Tag: Louis CK

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Cancel Culture and Other Myths

Photo: Richard Van Der Spuy | Dreamstime.com

That does it. Let it be known, with the Memphis Flyer’s readership as my witness, that the 64th annual Grammy Awards officially obliterated the last ounce of patience I had for any argument about so-called cancel culture.

No, I’m not upset that Cedric Burnside’s I Be Trying won Best Traditional Blues Album — last year, the Flyer listed it as one of our top 10 albums of the year, and I’m always pleased when this publication’s record of excellent taste is affirmed.

Rather, I’m totally unsurprised but equally disgusted that comedian and serial masturbator Louis C.K.’s album Sincerely Louis C.K. won the Grammy for Best Comedy Album. A headline from The Hollywood Reporter really sums it up: “Louis C.K. Wins Grammy for First Special Since Sexual Misconduct Allegations.” For those who don’t know or don’t remember, in 2017 five women accused C.K. of sexual misconduct, including masturbating in front of them. The comedian eventually admitted that “These Stories Are True.”

But I don’t want to get off track. It’s not so much that C.K. won a Grammy that upsets me, though I can’t say I’m wild about that development. Rather, it’s that a very vocal contingent of the population will undoubtedly continue to crow about cancel culture despite clear indications that it’s nonexistent.

“What about former Mandalorian actor Gina Carano?” some devil’s advocates might ask. To which I would promptly respond, “Oh, you mean the woman who claimed that being a Republican — a choice one makes — is akin to being a Jewish person forcibly relocated, tortured, or exterminated during the Holocaust? Yeah, pretty tone-deaf and egregious thing to say, right? She’s the star of the forthcoming Western film Terror on the Prairie.”

Oh, and she’ll be at Fan Expo in Dallas in June. She’s still getting work, still collecting checks, and I would be flabbergasted if she doesn’t publish a ghost-written book about the evils of liberalism soon. Carano vs. Cancel Culture: My Stand Against the Elites or something like that.

Look, cancel culture is not real. It’s made up, a bogeyman to drum up right-wing outrage and pearl-clutching fear in Fox News viewers. “You can’t say anything these days. You can’t even publicly denigrate another person for their culture. I ask you, what is the world coming to?”

But why invent a completely cuckoo culture war? It’s the easiest way to get people to vote against their own self-interests.

I’ve made a point to shy away from fuming about hypocrisy — the hypocrisy is the point, it seems. It’s an expression of power, of tribal solidarity. But something about this whole cancel culture debate has really ruffled my feathers. Consider how big a fuss is made, nationally and locally, about protecting children. From critical race theory, from CBD and Delta 8, from predators, from confusion about why little Sarah’s got two mommies. And yet Tennessee state Rep. Tom Leatherwood’s HB 233, which sets up a common-law marriage between “one man” and “one woman,” has no minimum age limit. The Sexual Assault Center of Middle Tennessee said this in a statement: “The Sexual Assault Center does not believe the age of consent should be any younger than it already is. It makes children more vulnerable to coercion and manipulation from predators, sexual and other.” Does that sound like a bill presented by people overly concerned with protecting children?

We have got to get beyond these cancel culture/culture war concerns. There are real, dangerous threats facing us. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just this week released a report that it’s “now or never” if we want to limit global warming. Limit. Not stop, but limit. We are wasting time, energy, and money on spurious arguments when we should be working to end climate change, to end the current pandemic and prepare for the next one, to combat the housing crisis, to focus on any number of other concerns that actually limit many people’s quality of life.

If you agree, I suggest that you do as I will, and shut down any cancel culture talk with one little phrase. I think it will be as useful as “State’s rights to do what?” — the question I use to nip discussions about the “true” cause of the Civil War in the bud.

The next time someone tries to warn me about cancel culture, I’m just going to say, “Louis C.K. won a Grammy for his first special since his sexual misconduct allegations.”

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Film Features Film/TV

Trumbo

As a writer, I’m always suspicious of movies about writers. The protagonist is always hailed as being exceptionally talented but probably troubled. But when our hero is called upon to read his writing that everyone in the film says is so great, it turns out to not be very impressive, because the film’s writer is not as much of a genius as his character is supposed to be. And let’s face it: The life of the writer is not very interesting. It mainly consists of sitting still in front of a laptop and fretting.

But Dalton Trumbo was interesting. He didn’t just sit still in front of a typewriter — he sat in a tub surrounded by booze, ashtrays, and a typewriter. Trumbo won the National Book Award in 1939, got nominated for a screenwriting Academy Award in 1940, joined the Army after Pearl Harbor, and, after the war, became the highest paid writer in Hollywood. He was also, for five years, a member of the Communist Party of the United States, which would come to cost him dearly when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) called him to testify in 1948. Trumbo considered himself a patriot, and thought that HUAC had no legal or ethical right to persecute an American citizen for his political beliefs, so he and his compatriots refused to answer the committee’s questions and were convicted of contempt of Congress. Trumbo became known as the leader of the “Hollywood 10” who were blacklisted and no longer allowed to work with the major Hollywood studios.

