Summer of Soul

If you’ve been on the fence, for whatever reason, about catching Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Summer of Soul, I urge you to fall on the side of seeing it. It’s a guaranteed mood-lifter. Questlove’s achievement here goes far beyond what some might take to be “just a concert film.” The bulk of the film, under the direction of Hal Tulchin, is footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969. The performers included Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The 5th Dimension, Nina Simone, and Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples in a duet that generates more power than you’ll find in any Marvel movie.

The Harlem Cultural Festival ran for six weekends in the summer of 1969, and Hal Tulchin shot it all. Then, despite Tulchin’s best efforts to sell it around as “the Black Woodstock,” the footage sat unseen on tapes in his basement for the next few decades. Questlove and his team unearthed it and whittled it down to two hours, with some interview space given to people who were there, either in the dense crowd or onstage. There isn’t a dud in any of the performances Questlove selected, and many of them do double duty as great music and as great human moments. You can see that all the artists know they’re a part of something major. “We were so happy to be there,” says a visibly moved Marilyn McCoo as she watches herself and the 5th Dimension finish a number.

It becomes an almost humorous motif: again and again we hear performers and audience members say they’d never seen that many Black people in one place before. You do see the occasional white face in the crowd (or, surprisingly, on stage; one man who caught the show talks about his bemusement that Sly Stone had a white drummer), but largely it was a Black event. Some of the performers made gestures towards brotherly love between the races, but there is an overriding concern, informed by the urgency of the day, that Black people must be allowed equity before any smiley talk about equality. These were not quiet times, and the Festival was in some respects an oasis but also an opportunity to reflect on the power, pain, and pleasures of the Black soul. (I’d say the use of that word in the title has at least two meanings.) Songs were sung as much in anger and longing as in joy and togetherness.

Questlove’s main accomplishment is to thread the joy alongside whatever anguish it came out of. The energy of the music is profound and rich — the performers, especially the gospel singers, seem to tap into something direct, elemental, occasionally almost frightening in its force. I don’t know anyone still vertical who wouldn’t be wiped out by Nina Simone’s set, or a rare taste of Stevie Wonder on drums, or the moment when Mavis Staples, having scorched the air with her voice, hands the mic to the ailing Mahalia Jackson, a dragon awakened, who reaches inside herself and pulls out something annihilating yet restorative. And this almost never saw the light of day.

What we take with us, perhaps even more than the warming memory of the music, is the vibe passed back and forth between artists and audience. That exchange of spirit is common in concert films, whether the exchange is cool (Jazz on a Summer’s Day) or toxic (Gimme Shelter). Here, the give-and-take is a bit more complex. Some of the faces in the crowd are wary, closed off; some are wide open, embracing the experience. None of the music is insular or wise-ass (they had comedy bits for that — Moms Mabley and Willie Tyler turn up briefly); it’s all transportive, reaching out to community and to life. If you were in that crowd, you would have had to work at it not to be won over. Questlove has a light touch, alternating historical gloom with aesthetic elation. This is a beautiful work of restoration and tribute.

Richard Pryor: Live in Concert

In Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this week, the eponymous great comedian drops what has become euphemistically known as “the N-word” forty-two times. The word, in Pryor’s hands, becomes a rueful acknowledgment of fellowship, of shared indignity and terror and general craziness connected with being black in a racist white society. Occasionally he puts it in the mouth of a white person, but most often Pryor uses it interchangeably with “brother.” (As a man in the ‘70s, Pryor was not especially enlightened on matters of feminism — but that doesn’t mean he was unconcerned with women’s struggles, either.)

Eventually, in his later concert film Live on the Sunset Strip, Pryor talked about his trip to Africa, and said “I ain’t gonna never call another black man a n——. You know, ‘cause we never was no n——s. That’s a word that’s used to describe our own wretchedness.” In the 1979 film, though, Pryor is (and would later remain) conversant with his own wretchedness — his embarrassing, screwed-up humanity, the ways in which he was down in the dirt with the rest of us. He was the first to call himself out, and he fashioned his foibles into poetry. Live in Concert is not art as filmmaking — director Jeff Margolis, who has helmed TV specials and awards shows for decades, basically just keeps Pryor in focus. It’s the text, the material, that I value as art, as literature, as hilarious and heartbreaking memoir.

