There is a belief among some black comics that audiences find it funny when they launch extended insults against white people (see also Chris Rock’s embarrassing outburst in Jay and Silent Bob). My feeling is that audiences of any race find such scenes awkward and unwelcome; I’ve never heard laughter during them, but have sensed an uncomfortable alertness in the theater. Accusing complete strangers of being racist is aggressive, hostile, and not funny, something Tucker demonstrates to a painful degree in this movie—where the filmmakers apparently lacked the nerve to request him to dial down.
There’s one scene that really grated: The Tucker character finds himself in a Vegas casino. He throws a wad of money on a craps table and is given a stack of $500 chips. He is offended: It is racist for the casino to give him $500 chips instead of $1,000 chips, the dealer doesn’t think a black man can afford $1,000 a throw, etc. He goes on and on in a shrill tirade against the dealer (an uncredited Saul Rubinek, I think). The dealer answers every verbal assault calmly and firmly. What’s extraordinary about this scene is how we identify with the dealer, and how manifestly the Tucker character is acting like the seven-letter word for jerk. Rubinek wins the exchange.
The movie begins with Tucker and Jackie Chan going to Hong Kong on vacation after their adventures in the previous movie. Soon they’re involved in a new case: A bomb has gone off in the American embassy, killing two people. Their investigation leads first to the leader of a local crime triad (John Lone) and then to an American Mr. Big (Alan King). Sex appeal is supplied by Roselyn Sanchez, as an undercover agent, and Zhang Ziyi, from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as a martial arts fighter.
Jackie Chan is amazing as usual in the action sequences, and Zhang Ziyi has hand-to-hand combat with Chris Tucker in a scene of great energy. There are the usual Chan-style stunts, including one where the heroes dangle above city streets on a flexible bamboo pole. And a couple of those moments, over in a flash, where Chan combines grace, ability, and timing (in one, he slips through a teller’s cage, and in another he seems to walk up a scaffolding). Given Chan’s so-so command of English, it’s ingenious to construct a sequence that silences him with a grenade taped inside his mouth.
But Tucker’s scenes finally wear us down. How can a movie allow him to be so obnoxious and make no acknowledgment that his behavior is aberrant? In a nightclub run by Hong Kong gangsters, he jumps on a table and shouts, “OK, all the triads and ugly women on one side, and all the fine women on the other.” He is the quintessential Ugly American, and that’s not funny. One rule all comedians should know, and some have to learn the hard way, is that they aren’t funny—it’s the material that gets the laughs. Another rule is that if you’re the top dog on a movie set, everybody is going to pretend to laugh at everything you do, so anyone who tells you it’s not that funny is trying to do you a favor.
S
Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic
(DIRECTED BY LIAM LYNCH; STARRING SARAH SILVERMAN, LA’VIN KIYANO; 2005)
Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic is a movie that filled me with an urgent desire to see Sarah Silverman in a different movie. I liked everything about it except the writing, the direction, the editing, and the lack of a parent or adult guardian. There should have been somebody to stand up sadly after the first screening and say: “Sarah, honey, this isn’t the movie you want people to see. Your material needs a lot of work; the musical scenes are deadly, except for the first one. And it looks like it was edited by someone fooling around with iMovie on a borrowed Mac.”
Apparently the only person capable of telling Sarah Silverman such things is Sarah Silverman, and she obviously did not. Maybe the scene of her kissing herself in the mirror provides a clue. The result is a film that is going to make it hard to get people to come to the second Sarah Silverman film. Too bad, because Silverman is smart and funny and blindsides you with unexpected U-turns. She could be the instrument for abrasive and transgressive humor that would slice through the comedy club crap. But here, she isn’t.
You have seen her before. She started on Saturday Night Live and has been in fifteen movies and a lot of TV shows. She’s tall, brunette, and good-looking, and she says shocking things with the precise enunciation and poise of a girl who was brought up knowing how to make a good impression. The disconnect between what she says and how she says it is part of the effect. If she were crass and vulgar, her material would be insupportable: If you’re going to use cancer, AIDS, and 9/11 as punch lines, you’d better know how to get the permission of the audience. She does it by seeming to be too well bred to realize what she’s saying. She’s always correcting herself. When she uses the word retards she immediately registers that it’s non-PC and elaborates: “When I say ‘retards,’ I mean they can do anything.”
So that’s one of her lines. It would be a cheap shot for me to quote a dozen more, and do her act here in the review. Better to stand back and see why she’s funny, but the movie doesn’t work. The first problem is with timing. None of her riffs go on long enough to build. She gets a laugh, and then another one, maybe a third, and then she starts in a different direction. We want her to keep on, piling one offense on top of another. We want to see her on a roll.
That’s in the concert documentary parts of the movie. She stands on a stage and does the material and there are cuts to the audience, but curiously not much of a connection; it doesn’t seem to be this audience at this performance, but a generic audience. Then she cuts away from the doc stuff to little sketches. The first one, in which her sister (Laura Silverman) and her friend (Brian Posehn) brag about their recent accomplishments, is funny because she perfectly plays someone who has never accomplished anything and never will, and lies about it. Then we see her in a car, singing a song about getting a job and doing a show, and then she does a show. Fair enough.
But what’s with the scene where she entertains the old folks at her grandma’s rest home by singing a song telling them they will all die, soon? She is rescued by the apparent oblivion of the old folks, who seem so disconnected she could be working in blue screen. Then there’s the scene where she angrily shakes the corpse of her grandmother in its casket. Here is a bulletin from the real world: Something like that is not intrinsically funny. Yes, you can probably find a way to set it up and write it to make it funny, but to simply do it, just plain do it, is pathetic. The audience, which has been laughing, grows watchful and sad.
To discuss the film’s editing rhythm is to suggest it has one. There are artless and abrupt cuts between different kinds of material. She’s on the stage, and then she’s at the nursing home. There is a way to make that transition, but it doesn’t involve a cut that feels like she was interrupted in the middle of something. And the ending comes abruptly, without any kind of acceleration and triumph in the material. Her act feels cut off at the knees. The running time, seventy minutes including end credits, is interesting, since if you subtract the offstage scenes that means we see less of her than a live audience would.
Now if Silverman had been ungifted or her material had lacked all humor, I would maybe not have bothered with a review. Why kick a movie when it’s down? But she has a real talent, and she is sometimes very funny in a way that is particularly her own. Now she needs to work with a writer (not to provide the material but to shape and pace it), and a director who can build a scene, and an editor who can get her out of it, and a producer who can provide wise counsel.