Is it the End of an Era?
Obligatory Bare Naked Ladies One Week Song Reference (The Week Of, 2018)
Kenny Lustig is a lower middle class Jewish dad whose daughter is engaged to the son of rich surgeon (and black) Kirby Cordice. The week before the wedding, Kenny is trying to set everything up to go perfectly. Shockingly in a story like this…that is not happening.
There is certainly a potentially entertaining movie in the story. But the weight of the cliches and the casting brings to much drag. Kenny has big ideas, but is trying to pull them off on a budget and hide just how tight money is. He is constantly fighting with his wife, his family is overbearing but he and his daughter have a special bond. Is the massive fighting with his wife (played by Rachel Dratch) something that needs resolution? I don’t know…maybe? It is almost more like “This is an Adam Sandler movie, he needs another person to have shouting matches with”.
Rock’s Cordice has no apparent relationship to his ex-wife or his kids. He hates her new man, and just threw money at the kids. But the movie never does a good job of showing this relationship. But at the end, we are supposed to accept how much he has grown. But from where???
We don’t really get much of a sense of any of the relationships. A lot of the running gags feel like the film was originally envisioned as a writer pitch to Wes Anderson. The quirky friend who offers to sleep with guys for her best friend’s sake, another friend who throws herself at the weird neighbor kid who has been obsessed Sandler’s daughter for years…they are all “quirky”…but here it just feels like a weird clash.
And the biggest problem is the casting. Sandler and Rock are just not the right guys for these roles. They do not bring any real personality or life to their characters. Kirby and Kenny are ill defined characters, relying on cliches…and neither actor does anything to make these characters feel like they are more than those cliches.
Heck, they don’t even really make use of the cliches that might give them some solid awkward comedy. The only gag we really get from the Black and Jewish thing is one that…well, makes Kenny look pretty bad. He sees two black guys walking by the house and invites the (rather confused) two in because he assumes they are members of Kirby’s family.
Nothing really seems able to save The Week Of from drowning in it’s own lack of creativity.
Comedy Is Like Marriage (The Honeymoon Stand Up Special, 2018)
A good standup can give a real cathartic laugh or even challenge your perceptions through humor. While I was familar with Natasha Legerro through various appearances on Comedy Central…I really only know Moshe Kasher from some appearances on the late @Midnight. I knew that with Legerro I would be getting some raunchy jokes mixed with some pushing the limits of polite conversation. I did not know what to really expect from Kasher. Other than, for some reason, I always thought he was a gay guy. And apparently (in spite of a joke about jerking off to gay porn at the fertility clinic) he is not. He and Leggero are married and have a child (they were still in the expecting stage at the time)…hence the title of the Honeymoon Stand Up Special.
Split into three parts, the special starts out with Leggero’s set. Leggero is one of those comics who kind of plays into “being a girl comic” but quickly makes it clear she can be raunchy and push back against boundaries. When the audience cheers for her being pregnant, she warns them she is still within the potential area of abortion.
The whole comedy of discomfort can be a difficult tight rope. Sometimes you can reap great reward from making your audience squirm and laugh. Usually this comes in the form of uncomfortable truths and “I cannot believe the comic went there”. But in some cases, the joke is dying a slow death. Unfortunately, Leggero’s set suffers from this a couple times. She can definitely elicit laughs, but an offhanded joke about the Catholic Church’s child abuse scandal would have worked if it did not get drawn out into a cringe worthy discussion about how the altar boys are “asking for it”. On the other hand…men will likely find it uncomfortable just how many women have tales of random men masturbating in public in front of them. We are awful.
Part two is Kasher’s stand-up. Kasher actually ratchets up the raunchiness by focusing heavily on masturbation. And actually, some of this is pretty funny, as he talks about how his “progressive militant feminist” single mom took him to a sex shop at thirteen to allow him to buy porn…but since she was a feminist and believed porn to be inherently misogynistic…he was only allowed to buy from a selection of text based lesbian erotica. But like Leggero’s set, Kasher can take a funny joke and stretch it past the point of laughter.
So, you are probably thinking…well, Thom clearly hated this special. And this is not true. I found both sets to be pretty hit or miss. I laughed at some jokes…but not enough to feel like I fully had fun.
But then came the third part. In part three, Leggero and Kasher share the stage. They discuss her conversion to Judaism (noting that it is way harder to become a Jew than a Christian). They then start to bring couples up on stage. Natasha and Moshe have a good chemistry as a team. They play off each other in a way that has a sweet tension. And when they bring up couples to question them about their relationships, the special takes off. I really enjoyed part three. The banter between Leggero, Kasher and the couples is a whole lot of fun. Part three absolutely shines.
And so there you have it. I highly recommend Part three of the Honeymoon Stand Up Special.
Tripping Through Gateways 