Helen Mirren and Brian Cranston in Trumbo

Bryan Cranston plays Dalton Trumbo in Jay Roach’s adaptation of the writer’s life, and as you would probably expect, he does a tremendous job. Cranston’s work as Walter White on Breaking Bad has cemented him as one of the best actors working today, and he fully inhabits the role of the too-smart-for-his-own-good leftist with a big mouth and a precision-guided pen. Trumbo wrote scripts the old-fashioned way, buoyed by a heroic intake of scotch, nicotine, and amphetamines, and there is rarely a shot in Trumbo where Cranston is without a lit cigarette curling smoke from a long filter. There’s so much smoking going on that when Trumbo’s fellow traveller Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.) tells Trumbo he has lung cancer, it’s completely unsurprising. There are a lot of acting heavy hitters in Trumbo, but the scenes between Cranston and C.K. are by far the sharpest. Hird sees through Trumbo’s prodigious bullshit, but he plays along because he both agrees with and respects the older man. Cranston also gets to match wits with Helen Mirren as Hedda Hopper, the arch anti-communist gossip columnist whose column in the Hollywood Reporter reinforced the blacklist. Diane Lane plays Trumbo’s wife Cleo, and Elle Fanning his daughter Niki, both of whom feel the negative effects of Trumbo’s crusade. Other welcome actors include the underutilized Alan Tudyk as Ian McLellan Hunter, Trumbo’s friend who served as a front writer for the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Roman Holiday; John Goodman as hack studio head Frank King; and Dean O’Gorman, last seen as the dwarf Fili in The Hobbit trilogy, does an absolutely uncanny impression of Kirk Douglas

The actors are having such a good time that Trumbo‘s weaknesses in the story department are mostly papered over. Cranston’s huge, humane portrayal is great fun to watch, but he may come on too strong for the overall good of the picture. His confidence never wavers, even when he’s being strip-searched in prison, which means his character never changes. This is a common malady of biopics and historical dramas shared by, among others, Selma. Like Ava DuVernay in that film and F. Gary Gray in Straight Outta Compton, director Jay Roach plays it pretty safe, style-wise, choosing to focus on the characterization. Writer John McNamara’s dialogue gives the actors plenty of material to work with, but he lacks his subject’s talent for structural clarity. It would probably please Trumbo to hear a critic say Trumbo would have been better had Trumbo written it himself.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Addison’s February Film Journal

Journey To The West (2013; dirs. Stephen Chow and Derek Kwok)—Stephen Chow’s adaptation of what amounts to a few choice early chapters from Wu Cheng’en’s 16th-century Chinese novel is only the second film he’s directed since his triumphant live-action cartoon Kung Fu Hustle hit American theaters a decade ago. Unfortunately, distribution and exhibition vagaries prevented his newest work from reaching a wider audience; in fact, I don’t think Journey To The West played more than a handful of American theaters all year. Yet, like Hustle, Journey’s take-it-or-leave-it combinations of slapstick absurdity and spiritual gravity ought to surprise and delight any action-movie aficionado with an open mind, and it will bring great joy to anyone with a soft spot for the scrappy peasants and secret martial-arts masters of Hustle’s Pig Sty Alley. The CGI-heavy landscapes of this Asian period epic might look a bit chintzy at first, but as soon as an initially lopsided battle between a gigantic, man-eating thing-fish and an entire seaside village escalates into a deadly game of teeter-totter involving baby baskets, rickety bridges and peace-loving monks, quibbling about realism feels like poor sportsmanship. The other two big brawls—which feature professional bounty hunters, an angry Pig Demon and the wicked, all-powerful Monkey King—are just as zany; watching them is a little like watching a couple of bouncers try to beat each other to death with rubber chickens. Surprisingly, Chow’s ceaseless juggling of comic, romantic, sentimental and sorrowful over- and undertones make catching your breath between fight scenes something to look forward to. Grade: A

Mr. Turner (2014; dir. Mike Leigh)—Mike Leigh is one of the indisputable titans of contemporary cinema, but his latest film—which shows us 19th-century England (and a bit of Europe) through the eyes of acclaimed landscape painter and grunting, ill-natured ogre Joseph William Mallord Turner (Timothy Spall)—is an altogether less pleasurable affair than either 2010’s Another Year or 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky. Mr. Turner is a long, lumpy, and weirdly dull film; for nearly half of its 150-minute run time, period details, production design and first-rate location scouting threaten to trump any of the half-formed human and social drama on display. You find yourself thinking things like “Oh, so that’s what a pre-Victorian British art-supply store looked like!” or “Ah, so that’s how the locomotive that inspired the painting ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ sounded!” or “Did John Ruskin really have a speech impediment?” Natural-light cinematography so vibrant it looks artificial is more immediate than Turner’s troubling interactions with his estranged family, his grotesque maid, and his doting dad. Eventually, though—and it took me a while to step back and see this—these scattered, seemingly disconnected scenes add up to a full, sympathetic portrait of an irascible artist who was alive to something inside himself that others simply could not reach. Once you realize that, Leigh’s methods and techniques reveal themselves more forcefully than ever before. He and his collaborators don’t forge iron links of cause and effect; they stack great and small blocks of incident on top of each other until they form something like a tabernacle for the souls they’ve chosen to observe and preserve for the British nation—and for us. Grade: A-