Pryor flits from subject to subject, but the jewel in the crown of Live in Concert is his account of his heart attack, in which Pryor famously gives voice to himself and to his own aggrieved heart (“You thinkin’ about dyin’ now, ain’t you?” the organ growls as it goes into cardiac arrest; “You didn’t think about it when you was eatin’ all that pork”). Pryor will occasionally lapse into a truism — “The hospital ain’t no place to get well” — and then chase it with “You can die in there and nobody give a fuck,” something so bleak and blunt it forges its own hilarity. In reviewing Sunset Strip, Pauline Kael — a big fan of Pryor — somewhat uncharitably noted that his routine about his self-immolating suicide attempt (which he passed off then as an accident) couldn’t help but be a pale echo of the earlier heart-attack bit. But Pryor so often abused his own body, as if in twisted solidarity with his abusers from his childhood, that it was inevitable that he should work up comedy about his own physical self-disrespect.

When Pryor hops from being Pryor to being his heart to being an indifferent phone-operator angel in heaven, he’s firing on all cylinders and doing what he did better than anyone — breathing life into people and things, animate and inanimate, raising monkeys and dogs and deer and car tires to his own level of awareness — sharp, paranoid, lowdown and unsentimental. Pryor, especially here, doesn’t do anything so mundane as tell jokes. He embodies; he inhabits. Sometimes, not to get offensively voodoo-mystical about it, he seems to channel alien consciousness and reinterpret it through his own wounded yet tickled human experience.

Pryor creates for us an entire world, in seventy-some minutes, with just a microphone — a world of danger and rage, yes, but also one of mitigating ironies. “I woke up in an ambulance, right,” he says after his heart punks out on him. “And there wasn’t nothing but white people staring at me. I said, Ain’t this a bitch. I done died and wound up in the wrong motherfuckin’ heaven.” For Pryor, whose art and viewpoint were so snugly connected to his experience as a black man, ending up in white heaven (“Now I got to listen to Lawrence Welk the rest of my days”) would have been the ultimate indignity and joke. Pryor’s comedy draws on deep African and African-American traditions of folklore, storytelling, playing the dozens, anthropomorphism. He was an original, a visionary, a crowded house of voices — an American sangoma, healing with visions and laughter and empathy, divining by throwing his own bones.

Louis C.K. 2017

In his new, simply titled concert film Louis C.K. 2017, the eponymous comedian doesn’t waste any time with pre-concert sketches. He just gets right into it: “So I think abortion is, um, here’s what I think,” Louis begins, and the audience guffaws knowingly. A lot of what Louis C.K. says is in quotes — “Here’s what a clueless white guy sounds like” is the unspoken preface, followed by an observation along the lines of  “I’m not condoning rape, obviously — you should never rape anyone. Unless you have a reason, like if you want to fuck somebody and they won’t let you.” The point, to an intelligent audience, is that there isn’t a reason; Louis also lays down a level of satire of self-justifying rhetoric. So when Louis steers his abortion bit into a statement that “women should have the right to kill babies,” the bit becomes more about the irreconcilable, eternally warring language used in the abortion debate than about abortion itself.

Louis C.K. 2017 finds Louis in his usual amiably schlubby but seriously askew conflict with life — a concept that gets no respect from him: the abortion material more or less ends with Louis saying that life is overrated anyway. (Another bit has him musing about suicide in a way that falls on neither side of that topic.) He wears a suit this time out, as he also did in his opening monologue on last weekend’s Saturday Night Live. Has he grown up, or sold out? Louis has shed his typical working uniform — a black t-shirt and jeans — in favor of an outfit that more effectively points up his opinions as those of a goofy white dude.

