I LOVE YOU MAN

That whole Judd Apatow schlubby, boy-men, buddy-movie-turns-into-boy-girl-romance thing (KNOCKED UP may be the best example and Seth Rogan the emblematic representative actor) is what I expected I LOVE YOU MAN to be.

And it is, in general outline terms. But, it also isn't. Partly because John Hamburg who wrote and directed I LOVE YOU MAN was doing this before the Apatow phenomenon became dominant (see Hamburg's ALONG CAME POLLY, which he wrote and directed, or ZOOLANDER which he wrote, both before the big Apatow ascension, though Apatow's been around as a producer for a lot longer).

No one making movies, certainly not comedies, is as consistently successful as Apatow, nor does anyone make films that are as consistently well worked out as Apatow (there's rarely, if ever, a missed beat or plot point in Apatow's funny films, they're like perfect comedy machines, at least for these times and certain age groups).

And Hamburg's movies contain some of the elements Apatow uses in his (and some of the actors etc.) so I'm not trying to set up a whole separate camps kind of thing here. I'm just pointing out that to my taste and critical eye, Hamburg's movies are much less predictable outside the general outline of these comedies.

For instance, the whole "gay" joke box of tricks all these comedies use for an easy laugh, Hamburg uses as well in I LOVE YOU MAN, but at least in some ways we haven't seen before (probably the best adjusted male character in the film is played by Andy Samberg playing Paul Rudd's character's gay brother, but playing him as straight as any character in any movie ever gets, so ordinary and so not stereotypical it elevates that subplot to a much more realistic and even in some ways enlightening level than these movies hardly ever achieve, and that's just one example).

Casting Jason Segal as the co-lead (to Paul Rudd) was smart too. His character is bigger than life, but also vulnerable and typical of the boy-men in these types of comedies, but Segal has such a unique presence on screen, he extends this type of character's usual obviousness into such a specific kind of realism of unpredictability and particularness he seems like a real person most of the time who just wandered onto the set.

Rudd has this attribute as well, but not in the Segal-uniquely-individual way, more in the Tom Hanks everyman way. Rudd's been a stalwart presence in these kinds of movies for years now, but when I first noticed him in the comedy CLUELESS back in the '90s, he came across as so authentic, such a fine actor, and yet so charmingly egoless, that I expected him to become one of his generation's major stars in serious movies.

But it's taken this long and this movie for him to become a true movie star, as it's his character that is at the heart of this movie, and with the help of Segal and the love interest, as they say, played by Rashida Jones—another unique screen presence that grounds the movie in a kind of realism these flicks usually don't have—Rudd and Hamburg, and the other collaborators that made this movie, pull it off.

It's not a run-out-and-see-immediately movie, so you can wait for it to go to DVD or get on cable. But if you run across it, don't ignore it. They say a good laugh every day helps the body heal and keep the immune system strong, well I LOVE YOU MAN worked for me like the flu shot is supposed to. I laughed out loud so much I was afraid I was disturbing the few other people in the tiny section of our local multiplex it was showing at. Not a bad recommendation for a comedy.

TODAY'S QUOTE

"All art is a collaboration." —John M. Synge from his preface to The Playboy of the Western World

KINDSIGHT

I've written about and recommended my friend Robert Zuckerman's collection of photos with commentary called KINDSIGHT. It came out several years ago, but he's been steadily continuing the venture and hopefully there will be a new collection soon.

The project is unique as "art" and powerfully moving. Sometimes even provocative, as the last one he sent around, which is receiving strong reactions from the usual suspects. I've added his blog where he posts his newest photos and commentaries, most as inspirational as you could ever need, to my list of mostly good friends' blogs and sites down to the right, but since the latest isn't posted yet I'm reproducing it here. If you click on it, it will get bigger so you can read it.

[I should add that Robert makes his living as a still photographer on movies. You've seen his work, as I'm sure everyone has in this country as well as around the world, because many of the movies he's worked on have been big successes and the image used in ads and on posters etc. is a photo that Robert took. So saying what he does in this post and sending it out to friends and colleagues in the movie business is not only provocative, but extremely courageous, because it could cost him jobs. But he's one of the most honorable, as well as obviously thoughtful, people I've ever known, so I'm not surprised.]

