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Steve Martin is 70

For better or worse, Steve Martin helped to popularize the air quotes gesture.

Years back, I found it weird and strange that, in some circles, people decided that Steve Martin was not funny because he wasn’t angry enough, was inauthentic, too oblique, or whatever.

This bit from a February 18, 1982, Ben Fong-Torres Rolling Stone Interview, somewhat explains his humor:

“[College] changed what I believe and what I think about everything. I majored in philosophy. Something about non-sequiturs appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, ‘Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!’ Then it gets real easy to write this stuff because all you have to do is twist everything hard—you twist the punch line, you twist the non sequitur so hard away from the things that set it up.”

Martin further describes the development of his humor in this 2008 Smithsonian interview.

WATCH 1976 Standup Comedy.

Success came early for him, from working as a magician at Disneyland when he was 15 to getting an Emmy as a writer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour when he was 23. He also wrote for the shows of Glen Campbell and Sonny & Cher.

On his TV appearances, on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and, most notably, on Saturday Night Live, which he’s hosted 15 times, he created catchphrases such as “Excuuuuuse Me.” He was one of the wild and crazy guys with Dan Aykroyd, who played a “couple of bumbling Czechoslovak would-be playboys.” For better or worse, Martin helped to popularized the air quotes gesture.

WATCH Steve Martin Has to Leave – Johnny Carson, 1978.

On JEOPARDY! a couple of weeks ago, there was a clue about King Tut, and the contestant mimicked the hand gestures from the Steve Martin song that debuted on SNL, featuring the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, which only went to #17 on the pop charts in 1978, but ultimately sold a million copies.

WATCH King Tut SNL, 1978 and Live, 1979.

But he really wanted to be in pictures, and I’ve seen him in several films.

1979 The Muppet Movie, as a waiter
1984 All of Me, with Lily Tomlin
1986 Little Shop of Horrors, as the dentist
1987 Roxanne, which he also wrote and executive produced; I was quite fond
1987 Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, by far my favorite John Hughes movie
1989 Parenthood

1991 L.A. Story, for which he was also a writer and executive producer.
1991 Grand Canyon, which has my favorite quote about cinema: “That’s part of your problem: you haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.”
1992 Housesitter
1992 Leap of Faith, as a faux faith healer
1995 Father of the Bride Part II – an awful film
1997 The Spanish Prisoner – a decent drama
1998 The Prince of Egypt (voice)
1999 Fantasia 2000 (introductory host)

2008 Baby Mama
2009 It’s Complicated
2011 The Big Year, about birdwatching

He’s also been writing plays, articles, screenplays, and a very well-received 2007 memoir, Born Standing Up.

More recently, I’ve seen him on TV playing his banjo. In the comedy years, he’d play it mostly as a diversion for the joke. But now he, primarily with the band the Steep Canyon Rangers, has been playing a number of banjo gigs.

WATCH Steve Martin and Kermit the Frog in “Dueling Banjos”, 2013.

He’s won several honors, including the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the Kennedy Center Honors, the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year, the AFI Life Achievement Award, and an Academy Honorary Award. He became a father for the first time at the age of 67.

WATCH an interview with David Letterman – May 1, 2015.

MOVIE REVIEW: Trainwreck

I wonder what Amy Schumer’s cousin, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) thought about the movie Trainwreck?

There’s a TV show on Comedy Central called Inside Amy Schumer. I’ve never seen it, but it is described as “straight from [her] provocative and hilariously wicked mind,” exploring sex and relationships.

So the language and sexuality was not a shock to my system when The Wife and I saw Trainwreck, written by and starring Schumer as a thirtysomething named Amy, who learned early on, from her father Gordon (Colin Quinn), to eschew romantic commitment; so she is either sex-positive or slutty, depending how one views these things.

She can be snarky about the marriage of her younger sister Kim (Brie Larson) to Tom (Mike Birbiglia), which meant instant family, with Tom’s son Allister (Evan Brinkman).