Louis treats his insights as throwaways; an unimpressed Generation X elder (born in 1967), he doesn’t buy into anything as the one way to look at the world, much less his own view. His bit about how Christianity “won” — pointing to the very fact of the numerical year we all agree on whether or not we’re believers (hence the title of the special, I guess) — is less confrontational than just bewildered. The broader his reach, the more timeless his comments, the closer he gets to being his generation’s George Carlin. But then he’ll take it back down to muddy earth, to the grimy and personal, linking him to Richard Pryor. Yet he comes off as an original; he doesn’t ape Carlin or Pryor so much as earn the right to be included with them in conversations about American comedy.

A good chunk of Louis’ material can be taken as depressing. Love, he says, is nice but doesn’t last; he even leaves out the usual bromide about how the finest things don’t last, which is why they’re the finest things. I suppose we can infer that, but that would violate Louis’ particular defeated weltschmerz. Carlin was angry; Pryor was afraid; Louis is just, like, whatever, this all sucks (another generational thing). There’s a cap, though, on how cynical a creative person can get — especially one operating at the level of Louis C.K., who in recent years has evolved from a comedian’s comedian to someone who can sell out Madison Square Garden. He has achieved, in this degraded pop culture, the rare distinction of being both artistically respected and wildly popular.

So how does someone whose shtick rests on himself being a skeevy bum (but hilariously honest about his bummy skeeviness) respond to being loved by his peers and by the masses? (Well, maybe not all his peers — there are still various allegations of gross behavior in front of female comedians he has to contend with.) On the evidence of Louis C.K. 2017, he just continues doing what he’s been doing. He can do five minutes on the most piddly-ass thing, and then tie it into a coherent (though frumpy) filter on the world. The subtext of his more outrageous bits is “Yeah, listen while this scuzzy idiot presumes to tell you what he thinks about [fill in the blank],” which is why his opening sentence about abortion gets a big laugh even though it doesn’t read funny on paper. A consummate actor, as proven on his dazzling and much-lamented FX show Louie, he can give the impression that his act isn’t honed and perfected over the course of dozens of gigs but just a guy riffing off the top of his head. As mopey as his material can get, the fact that Louis C.K. can work at his level and be successful is one reason to stay optimistic.

Wishful Drinking

One of the better jokes in Wishful Drinking, HBO’s filmed version of Carrie Fisher’s one-woman show, will inspire sad cringing more than laughter these days. I won’t give it away. But if anyone existed in the zone between laughter and sad cringing, it was Carrie Fisher, who at one point during the show touted herself as “runner-up for bipolar woman of the year.” Fisher, of course, will forever be known for the piece of real estate she held down in the vast suburb that is Star Wars. But her true sardonic self came out in her writing and then in her performance of her writing. Wishful Drinking, which HBO re-ran on January 1 in the wake of Fisher’s death, offers probably the purest essence of Fisher in the visual medium (you can look to her novels and memoirs for more).

Fisher’s subject is how bizarrely magical and magically bizarre it is to be “celebrity royalty” — the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, both of whose later married lives were so thick and confusing a large family-tree diagram is necessary to keep it all straight. The format is mainly anecdotal; wandering around a stage set that resembles a retiree’s cluttered but homey living room, Fisher keeps the show on the level of decent stand-up. She doesn’t go for any pathos — she’s too acerbic for that, and whenever she approaches a cliché, she backs away from it quickly with a jet-blast of snark. She doesn’t want to make the material more meaningful, or enlarge it to fit a theme; she just presents her life as comedy. I imagine the movie gives us what it might have been like to sit in Fisher’s parlor listening to her hold forth.