DYLAN ON DYLAN

This collection of interviews with Bob Dylan is in many ways much more revealing and sometimes more interesting than CHRONICLES, the first volume of his official autobiograhy. Not as literature, or personal myth manipulation, or sustained life story (no matter how choppy CHRONICLES was, it still cohered as a piece of writing). But as autobiography.

The interviews are ordered chronologically, from a radio interview in 1962 to an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2004 (the book itself came out in ’06, though I only recently picked up the paperback version because it’s now available at a big discount).

There’s something about celebrity interviews that usually comes across as phony or canned. But a lot of the time—especially with someone as evasive yet uniquely direct as Dylan—an interview can expose angles of perspective on an “artist” that otherwise we’d never encounter.

That’s the case here. Because it spans almost his entire performing and recording career, and because the interviewers are varied and the setting and intent of the interviews equally varied, and because of the variety in Dylan’s personas and intentions and capacity for normal conversation, it adds up to an enlightening series of what seem like attempts by Robert Zimmerman to truly tell his story, or at least the story of his role as Bob Dylan musical original, even genius.

I’ve had an ongoing mental review of Dylan and his approaches to his music and his persona since before he recorded his first album when I ran into him in the Village where we were both hanging out but with different crowds (him the folkies, me the jazz scene) and I pegged him for an arrogant phony from in front (which easily could have been said of me at the time).

But when I heard his early recordings (introduced to me by my first wife, Lee, who brought them with her from Buffalo to Spokane, Washington, where I was stationed at the time of our marriage) I realized no matter how he came across in person to me, on record he was a genius, doing what I was trying to do with my poetry and other writing, but doing it so much better and so much more successfully.

I was envious, but I was also in awe. And I continued to view Dylan and his music with a double perspective, part blown away by his amazing musical shifts and surprises, while at the same time being critical of his public personas.

Like in an interview not included here that I read in the Village Voice in 1964, not long after I first heard his early recordings, when he described himself as “just a guitar player” as I remember it. I was offended by what I took as the faux humility of a guy who was being touted as a “great poet” and breath of fresh air not just in music but in our entire society because he was telling the truth to power, but the truth of the moment was he had become so much more than a mere guitar player, or musician, or even songwriter/singer, he had become the uncrowned king of his generation.

In later years I was always bugged by the spin that was put on the first big changes in his music and persona after he “went electric”—what others, and sometimes Dylan, described as an attempt to throw off the designation of “spokesman for an entire generation” I saw as just a change in the drugs he was imbibing, just like most of the rest of us in and outside the music world.

So as much as I have always loved and been amazed by Dylan’s musical “genius,” I’ve been upset or at least put off by all the subterfuges, as I saw them, he employed to avoid responsibility for what he had wrought, or at least majorly contributed to.

This collection of interviews goes a long way to resolving that conflict I’ve had with this contemporary. Watching Dylan go through his changes over more than four decades, big and small, and try to explain or avoid explaining them to a regiment of interviewers ended up endearing him to me. I can read in his answers, even the deliberately opaque ones, a pretty clearheadedly consistent attempt to be as true to his interior music and vision as the times and circumstances of his life allowed, while doing his best to not let anything get in the way of that.

After reading DYLAN ON DYLAN, I feel more sympathy and empathy for his personal struggles with fame and his creativity and the problems and opportunities and plain business surrounding both from the beginning, and I appreciate all that much more, like I always have the music. If you dig Dylan, I highly recommend it.

MICHELLE OBAMA

Anyone see that talk she gave at the girls' school in France yesterday?

It had me all teary eyed (as it did her).

The thing I love most about Obama and his wife is their honesty. It's seemed all my life like politicians speak a different language, and their spouses too.

There's a kind of diplomacy or tact that I understand most public figures need to keep in mind—when I'm asked to speak on or contribute some writing about topics that involve real people and their experiences, I have to calculate if anything I say or write will hurt anyone. so I understand this. [My old friend Hubert Selby Jr. used to say "Honesty without love is attack."]

But aside from being conscious of not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings, there's another layer of language padding that surrounds most statements from politicians and their spouses that compounds the distance and differences between us and them, and resonates with phoniness, or at least unreality.

This isn't true most of the time when Obama speaks. And none of the time when Michelle does.

She not only seems to speak spontaneously from her heart (even with notes) but to be aware of the reality of her unprecedented position on the world stage. She has to be the tallest, most athletic, most self-made woman ever on the world political stage. And she definitely is the darkest, at least from any developed country.

