Change Your Image
wobbly33
Reviews
Call Me Lucky (2015)
Hilarious and haunting look at a comic legend and how he got that way
Barry Crimmins is not a well-known comedian outside of Boston and New York. But he is a legend among comics, including many legendary comics. His highly intelligent and hard-charging style, lashing out at greedy and inhumane politics, puts him in the ranks of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Bill Hicks. He also helped mentor a roster of comics like Denis Leary, Stephen Wright, Tom Kenny, Paula Poundstone, and Lenny Clarke. He also mentored Bobcat Goldthwait, who directs this simple yet emotionally packed biography that explains not only who Crimmins is, but how he came to be. This is not a "how did he get to be so funny?" or "the greatest (blank) you've never heard of" fluff piece. This is a very gritty, sometimes very dark look at the horrors Crimmins endured as a child, and how he turned his suffering into a lifelong mission to help those victimized by man's inhumanity to man. His compassion permeates his actions, even as he takes the microphone at a Senate hearing on child pornography and uses it to (figuratively) beat a suit from AOL into submission. The result is an emotional wringer that will take you from belly laughs to gut-punched. See this film.
Suburbia (1983)
A little bit of everything punk....
This is not a documentary, although much of it is allegedly based on fact. What "Suburbia" does, and does well, is capture a moment in LA/OC punk. If you were there, you recognize almost every character in the film, and you probably recognize a lot of the "actors." It's a grab bag of punk "types": the skinhead, the conehead, the goth, the mohawk, etc. etc. But if you were an LA suburban punk, you knew someone just like all of them. If you're of a certain age, of a certain time, of a certain place, it's a touchstone. You know exactly what it was like. Even the rednecks have their place, when the plants were closing, when and middle-class life starting fading away. The story is not great, the acting is not great, but the moment is captured, and if you were there, it takes you right back: when moshing was called slamming, and tattoos were done with a straightpin by hand, not next door to the Starbucks. If you weren't, you get a pretty good idea about what is was like to be a punk when you couldn't buy it at the mall, when it might actually get you beaten up by jocks, when a nosering might get you fired from the record store. Punk was, for a time, actually dangerous. And that made it great.