Fisher visits the old suburb briefly, counting the ways Star Wars has immortalized her (as a Pez dispenser, as a shampoo bottle, as a photo in a book ironically titled — no kidding — New Hope for People with Bipolar Disorder). “George Lucas ruined my life,” she says, adding “and I mean that in the nicest possible way.” I’ve seen Fisher’s Princess Leia described as the most famous female character in history; I balked at that until considering that Star Wars is quite likely the most famous film in history and that there are very few other women in Star Wars. That donut-headed hairstyle is iconic, immediately recognizable, and mortifying to a 19-year-old.        

So what happens to the human woman who played the icon and is forever linked to it? Especially a woman whose sanity had already been imperiled by being the daughter of stars? It’s a wonder Fisher never climbed a tower with a rifle, but women of Fisher’s generation didn’t do that; they self-medicated, self-deprecated, self-destructed. Somewhere in the show, Fisher proselytizes for electroshock therapy, which she later expanded on in her second memoir, Shockaholic. Fisher felt it helped with her depression, but there’s a chance it might have done some damage to her heart — along with the other punishment she dealt it over the years.

There’s a certain degree of heartlessness — not soullessness, but an ability to distance oneself — required to make witty one-liners out of the chaos of one’s life. (Fisher was a modern master of the epigram, the baby-boomer Dorothy Parker.) Some detachment is needed in order to shape the material so that it can reach others, rather than being incoherent diary entries. (Sadly, Fisher’s last book, The Princess Diarist, was sometimes that.) What brought Fisher’s later fans closer to her, though, was her vulnerability. What you hear in the audience in Wishful Thinking is laughter given gratefully and also generously. Fisher wasn’t angling for pity. She wanted to hear laughs. So much of her writing earns laughs, but they sound hollow now that she’s not here to hear them.

Michael Moore in TrumpLand

Has Michael Moore broken some kind of record with his new stand-up-punditry film Michael Moore in TrumpLand? This movie didn’t even exist three weeks ago. It was filmed on October 7 and 8, and it premiered less than two weeks later. Welcome to the wonderful world of digital, I guess. Anyway, the movie, which Moore sprang on the world with a flourish last week, captures Moore during two talks at the Murphy Theater in Wilmington, Ohio, a town that Moore tells us leans largely (or bigly) toward Trump. So here comes Moore, the lefty barnstormer, to take his argument behind enemy lines, with the marquee outside blaring “Trump Voters Welcome.”

I don’t know — and I’m sure Moore doesn’t know either — how many people in Moore’s theater audience were, in fact, Trump voters; there’s really no way to know. I don’t trust Moore’s editing: Who’s to say the man photographed scowling during a Moore paean to Hillary Clinton wasn’t filmed at some other point in the evening, actually frowning at something else? (This is nothing new, of course; editing makes audience members seem to respond to something other than what they actually responded to in practically every concert film you’ve ever seen.) We also don’t know if he changed anyone’s mind. Does it matter? At this point, people are pretty well seated where they’re at, and they’re probably not going to be budged.

What the movie amounts to is a fearful-sounding plea by Moore for everyone to vote for Hillary. Moore is not as sure of Trump’s defeat as many are. By his own account, Moore was in England during Brexit, and that experience — people voting as a “fuck you” to the status quo, and ending up fucking themselves — seems to have scarred him. In July, Moore rattled a lot of his fans by insisting that Trump would win. Most polls these days beg to differ, but Moore might also have been trying to galvanize people into action, which he also tries to do here.

In a way, Moore’s instincts towards compassion sabotage his proselytizing efforts, because as a native of the much-disgraced Flint, Michigan, Moore knows the frustrations of the working class and can understand why they want to blow up a system that gave them the shaft. He may be erring on the side of idealization when he says Trump boosters are decent people (all of them? The white supremacists? The bigots of all stripes? Milo Yiannopoulos?), but he seems to want to begin with a clean slate and work around to something Trump supporters and Clinton supporters can agree on. To be honest, I wonder if the true impetus for this movie was so that Moore could have a filmed document of himself publicly agitating for Clinton. Why? Maybe to assure Moore’s imagined post-apocalyptic post-Trump generations that at least One Man Stood Firm.