But she transcends the differences between her and her predecessors as well as between her and those of us who aren't tall, athletic, independent dark-skinned women, with the most disarming honesty I've ever heard from a public figure, at least among our country's political elite.

How unbelievably refreshing. Or actually, finally, believable. I hope she's setting a standard that we will all (including the media) hold future politicians and their spouses to.

THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY

Another HBO series that makes network TV seem obsolete.

I never read the books this one’s based on, though I heard good things from friends who have. But there were definitely some things about the two-hour pilot that might have been done better, or at least differently.

Like the broad humor that sometimes is reminiscent of old style sitcom playing-to-the-lowest-common-denominator type of stuff, or the sanitized background and setting that eliminates anything that might turn an audience away (not just deep poverty and deprivation and the things that go along with all that, there weren’t even any flies in the pilot as far as I could tell), etc.

But all this seemed pretty deliberate, and the ensemble cast is terrific, and the main stars—Jill Scott and Anika Noni Rose—are a delight to watch, even when they’re deliberately over the top they’re able to make it believable thanks to the magnitude of their talent and commitment, and I would assume the direction of Anthony Minghella (the pilot was the last thing he directed before he died).

Jill Scott, the singer (and songwriter) is a revelation. She is the star of the show, the number one lady detective, and like a true star she carries the entire two-hour pilot like it doesn’t weigh more than a feather. She is described by various people in the show as “fat”—but on her it’s a compliment, she couldn’t be more attractive in every way.

She and her co-star, Anika Noni Rose, are the reasons I tuned in in the first place. Rose is one of my favorite actresses (she just about stole DREAMGIRLS) and Scott is one of my favorite music makers. To see them playing native Africans (the show is set in Botswana) and seeming as comfortable as if they were born there (I have no idea how accurate their accents were, but they made their accented English and the characters’ native tongue sound convincing) was impressive.

The arc of the show was a little messy for me, some things seemed a little farfetched or too easily resolved, which I tend to blame on the writer (or more accurately adapter). But other parts were delightfully satisfying either as comedy or drama. I laughed several times out loud, and I got teary eyed at other times, even though I could see right through the obvious devices being used to elicit those responses. That’s because Scott and Rose and the rest of the cast were so good at making even the most obvious and/or absurd moments real.

It’ll be interesting to see where the show goes. This first episode was more like a film, everything wrapped up nicely at the end. Which didn’t leave much for future resolution, more like old mainstream TV sitcoms and even some dramas than more recent mainstream and HBO and other cable series, where we are enticed into sticking to a show to see how various story lines work out.

But it’s entertainment first, and for this viewer the pilot was entirely entertaining. The show also looks like it will attempt to make some points about some of the more challenging aspects of life in Botswana, and by extension, in much of sub-Saharan Africa. And just to watch a show set in any underdeveloped country, let alone Southern African, is not just a first, but feels overdue and necessary.

I couldn’t help but think of our president’s father (though he came from further North on that continent) and African relatives. And how finally fiction TV is catching up with documentary and news TV in terms of globalization and how we are all interconnected and share so much more in common than ever before.

Now someone’s got to find a way to write a series set in the Middle East that balances perspectives and experiences. Wouldn’t that be right on time.

NORM COLEMAN: A NO CLASS ACT

Here’s a pretty good expression of a class act: Al Gore, who won the popular vote for the presidency in 2000 and may well have won the electoral vote as well if the recount in Florida had been allowed to continue, concedes the win to Bush Junior in order to avoid a long drawn out battle that might divide the country and handicap any incoming administration in taking the reigns of government.

Fast forward to 2008 and the race for one of the senate seats in Minnesota. After a close election in which a recount was called for (and mandated I believe by state law), the Democrat Al Franken is shown to be the winner. But his Republican opponent Norm Coleman, instead of conceding,—even after the state voting officials, bi-partisan voting officials, etc. declare him the loser—vows to appeal the election results through the court system in a process that should take years. Leaving his state underrepresented in the Senate all that time (as it has been for months now).

It’s like the old Bible Story about King Solomon and the two women who claimed the same child as their own. When he said his verdict was to have the child cut in half, the real mother pleaded to let the other woman have the child in order to save it. Al Gore cared more about our country than his political ambitions or his party’s bid for power. Norm Coleman cares more about his political ambitions and his party’s bid for power than he does about his home state.

‘Nuff said.