"), stand-up comics only tell it to one another and never to audiences. It's a kind of a secret handshake, or a trade secret only brought out at conventions and never put on the market. The resulting documentary is a million close shots, on digital video, of comedians gushing and laughing over how funny think they are being. As the movie drones on and on with its garden variety junior high shocks, it really struck me how lonely and desperate for attention comedians really are. I don't think I've heard anything quite as contrived as a comedian laughing. "The Aristocrats" could almost be one of those Dogme 95 films where two crazy Danish filmmakers agree to shoot the exact same short film 20 times in a row just to see what happens. If, say, we saw a half-dozen comics tell the joke from start to finish, we might have something. But "The Aristocrats" is as repetitive stylistically as it substantially: no shot lasts for more than about three seconds, even if it's just to cut to a new angle of the same comic, and few comedians are even permitted to finish sentences. The result is that a single sentence is strung together out of the soundbites of ten different comedians. Does this make American stand-up comedians, as a group, look interchangeable and rather homogenous? Why, yes is it does, but, then again, I've always thought so. Is this the goal of "The Aristocrats?" I doubt it. There are some good spots: Kevin Pollak tells the joke while doing a great impersonation of Christopher Walken. Billy the Mime silently acts out all the obscenities with a look of joyous abandon on his face. Richard Jeni makes fun of the movie's editing pattern by always trying to look at the current camera, and always being a couple seconds behind. Naïve and open-faced, Sarah Silverman pretends to be a veteran of one of the characters in the joke, with sadly funny results. Jon Stewart, all distinguished with his newly-gray temples, is funny just by sidestepping the joke itself. And the magician who uses a deck of cards to illustrate the joke is amazing. Drew Carey and George Carlin aren't bad either (although, between you and me, my opinion of Carlin is that he's a more articulate version of a guy in a bar who wants to tell you how much better the world would be if he ran it). Yet there are almost as many moments of really awful filmmaking. Gilbert Gottfried is said to have given the best telling of The Aristocrats ever. Emphasis on "is said," because we don't actually get to see Gottfried tell the joke. Instead, we're treated to fleeting glimpses of him telling the joke while intercut with other comics gushing over how great it was. Another misstep is the inclusion of Bob Saget. Follow me closely, because my complaint is a little odd. Saget's claim to fame is bland, family friendly stuff like "Full House" and "America's Funniest Home Videos." To hear him tell a joke that's nothing but obscenities should be a riot--and he tells it pretty well--but by making him just one of many perverts, he's wasted. (Let me make a quick tangent: if someone told you to put bits of rust in your car's gas tank to prevent your car from rusting, you'd say he's full of crap, right? I'll need this later. The documentary "The Aristocrats" is co-produced by Penn Jillette of the comedy-magic duo Penn + Teller. I watched an episode of their show "Bullshit!" right before seeing "The Aristocrats." "Bullshit!" is best described as "Ripley's Don't Believe It." The episode I saw--which debunked alternative medical practices like reflexology and magnetism--was essentially a 30 minute advertisement for the status quo using bad words and name-calling. Yes, the reflexologist was obviously a charlatan. But Penn Jillette mostly came across as a guy who, if he lived in the 15th century, would have cited "common sense" as his reason for rejecting immunization. That's why I wanted to talk about putting rust in your gas tank. It sounds stupid and really counterintuitive--just like all the alternative medicines Penn and Teller felt deserving of bad words--but immunization is essentially the same principle: you voluntarily inject a small quantity of the disease into your blood. The other thing that bugged me about "Bullshit!" was that Jillette put something of a logic mistake right out in the open. The doctors he picked to ridicule were obvious quacks. The doctors he picked to help him ridicule them were supremely straight, very normal, very professional. We believe them because they look and sound the way doctors ought. Status quo. Yet, when Jillette pulled a stunt in which a phony doctor pandered the most absurd phony medicine in the middle of a shopping mall, he made it his business to have his phony doctor look very straight, very normal, very professional. Everyone who believed his lies did so because he looked and sounded the way doctors ought. Hmmm.) It goes without saying that I'm not at all opposed to vulgarity. My favorite toilet joke ever is in "2001: A Space Odyssey," which I guess proves that I really can mention "2001" while reviewing any movie. As we're traveling from the space wheel to the moon, listening to Strauss, watching the pretty stars, coldly observing the inhuman movements of the human crew, we suddenly cut to a close-up of a sign reading "Instructions for Using Zero Gravity Toilet." Reading the sign with a look of intense concentration, while biting his thumb, is Heywood Floyd. Then we go back to outer space. This is, of course, so funny because it's the only even remotely obscene thing to happen in the movie's 2.5 hour run-time. It is incongruous. Yet it also has the advantage of being inevitable, inescapable, and perfectly logical: eventually, you have to go to the bathroom in space. Still, there was thunderous laughter and applause all around me in the theater playing "The Aristocrats." For me, the documentary is an inside job: a movie made by comics, for comics. It's not really that different from listening to auto mechanics or my helpdesk buddies talk shop. Stand-up comedy isn't my shop; regular visitors to my site know I'm not funny. Finished Saturday, August 27th, 2005 Copyright © 2005, 2010 by Peter Kovic (aka Friday + Saturday Night Movie Critic) THE ARISTOCRATS ** (out of ****) A documentary directed by Paul Provenza. Featuring Drew Carey, George Carlin, Phyllis Diller, Richard Jeni, Penn Jillette, Kevin Pollak, Paul Reiser, Bob Saget, Jon Stewart, Teller, and a bunch of other people 2005 89 min NR (should be R or NC17) |
|
|
All content © Copyright 2007 - 2011 Insert Logo Productions
|