Call Me Lucky
Bobcat Goldthwait’s documentary of comedian Barry Crimmins doesn’t open in a comedy club but at a 1990 anti-war rally. Crimmins played protests as well as comedy stages—and he preferred the protest audiences. Although he was an influence on Goldthwait and many other comedians in his wake, Crimmins never achieved stardom with his joke-telling Noam Chomsky shtick, not only for the controversy of his ideas but his refusal to play the entertainment industry’s game.
Closer to the Moon
In late-1950s Romania, a young cameraman at the communist state’s film studio is given a “rather special” assignment—as a secret police official puts it. He must restage and film a bank robbery allegedly committed by a gang of Jewish Communist Party members who were actually victims of an anti-Semitic purge. Witty and perceptive, Closer to the Moon is a sharp satire of a system determined to repress apathy as well as dissent.
Manglehorn
What’s remarkable about Manglehorn is the carefully considered, thoroughly lived-through performance by Al Pacino as the protagonist. A.J. Manglehorn is walking through what remains of his life with an ironic tread. Estranged from his son and ex-wife, and still writing unanswered letters to the woman who long ago got away, Manglehorn has retreated into a lonely existence with his cat—until the possibility of love with a bank teller (Holly Hunter) brightens the horizon.
“The Carol Burnett Show: The Lost Episodes”
Carol Burnett DVDs keep coming and the latest release, a six-disc set, is culled from the first five seasons of her weekly variety show. The “Lost Episodes” have been unseen since originally broadcast in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Burnett was a gifted comedian capable of playing everyone from a Girl Scout to an octogenarian and packed her program with such current stars as Flip Wilson, Phyllis Diller, Andy Griffith and Cass Elliot.
