Pioneering

"These comedy things are just not for me," a film critic recently wrote me. I had pitched him to cover our "Comedy Fortnight," a two-week extravaganza of hilarity kicking off tonight. I feel this is a strong and nuanced program. That is why I had pitched him. I figured he might see some value in the program, given his analytical skills for films proper as well as their surrounding contexts. True, he doesn't write about comedy much, and recently he has become ever more harsh and alarmist in his diagnoses of the world of cinema.

His harshness and alarm are appropriate. The grand political situation seems at least as bad, if not much worse, as it was under Nixon. Socio-economically, we are headed back past the era of Warren G. Harding, toward a new robber baron-based Gilded Age. Meanwhile, the dark shadows of media-consolidation and xenophobic paranoia pour over the land like a poisonous mist, transforming our perception through a newspeak that equates torture with freedom and democracy with occupation. (Or "independent film" with movies produced by major studios and monopolistic cable television concerns.)

So how on earth can I rationalize showing an absurd improvised mockumentary about paintball? Honestly, I don't know that I can. Do I mention something about relief? Escapism? Balance?

Politically, socially, BLACKBALLED: THE BOBBY DUKES STORY is indefensible.

But the movie's pretty damn funny.

And so are a lot of the other programs in our Comedy Fortnight.

doom spreads
nothing is funny
i crack up

The Comedy Fortnight program is here.