Author: matt

Larry David with Krazee-Eyez Killa (Chris Williams)
I have a friend—let’s call him “the Other Matt”—who refuses to watch HBO‘s Curb Your Enthusiasm because it’s “too decadent.”
I guess Other Matt feels that the comedic travails of “Larry David”—the crankiest multi-millionaire in Hollywood—all revolve around the perils of money: how hard it is to give people gifts, buying a new house, or hosting a benefit party. Of course, he’s right: what Seinfeld did for venality, Curb does for profligacy.
But that’s just the TV Larry David, not the real guy. As readers of The Nation know, Larry is “a long-standing reader” and pitch person for the lefty magazine. Larry’s real-life wife, Laurie, is a committed environmental activist (which may explain why AAA was made the unlikely villain in one episode). Laurie and Larry recently came in for a Drudge-led conservative drubbing for attempting to host a benefit called the “Hate Bush 12/2 Event.” Rich Hollywood liberals? Guilty as charged. Decadent? Probably not.
Say what you will about the decadence of on screen Larry; the offscreen one is fighting the good fight. Okay, he may be trying to screw his former colleagues out of Seinfeld money, but… okay, there’s no ‘but.’ That sucks.
But my point was… what was my point? Oh, that Curb Your Enthusiasm is one of the best shows around and that far from being an exercise in decadence, it’s a sly—attention HBO publicists and print-ad writers—brilliant (!) critique of wealth. The way the show skewers rich people’s house envy, trouble dealing with working people (particularly those in industries meant to make their lives easier: salespeople, parking lot attendants, cable repairmen), and the limits of their liberal guilt perfectly nails the contradictions of dumb wealth that falls right into the lap of those who seek it least yet changes their lives the most. (This is clearly an obsession for David, who explored the same theme in his feature film debut, Sour Grapes and again in the perpetually-in-turnaround Envy.)
The money not only corrupts—that’s obvious—but it also simply confuses. What is the great Susie Essman‘s character, Susie, if not completely confused by her husband, Larry’s manager, Jeff‘s money? The only sane person on the show is the one who seems most at ease with her wealth. Larry’s wife, Cheryl (played by the lovely Cheryl Hines), doesn’t feel aspiration pushing her from below and status pushing down from above. The one thing that comes naturally to Cheryl—but seems to elude all the other characters (not least of all, Larry himself)—is class, with a lowercase ‘c.’ It’s the one thing all the money in Hollywood can’t buy, and she alone seems to understand this.
Why, that makes Curb Your Enthusiasm downright radical, don’t you think, Other Matt? Did I mention it’s funny as hell?
Curb Your Enthusiasm begins its new season on HBO, Sunday night at 9:30 PM EST, following a half-hour infomercial for shoes.
Related: Alessandra Stanley unleashes her enthusiasm (within reason) in The New York Times.

Nobel Prize winning Italian playwright Dario Fo as Silvio Berlusconi in The Two-Headed Anomaly.

Tim Conway is Dorf on Golf.

“Men are bad at [threesomes] because they’re too macho to deal.”— Vice Magazine, vol. 10, no. 11, page 84.
“You know what I’d like the Nature Channel to do a special on? The extinction of machismo. It seems like my whole fucking generation is a bunch of faggots and it bums me out. And I’m not even talking about the ‘Chuck and Buck, suck and fuck,’ take-it-in-the-ass type of faggot. Through therapy and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy I’ve learned to tolerate those dudes. My problem is the fashion-victim art fags in the clever hats and too-tight T-shirts and corduroys that think because they dress like a pansy and paint or take out-of-focus photographs they are beyond getting their teeth knocked down their throat.”— ibid., page 95.