Moore feints towards common ground, but mostly pays it jokey lip service. I’m a Moore admirer with serious reservations: I feel that he can speak powerfully for the downtrodden, but that his effectiveness can get lost in smug self-regard or just plain snark. During this show, Moore literally walls off Mexican audience members and sics a drone on Muslim listeners, ostensibly to make the Trump voters in the house feel safer. Well, first of all, this sort of unfunny stunt isn’t going to endear you to the butts of the joke, the Trump voters. Second, Moore’s output is awfully, awfully long on this sort of unfunny stunt. I know Moore is generally on my side of the fence. I also know Fahrenheit 9/11 didn’t prevent a second Bush term.

Then again, Dinesh D’Souza’s shitheaded 2016: Obama’s America didn’t prevent a second Obama term, either. (Nor, I think, will D’Souza’s recent Hillary’s America function as intended.) Generally folks who take in agitprop are not looking to have their ideas changed, but confirmed. D’Souza didn’t help convert Obama leaners to Romney, and Moore didn’t pull anyone away from Bush to Kerry. He isn’t going to do that to Trump, either. Trump seems to be doing a superlative job of that to himself. This concert, filmed in the moments right before the truly ugly Access Hollywood recording got out, doesn’t take that into account. This election season has been so weird, has moved so quickly into such unforeseen places, that even a film that was shot (as I write this) fifteen days ago can’t keep pace with it.

Nick Offerman: American Ham

According to the Wikipedia page on the concert film Nick Offerman: American Ham, Nick Offerman is an “American actor, writer, and carpenter.” That description might please him, though having “carpenter” ranked before the other two might please him more. Offerman, for those unfamiliar with his fan-favorite Parks and Recreation character Ron Swanson, is a stout fellow with a burly soup-strainer. He looks, and carries himself, like a man who works with his hands. Like Harrison Ford, another carpenter who found himself in front of the camera, Offerman has the authenticity of a person who knows how things fit together. This kind of knowledge is increasingly rare and useful.

Offerman may be an actor, writer, and carpenter, but he’s not a stand-up comic, and American Ham is not really a stand-up routine. It’s a test drive of material and thoughts that would make their way into Offerman’s book Paddle Your Own Canoe (the concert was filmed in March 2013; the book was published the following October), including a song with the same title as the book. Standing onstage, sometimes strumming a Gibson, Offerman makes good on his surname — he offers his audience, as the subtitle of his book puts it, one man’s fundamentals for delicious living. He places a heavy emphasis on tasting things, from red meat to, well, use your dirty imagination. American Ham is amiably filthy in an almost giggly, helpless way — Offerman front-loads the show with many riffs on his first tip out of ten, “Engage in Romantic Love,” and he sees no reason to soften his material for the prudes.

Don’t look to the show for jokes, though there are hilarious bits. Offerman is naturally funny, issuing his dicta (I can hear Offerman’s dorky 13-year-old-boy chortle at that) in the sonorous deadpan that has made Ron Swanson so cherished. Other than jabs at vegetarians (Offerman is very pro-meat), American Ham is good-hearted and inclusive. Offerman’s material on religion and the Bible isn’t the freshest, but it fits into his overarching live-and-let-live philosophy. To him, meat and the outdoors and sex and building things and “getting high and looking at a maple leaf” are the very stuff of life, of joy, and why wouldn’t anyone want to partake of joy? Offerman is a hippie spirit inside a mundane’s body. He’s only a day older than I am, yet he has the aura of a tribal elder, a medicine man with hair on his back.

American Ham was directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, who also made last year’s The Kings of Summer, featuring Offerman and his wife, soulmate and “legal property” Megan Mullally. Vogt-Roberts serves up a smoothly competent point-and-shoot record of the show, though at two points we cut away to only mildly funny segments in which Offerman quarrels with a lawyer over parody songs he sings during the performance. (Offerman advises us to look the songs up on YouTube.) The director is attached next to Kong: Skull Island, a sequel — I assume — to 2005’s King Kong remake, and considering the relationship Vogt-Roberts has with Offerman, the surest way to get me to see the new Kong movie would be to cast Offerman in it as a brawny, cocksure hunter who gets trampled by Kong. Or, failing that, as Kong himself. Offerman: Meat Island would get my opening-day dollars.