Amy is a magazine writer for a publication trying too hard to be cutting edge. She is assigned by her editor Brianna (Tilda Swinton, ever the chameleon) to write about a successful sports doctor named Aaron (Bill Hader), who hangs out with his patients, such as basketball player LeBron James (well played by LeBron James). Aaron has the audacity to ask her for a second date, and the tensions ensue.

Despite its explicit nature early on, at the heart of this film is a rom com, though, in the traditional roles, Amy’s the guy. That is not a putdown, only a description, as many of the mostly positive reviews suggested. Plus there are some interesting family dynamics; Amy’s dad was the original trainwreck. The movie’s a tad long, for which I blame director Judd Apatow, and it’s more than a bit sappy at the end.

I liked it when The Wife and I saw it at The Spectrum Theatre a couple of weeks ago. She was unsure early on whether she’d like it, but it turned out to be a winner for her too.

Amy and her father’s cousin, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), have teamed up to fight for gun control following a mass shooting at a screening of the movie in Louisiana.

MOVIE REVIEW: Spy

In general, I didn’t find the film Spy laugh out loud funny.

This, I suppose, is an embarrassing admission for someone who purports to care about movies: I have not seen, all the way through, any James Bond movie. I’ve seen bits and pieces on TV occasionally, mostly from the Sean Connery era, but never from beginning to end.

There, I said it.

Yet I recognized the spy movie tropes that ran through the movie comedy Spy, which I saw with my friend Mary at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany a few weeks ago.

Not familiar with the level of violence in an R-rated comedy, I was briefly taken aback by the first good joke, which involved the failure to take one’s allergy medication. Once that happened, I said, “OK, so it’ll be THAT kind of movie,” and I went with it.

This is the story of behind-the-scenes CIA analyst Susan Cooper (Melissa McCartney), who fed information through the earbud of super slick spy Bradley Long (Jude Law). But when Bradley is feared dead, and another top field spy, Rick Ford (Jason Strathan), goes rogue, Susan convinces her boss Elaine Crocker (Allison Janney) to allow her to go undercover to infiltrate the world of a deadly arms dealer, Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne).

I didn’t find the frumpy aliases and clothing the agency gave to Susan, on assignment in various cities, all that hilarious. More humorous was when Susan bought her own clothes and Rayna found them inadequate.

In general, I didn’t find the film laugh-out-loud funny. I’m told that Strathan, e.g., is playing on the roles in series for which he’s best known – Transformers, Fast & Furious, The Expendables, etc, – except that I’d NEVER seen him in ANY movie. And with all the double-crossing and triple crossing, I was a tad muddled in the middle about who was on whose side. I confused one dark-haired woman with another for a time.

Yet I enjoyed the movie as a whole, as an empowerment treatise, that the “behind the curtains” spy got to ultimately shine. The character of Nancy (Miranda Hart), who was Susan’s backup person, was appropriately awkward. Rose Byrne, who played the Bridezilla in Bridesmaids, also produced and directed by Paul Feig, was even more over the top here. Actually, the best comedy may have been in the end credits, which much of the audience missed, naturally, detailing Susan’s future spy exploits.

I’m glad I went, and I understand why the critics liked Spy, but I doubt The Wife would have enjoyed the language and violence.

Helen Mirren is 70 (tomorrow)

Mirren’s paternal grandfather was in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War.

In June 2015, Dame Helen Lydia Mirren won the Tony Award for the Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play. Here is her acceptance speech.

I had forgotten that she had been nominated for Tonys twice before. In her win for The Audience, she portrayed Queen Elizabeth II. Playing the same personage, she won an Academy Award for Best Actress in 2006 in The Queen. Like much of her stage work, the role was developed in the West End, London’s equivalent to New York City’s Broadway.

She had won the first of her four Emmy Awards in 1996, Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Special, for Prime Suspect: The Scent of Darkness, making her a Grammy shy of an EGOT. I’ve watched her in much of her seven seasons of Prime Suspect.

She’s done a great deal of voice work. On TV, she was Becky’s Inner Voice on Glee and a caller on Frasier; in the movies, the dean in Monsters University (2013), and the queen, per usual, in The Prince of Egypt (1998).