I’ll be the first one to admit that we here at low culture often take potshots at marketing, PR, and advertising executives. I mean, it’s so easy when they throw so much shit at us hoping something—anything—will stick.
Well, for once, I wanna compliment one of these unsung wordsmiths for a job well done. I just saw a poster for premium cable also-ran Showtime‘s newest series, The L Word and found it surprisingly, pleasingly clever. “Same Sex. Different City,” the ad says, above the sort of airbrushed promotional photo we’ve come to expect from ads for everything from TV programs to perfumes to clothing lines. I was impressed by how deft the copy was, how effortlessly it compressed so many ideas. I genuinely thought it was well done.
I can’t say anything about the show itself, which stars the once phenomenally hot Pam Grier who’s gone on to become something of a hip directors’ shorthand for “badass older chick.” It also features Mia Kirshner, who was decent in Atom Egoyan‘s Exotica, but seems to have been overlooked in favor her more talented A-list doppelganger, Jennifer Connelly. Anyway, I don’t get Showtime, so I’ll have to take your word for whether or not this show is even watchable.
I actually had the channel for a short time when Time Warner Cable was making amends for leaving me in the dark for over a week and I didn’t see much worth my money. I did, however, manage to watch the entire first season of Out of Order back-to-back in a fit of Huffmania. (To belabor the puns, I found it rather Stolzifying.) I wasn’t too impressed with the series’ tone of self-seriousness cut with self-awareness: it was just too knowing for me to care about, too melodramatic for me to laugh with. Also, I found the way Donna and Wayne Powers bit the hand that fed them by mocking F. Gary Gray and his hacky Italian Job annoying: if you guys were too good to (re-)write such a shitty script, you should’ve skipped the assignment—if you sold out big time to do it, just keep it to yourselves. (According to this week’s Times, Out of Order was not renewed.)
The L Word premieres January 18th. Reviews TK…

If I could imagine the banter around The New York Times Culture Desk water-cooler, it would probably sound a lot like the little year-end roundup conversations included in this weekend’s ‘Arts & Leisure’ The Highs (and Lows) of 2003 package.
Great, relaxed, off-the-cuff discussion on “The Lows” from Elvis Mitchell, A.O. Scott, and Stephen Holden on the film front. I much prefer this sort of approach to the obligatory year-end wrap-up to the more drawn out, rather blog-ish approach of The Village Voice‘s Take 5 critics’ poll or the ho-hum “best of” list found in nearly every magazine you can imagine. Here, for example, is a glimpse into the private life of a full-time film critic and father from Scott:

[I]t’s a terrible thing, I think, to have a film critic for a dad. My son—like some of our readers—didn’t trust me when I told him Cat in the Hat was no good. I was with another critic, who tried to explain to his daughter why it was a bad movie. She just burst into tears, as if he’d taken away one of her toys.

I also appreciated the fact that they all respected the Zooey Deschanel restraining order.
As much as I enjoyed “The Lows,” I have one complaint: stop the Larry Doyle bashing.

My good friends, Derek and Lauren, just gave me an amazing video for the non-denominational gift giving season (okay, Chanukah.) The tape—which was quaintly duped onto a commercially-available VHS tape and packaged in the original TDK E-HG cardboard box—came directly from its producer, director, and star, Sidney N. Laverents.
Never heard of him? Me neither. But I wish I had sooner, since his homemade shorts are incredible. This multitalented filmmaker makes jacks-of-all-trades (and credit hogs) like Robert Rodriguez and Steven Soderbergh seem like lazy bums. According to the Egg segment on him, Sid lives in San Diego and is 94 years old. He’s been conceiving, shooting, and editing his unique independent films for decades. (A fuller bio can be found here.)

Harry Knowles and his fellow movie freaks over at Ain’t It Cool News link to the trailer for the Coen Brothers‘ latest, a remake of The Ladykillers. (The 1955 version was directed by Alexander Mackendrick, probably best known for The Sweet Smell of Success, a film that should be required viewing for all media and gossip bloggers.)
It looks amusing, more in keeping with their ‘impossible caper’ flicks than their recent foray into Brian Grazer country, Intolerable Cruelty. (I can think of one thing right about that title.) It looks like it has the broad slapstick of Raising Arizona, but it also appears to have that film’s late period Fellini-ish love of laughing at odd looking people. Which is sad, since the Coen’s have moved on from that with beautifully-shot period pieces like The Man Who Wasn’t There, creepy ‘comedies’ like Fargo, and groovy hodgepodges like The Big Lebowski. (The latter of which, scene-for-scene, is still one of the best movies of the last decade and even more relevant since the capture of Saddam Hussein.)
Sure, O, Brother, Where Art Thou? had its share of mugging and hillbilly teeth jokes, but shot, as it was, to look like a sepia-toned screen gem, you kinda accepted the insensitivity of its humor as part of its period charm.
It looks like the cast of Ladykillers had a ball. Tom Hanks looks more at ease in a comedy than he’s been since, maybe, Splash. Marlon Wayans (who appears to have brought his same hairstyle and facial gestures from Scary Movie 1 and 2) looks funny. The character names alone make it worth the price of admission: Hanks plays a charming scoundrel named Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr (!) and Wayans is (Sir?) Gawain McSam (!!). I just hope the racial and cultural stereotypes featured prominently in the trailer aren’t as unbearable in the film: no one wants to see the Coens do Big Momma’s House.
So, I’m crossing my fingers for the best, and holding my breath until March 26.