This Is It

I feel a little bad for the stage dancers in This Is It. There they are at the beginning of the film, many of them moved to tears by the very prospect of dancing onstage with their hero, Michael Jackson, for his projected farewell concert in London. Well, they got to rehearse with him, anyway, and their efforts, captured on camera, are recorded for posterity. As the world now knows, Jackson’s This Is It concerts were not to be; he died less than a month before the first show.

One hundred hours of rehearsals were filmed for the concert crew’s own reference and for Jackson’s personal library; the footage was never intended to be seen by the public. We’re to understand that the show’s director (and the film’s credited director), Kenny Ortega, heard from so many fans wanting to see that footage that Ortega decided to put the film together for them. The truth is probably somewhat thornier; the concert promoter AEG Live, which took a $500 million bath from the fifty cancelled dates, has to make its money back somehow. Still, what’s left here is an interesting, if remote, portrait of an entertainment machine with a laser-precise vision of what he wanted.

It’s possible that the only time Michael Jackson was fully in control was when he was onstage, or doing prep work for a show. The rest of his life was mess and scandal and self-disfigurement, but in the lights, at least, he knew something about something. Always gracious, often appending his critiques “with love,” Jackson makes minute adjustments to the sound, the timing, the funkiness. We’ll never know what cocktail of meds he may or may not have been on when this footage was shot, but mentally, in the film, he seems formidable. Physically, he often holds back, saving his voice, he repeatedly says, for the main event. He gladly gives the spotlight (“This is your turn to shine”) to Orianthi Panagaris, a 24-year-old Australian virtuoso guitarist always seen chewing gum. When you’ve played onstage with Steve Vai at age 15, you can probably get away with chewing gum in front of the King of Pop.

For obvious reasons, This Is It suffers from a patchwork style — the editors do a heroic job of stitching it all together into something coherent. The highlight, mid-film, is probably “Thriller” (notch up another movie credit for Vincent Price); we get a peek at what would’ve been an impressive multimedia 3D presentation. This megaproduction in general would likely have been quite a night out, though by necessity short on spontaneity; Jackson’s fans paid to see his act well-worked-out, not rough around the edges. The film shows only the bare bones of what might have been. It’s difficult to assess, on a narrative or even technical level, footage that we weren’t really supposed to see. But people are expected to pay to see it, so that’s where we critics come in.

This Is It shows a man, frail and (unwittingly) close to death, yet still packing iconic power. He doesn’t waste a movement or a word. His entire essence seems mixed into the music (much of which has odd levels of hostility and aggression for someone who talks constantly about peace and love). His fluid mechanical-man moves and his strange late-period martial iconography (as seen in “They Don’t Really Care About Us”) denote a control freak, or, more generously, a perfectionist, and it’s clear to me that the Michael Jackson we see here would not have wanted us to see the Michael Jackson we see here. His estate okayed the film, but his estate has bills to pay, too. As a posthumous document, This Is It offers a veiled, vaseline-lens look behind the curtain. As a cultural event, it’s more than a little creepy and depressing. As with Elvis before him, the vultures will keep picking at this sad man-child’s bones until there’s nothing left.

Margaret Cho: Beautiful

As a Margaret Cho fan from way back, I sympathize with efilmcritic.com’s Eric D. Snider, who gave three stars (out of five) to Cho’s 2005 concert film Assassin. At that point, Cho had become more of a knee-jerk Republican-basher than the personal comedian she’d started out as, and while I’m always up for GOP-grilling, it didn’t make me laugh so much as just nod in agreement. If we’re listening to you, Margaret, we know this stuff already; make with the funny.

