At Home: The King of Comedy

“Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime”

Scorsese, like Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola and the rest of the so called “Movie Brats” from the seventies have become recognised for a small collection of their titles rather than their sprawling body of work. Spielberg has E.T, and Indiana Jones, Lucas has Star Wars and Coppola The Godfather trilogy (actually let’s just count the first two) and in all cases it does the director a disservice.

Narrowing Scorsese to his gangster movies is reductive and simplistic, not taking into account that his attempts in different genres with emphatic (and sometimes not so emphatic) results. The King of Comedy is a film that if viewed through the prism of Scorsese’s work would look and feel distinctly unlike him. There’s little of the whirlwind-like energy he’s known for or a look at fragile family relationships (a feature in more than a few of his films). Take a peak beneath the surface and it does feel more like the director on a filmic and personal level.

The King of Comedy is about Robert De Niro’s Rupert Pubkin, an aspiring comedian who wishes to get into the game by gaining the support of talk-show host Jerry Langford (played by Jerry Lewis). At first what appears out to a series of amicable meetings soon devolves into a morass of obsession, ambition and fanaticism that takes both characters to strange places.

The title implies a comedic tone but it obscures the more disturbing content just beneath it. De Niro’s Pubkin is a desperate man, walking the New York streets in his smart suit and with his briefcase, constantly on the lookout for Langford. From early on in it’s apparent that there’s something not quite right with him, whether it’s his insistence on meeting Langford or that he appears to be living in his mother’s basement (was he cinema’s first fanboy?). The film reveals his delusion, a man with little in the way of social skills and who’s never shown in his workplace (if he has a job). De Niro brings a fanaticism to the role, a character with the blinkers on who can’t see beyond his narrow vision of what the world is and what he should receive from it.

And it’s perhaps in the final reel that will provide further discussion as to the film’s intent, playing with reality and fantasy and ending on an ambiguous note as to whether he achieved his ambitions. It’s a fascinating end that could be viewed as some sort of modern parable; the ordinary person’s wish-fulfilment fantasy combined with a lack of talent that makes you wonder if Scorsese was damming society’s relentless need to consume every detail about those who entertain us for a living.

8/10

Reels revisited: Alien 3

“You’ve been in my life so long, I can’t remember anything else.”

Where do you go after two very successful films in an iconic franchise? In the case of Alien 3 the answer would be nowhere in particular.

Alien 3 disappoints on a number of levels but perhaps the biggest disappointment is its failure to improve on (or even match up to) its predecessors. It’s a stale and enfeebled film that lacks a sense of its own identity. I’d heard about the problems that had plagued production (multiple scripts, multiple directors attached, Fincher walking away from the film before the editing process), it’s apparent that Fincher dislikes this film immensely and it’s not hard to see why.