I think of her primarily as a film actress, but I’ve not seen as many movies as I would have thought. On-screen, I’ve seen her in:
2014 The Hundred-Foot Journey
2006 The Queen
2003 Calendar Girls
2001 Gosford Park
1999 Teaching Mrs. Tingle
1994 The Madness of King George (playing Queen Charlotte)
1985 White Nights
1973 O Lucky Man! – here’s the O Lucky Man! trailer

From the Wikipedia:

“Mirren was born Helen Lydia Mironoff in … London. Her father, Vasily Petrovich Mironoff (1913–1980), was Russian…and her mother, Kitty (née Kathleen Alexandrina Eva Matilda Rogers; 1909–1996), was English.

“Mirren’s paternal grandfather, Colonel Pyotr Vasilievich Mironov, was in the Imperial Russian Army and fought in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. He later became a diplomat and was negotiating an arms deal in Britain when he and his family were stranded during the Russian Revolution. The former diplomat became a London cab driver to support his family and eventually settled down in England.

“Helen’s father… anglicised the family name in the 1950s and changed his name to Basil Mirren. He played the viola with the London Philharmonic before World War II, and later drove a taxi cab… before becoming a civil servant with the Ministry of Transport.

“Mirren’s mother was a working-class Londoner… and was the 13th of 14 children born to a butcher whose own father had been the butcher to Queen Victoria… Mirren was the second of three children; she was born three years after her older sister Katherine (“Kate”; born 1942), and has a younger brother…named Peter Basil…

“Mirren married American director Taylor Hackford (her partner since 1986) on 31 December 1997, his 53rd birthday…. The couple had met on the set of White Nights. It is her first marriage, and his third (he has two children from his previous marriages). Mirren has no children and says she has “no maternal instinct whatsoever.”

“On 11 May 2010, Mirren attended the unveiling of her waxwork at Madame Tussauds London.”

Her Bio piece.
CBS Sunday Morning February 2015 (updated in June 2015).

Flinching from the “new” Atticus Finch

I found myself watching the movie To Kill a Mockingbird in the context of the release of the new book by Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman.

The family went to the Madison Theatre in Albany last Wednesday night to see the classic movie To Kill a Mockingbird. I had never watched it before at a cinema, only on TV. The Wife had viewed only bits of it, and The Daughter had not seen it at all. It is a fine film, of course, and I need not review it here.

The great music of Elmer Bernstein made The Daughter nervous, especially around the storyline of Boo Radley. And she was confused by the scene in the woods near the end as to what really happened, given the subsequent dialogue.

While I appreciate the timeliness of the showing, I should note that the experience was lessened somewhat by a large amount of sound “bleed” from the adjoining theater. In fact, it got SO loud that I could almost not hear the film I was watching. What the heck was playing over there, anyway? It turned out to be the earthquake disaster film, San Andreas.

I found myself watching Mockingbird in the context of the release of the new book by Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman. This novel has been mired in controversy. First, the argument was that the author was “increasingly blind and deaf,” and that the book’s release was somehow contrary to her real wishes.

More importantly, the new tome redefines Atticus Finch, the practically saintly protagonist of Mockingbird, so well played by Gregory Peck in the movie, and is so popular that children have been increasingly named after him. Watchmen suggests that Atticus, was, in his later years, a racist on the wrong side of history.

Some folks, like my buddy Chuck Miller, have chosen to ignore Watchman, considering it not part of the canon. I used to read comic books, so I recognize that writers are often mucking up beloved characters in ways we do not recognize. We often pick and choose what we will choose to accept. (Hey, kind of like the Bible!)

As someone who participated in a marathon of To Kill a Mockingbird reading a few years back, I’m excited to read Go Set a Watchman, even if it’s less compelling than its predecessor. Because, as NPR put it: Harper Lee’s ‘Watchman’ Is A Mess That Makes Us Reconsider A Masterpiece.

The screenplay for the movie To Kill a Mockingbird was written by the late Horton Foote. His third cousin, the late writer Shelby Foote, was an apologist for the Confederate flag. I have a feeling that the “new” Atticus is more complicated than we want to accept.