Fortunately, Beautiful — Cho’s first concert film in four years — goes lighter on the liberal call-and-response, though she does kick off by saying “I fuckin’ hate Sarah Palin.” But then she winds up admitting, “I kinda wanna fuck her.” Most of the show takes its cue from that; this is probably Cho’s dirtiest collection of material since 2002’s Notorious C.H.O. She started the decade with the superb, eye-opening I’m the One That I Want, in which she exuberantly fessed up to her sexual misadventures, and now finishes the ’00s with a tribute to the folly and beauty of the sexual animal.

My guess is that being neck-deep in the Bush era for most of the decade gave Cho a lot of temporary agita and an urgent need to vent. (And it did make many like-minded listeners feel less alone, but the comedy got lost in the comfort.) In this concert, filmed in Long Beach about a week before the 2008 election, Cho seems more relaxed, more relieved. She seems pretty confident that Obama will get in; sadly, she also seems to assume that Prop 8 will get slapped down. In any event, without years of Bush ahead of her, Cho feels more free to get down and dirty. Even a bit about hypocritical Republican politicians who troll for sex on the down low becomes an occasion for more raunch. And, having seen this film, I now think Sacha Baron Cohen needs to hand his Brüno trophy for air-simulating fellatio over to Cho.

The major disappointment here is the shortage of Cho-imitates-her-mom bits; there are a couple of brief bits, but it’s as if Cho didn’t want her mom to get any more pissed off at her than she already was (over Cho’s tattoos). But Beautiful is generally so generously filthy that there really isn’t much room for Cho to bring her mom into the bacchanal. Gay sex, straight sex, the difference between gay penises and hetero penises — there’s very little ground she doesn’t cover, including her dabbling in “G-shots” and anal bleaching and her love of ass-eating. And she wants us to know it’s all good, it’s all beautiful. By the end, there’s only one place left to go, and it’s into song — a grand finale called “Eat Me Out,” belted out with brio, with the camera tracking back dramatically as she hits the final hilarious, triumphant note on “vaginaaaaaa.”

Once again, Cho has gotten in touch with her inner slut (a term she no longer uses here, perhaps because of its negative connotations) and reported back to us from the frontline of her pussy. The main thing to note here is that, if you’re like Eric Snider and me and felt let down by Cho’s previous two Dubya-haunted, preaching-to-the-choir concert films, it’s now safe to go back into the water — this one delivers.

The Life of Reilly

In the early ‘80s, Stephen King was talking to an interviewer and got on the subject of people famous for being famous. He cited Charles Nelson Reilly as an example. Why is he on my TV? What did he do to get there? Most people only know Reilly from his many appearances on game shows in the ‘70s, particularly Match Game. Some might also know him from his character Jose Chung on The X-Files and Millennium. But Reilly, who died in 2007, had a much fuller life than that. He was on Broadway in the ‘60s. He studied acting in the same class as Jason Robards, Hal Holbrook and Steve McQueen. He taught acting for years; among his students was Burt Reynolds. And from 2000 to 2004, he toured the country with a one-man autobiographical show called Save It for the Stage.

The Life of Reilly captures the final performance of that show. Reilly appears onstage with a variety of props clearly marked to look like stage props; he also seems to have saved a fair amount of memorabilia related to his career, such as a beaten-up newspaper clipping from 1977 in which a reader wrote in asking if Reilly was still alive. Reilly had a wicked sense of humor about that sort of thing. He had to. Born in the Bronx to a shrewish mother and a despairing, disappointed father (who had an opportunity to work with Walt Disney but was denied by his wife), Reilly had an awful childhood filled with imaginative play (dolls, puppets) and a “voice” in his head that kept telling him he was going to make it. Eventually he did; at the peak of his ubiquity, he estimated he appeared on TV about a hundred times a week.