Louis CK Live at the Comedy Store (2015; dir. Louis CK)—So this movie came out recently, and it stars this fat, balding redhead with a goatee who stands on a (more vivid) red-colored stage in front of what looks like Twin Peaks curtains for about an hour, and he makes funny noises and presents a whole bunch of absurd premises that he sometimes stops to think about and question and poke and prod until he feels like moving on to something else that’s totally unrelated to what he was saying in the first place. And it only costs you $5, and you can only buy it on his website, and if you forget your account password the reminder email will call you an idiot and make sure your new password includes the word “jerkoff” or something similar IN THE PASSWORD ITSELF. But even though you might feel like kind of a jerkoff now that you have an account password that reminds you of that, you should buy the movie and watch it anyway because it’s pretty funny. It’s not quite as good as his other specials, but it’s hard to think of anyone at his age—he’s 47, and he’s done like seven other hour-long specials—who’s as prolific and as entertaining. It’s a great bargain too.

At this stage in Louis CK’s stand-up career, the most conventional and bit-like bits of his act seem somehow beneath him; he’s so fond of pulling the rug out from under his own punchlines that when he lands one like the pro he is it feels like he’s using a cheat code. Still, he has the freedom to entertain himself as well as others, and it’s during those dark spots in his set where the audience is a little unsure of themselves that he still carves out some space for himself. After all, he’s the one who laughs hardest at exposing a hated neighbor kid to the concept of death. Other highlights include run-ins with bats and babies and racism, and the Gawd’s Hawnest truth about the Boston accent: “It’s not an accent, it’s a whole city of people saying most words wrong.” Grade: A-

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Film/TV TV Features

TV Review: Louie

“TV was (and to a lesser extent still is) fractal, with each individual episode standing in for the show as a totality. To tinker with the basic concept — like letting two battling lovers marry and have a child in the fourth season — is to destroy the delicate balance that keeps viewers tuning in.” — Ty Burr, Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame

“I said, ‘I won’t show you anything. You have to just wait until I’m finished with the shows.’ That was a very reckless thing to do, and [FX] could have said no, but if they had I would have just gone back to the road. But they said yes, so here I am.” — Louis C.K., interview with FilmSchoolRejects.com, June 28, 2010

FX’s Louie, which wraps its fourth season Monday night, stubbornly reinvents television every week. Like his creator, writer-director-editor-star Louis C.K., the Louie in Louie is a comedian and father of two girls. He’s eloquent onstage, but that telltale hand on the wall of the Comedy Cellar hints at other insecurities. At times, his failure to communicate grows so profound that he forsakes Newhart- or drops the Letterman-style stammering and falls mute. He spends a chunk of every episode sitting or standing silently and awaiting judgment; half of this season has explored Louie’s relationship with a Hungarian woman (Eszter Balint) who barely speaks English.

The hilarious Louis C.K.

Louie is a sad sack who trudges about his day like your uncle Marv. No belt can rescue his droopy jeans; no Beefy-T or XXL-sweater can hide his gut. He half-shuffles, half-lumbers into his scenes like a drunk or a grizzly bear that just got off the Tilt-A-Whirl. His gait is as expressive as Chaplin’s waddle, Tati’s tiptoe, or Keaton’s pit-bull charge.

In Louie‘s universe, things get weird fast. A tickle fight with an astronaut’s beautiful daughter winds up in the emergency room. A hurricane named after a Southern debutante kills LeBron James and demolishes Brooklyn in seconds. In flashbacks (or are they daydreams?) Louie’s black ex-wife suddenly turns white. His recalcitrant daughter suddenly cries out, “Why is there even an America?” A fat girl suddenly says “fuck” on network TV.

But things frequently slow to a crawl, too; the sense of time passing both quickly and slowly is reminiscent of those moments after an automobile accident. C.K.’s proclivity for long takes and shallow lenses prolong awkward moments, difficult conversations, and solipsistic reveries that explode in his face. In “So Did the Fat Lady” — one of the most extraordinary reckonings with female body-image issues I’ve ever seen — an awesome, overweight woman (Sarah Baker) takes Louie to task for his refusal to really see her. The camera circles them repeatedly but it won’t look away from her or from him when Louie tries to escape. That episode is the strongest example of Louie‘s bracingly surreal approach to storytelling, where the terrifying unpredictability of the next thing seen or the next thing said is the only constant.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

Louie
FX
Season 4 Finale, Monday, June 16th, 9 p.m.