The movie records Reilly’s show and intersperses some very brief vintage clips of him (the rights issues are perhaps the reason that the DVD can’t legally be sold, but is given away with a purchase of a t-shirt on the official website, http://www.charlesnelsonreilly.com). Street interviews reveal random passersby who either haven’t heard of him (too young to remember Match Game) or vaguely remember him trading double entendres with Brett Somers. Why did Reilly stoop to game shows? Probably because he thought they were fun, and also because he worked too hard to get in the door to turn down anything. He also likely did it to spite the nameless network exec who told him, as Reilly recounts here, that “they don’t let queers on television.” If nothing else, Reilly put the lie to that.

The Life of Reilly gives us a sense of a full life of triumph and tragedy, an epic story told in 84 minutes by a master raconteur. The filmmakers, initially defeated when the film’s distributor New Yorker Films went bankrupt, have said that they hope to make an official DVD commercially available at some point. I hope so. The movie, and Reilly’s final performance, deserve to be seen by everyone — not just existing fans who don’t mind buying a t-shirt to see the film.

John Waters: This Filthy World

Is there a more lovable director now working (though not nearly often enough) than John Waters? The man wears his loves and hates on his sleeve, unapologetically; he won’t apologize for his films, either. Why should he? If he didn’t like them, why would he have made them?

In This Filthy World, Waters stands up in front of a New York audience for a little over an hour and takes them — and us — through a lifetime of obsessions, pet peeves, and filmmaking. Much of the material and anecdotes will be familiar to longtime fans who’ve read his interviews or his essential books (Shock Value and Crackpot). But it’s more fun to see and hear him presenting the stories. What we come away with is a self-portrait of a pre-punk transgressor gentled by the years into an elder statesman — with two Broadway hits, no less! — whom everyone expects to be wilder and crazier than he actually is. Hunter S. Thompson lived his role in and out. Waters prefers to get all his madness out in his movies, and go about his regular business dressed like a natty clerk and living a conservative life, albeit a life governed by fascination with things like murder trials and the consistent bad taste of his Baltimore neighbors.

Under Jeff Garlin’s unobtrusive if pedestrian direction, This Filthy World is your basic three-or-four-camera set-up, with occasional audience cut-aways and lighting on Waters that makes him look like he’s wearing a blue toupee. Fans of his films will appreciate that Waters offers at least one witty anecdote about each, from the Eat Your Makeup days all the way to 2004’s A Dirty Shame. His lasting affection for his incomparable star Divine is obvious; he says that if Divine were still alive, he would have wanted to star in Hairspray the musical and Hairspray the movie musical. It struck me anew how odd it should be that John Travolta, who ended up filling in for Divine (quite capably) in the movie musical, was making Saturday Night Fever at the same time Waters was making Desperate Living, his last “underground” film.

Reviewing Serial Mom back in 1994, I said that it was hard to tell whether John Waters had gone mainstream or mainstream had gone John Waters. He himself guesses that the story of Beverly Sutphin could happen today; “everybody can have a bad night,” he says, explaining why he doesn’t favor the death penalty. Waters is not for gay marriage, but not for the reasons bigoted straight people are; he opines that two of the perks of being gay were that you didn’t have to get married or go into the army, and now, as a gay man, he’s expected to fight the good fight to win gays the right to marry and go to war. Well, fine, he concludes, they should have the right if they really want to; leave me out of it.

The secret of Waters’ cult success, I think, is his essential good-heartedness. He’s too curious and easily amused by human foibles to be a misanthrope — if people were perfect, what would he make movies about? Even the rare villains in his work are seen campily, almost lovingly, the way he views the Wicked Witch of the West. That good-heartedness — the ease with strange behavior — comes through here, though he does draw the line at “adult babies.” He talks almost warmly about the woman who got him to sign a bloody tampon; sure it was weird, but he signed it, and he got a good story out of it. This Filthy World is a collection of good stories, and while it’s somewhat lacking as a deep probe into what makes Waters tick and as a piece of stand-up, it works well enough as a record for those of us who in all likelihood won’t ever make it to see him chat in person. The DVD has the added value of a featurette and an audience Q&A.