Exposition Crime Thriller

Title: The Gentlemen

Rating: 5 Stars

Guy Ritchie must get pretty frustrated. You can tell that he wants to be known as a director with many talents. It has to be frustrating that so many of his films are received poorly. What did you think of the live action Aladdin (otherwise known as the Blue Will Smith)? Or the most recent King Arthur? I don’t know about you but I couldn’t even finish The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Sure, he made the first Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law. That was pretty good, but then made the two sequels which weren’t quite so good.

But then there’s the British overly-complicated overly-verbal organized-crime caper film. He absolutely owns that genre. I’m talking Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. I’m talking Snatch. I’m talking Revolver. I’m talking Rocknrolla. Seriously, each of these films is brilliant in its own way.

There’s an authenticity to these films, even though I have no idea how the British criminal underground actually works. He often casts actors that come from this milieu. Each of the characters are distinct. All characters have perfect voices saying the perfect lines.

It’s been over ten years since his last one. I don’t know if there were studio executives pleading with him to quit fucking around with subjects that he’s not good at and to go back to his genius. Whoever or however he was convinced, I’m thrilled that he’s back.

The Gentlemen is a wonderful Guy Ritchie film. If you’re not into comedically dark violence, accents that sometime border on the impenetrable, plots that require a PhD in chaos theory, or a film that is nearly entirely composed of exposition, this might not be up your alley.

Otherwise, hold on, it’s going to be a ride. I’m not going to bore you with the plot details, not to mention that I don’t have enough words anyway. Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) is a very successful pot dealer that wants to sell out and get out. He wants to sell to Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong). Dry Eye (Henry Golding) also wants to buy Pearson’s business. Fletcher (Hugh Grant) is a private investigator sniffing around Pearson’s business.

Plot gets complicated. Double crossers get triple crossed. People die in varied and amusing manners.

To enjoy a Guy Ritchie film, you just have to sit back and enjoy the characters and the action. Hugh Grant is perfect as a sniveling and smarmy weasel trying to get his cut of the sale. Colin Farrell, as Coach, the local gym owner whose mission in life is to straighten out wayward young lads and, oh, by the way, turns them into a rapping, youTube violence porn gang, is absolutely the best small part by a major star in a Guy Ritchie film since Brad Pitt’s Mickey O’Neil, the Irish Traveller bare knuckle champion from Snatch.

And, oh my God, the exposition. Fletcher basically narrates the entire film during an extended session of scotch and steak as he attempts to negotiate his twenty million fee from Pearson’s right hand man Raymond (Charlie Hunnam).

Oh yeah, there’s also Russian oligarchs involved. And some lower tier British peers and their mansions. And a Rupert Murdoch like media magnate. And sex with a pig.

In short, an awesome film.

OK, Guy Ritchie, go ahead and go back to what you were doing. Who knows, maybe a musical teenage coming of age in outer space? Whatever, hopefully I’ll see you again in five or ten years, making the kind of film that only you can make.

I can’t wait!

Brand New Old West

Title: The Wild Bunch

Rating: 5 Stars

I recently watched this 1969 film. It’s number 79 on the 2008 AFI list. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen it before.

There’s a gang of aging outlaws. The year is 1913 and the Western era is coming to a close. While they ride around on horses, others are now driving cars. They attempt to rob a bank as their final score. However, the authorities are aware of their plan, and after the gang makes their bloody getaway, they discover that instead of gold coins that they just have bags of steel washers.

Now they need yet one more score to get away. They are still being chased down by a posse. They make contact with a Mexican general. They agree to rob a train of military weapons in exchange for gold. They manage to do so. The general pays them but realizes that one of the gang, a Mexican, has double crossed him. He lets the others go but then proceeds to brutally torture the captor. The gang decides to come back to try to rescue him, but in the resulting chaos (1969 spoiler alert!) a massive shootout takes place that essentially kills everyone.

I was pretty blown away by it, especially if you consider its historical context. It is a revisionist Western. Considering the fact that True Grit, the Western that finally won John Wayne his Oscar, also came out in 1969, this shows how revolutionary of a film it really was. According to legend, when Wayne saw The Wild Bunch he claimed that it ruined the Western genre forever.

A couple of things makes it different in comparison to previous Westerns. First of all, the protagonists are not particularly good guys. I’m not talking not a good guy like the irascible Rooster Cogburn of True Grit. I mean that they are legitimately bad guys. They are career criminals. In shootouts they cower behind innocent people that are shot dead. They have no problem shooting into crowds. When escaping, they abandon members of their gang to meet their inevitable deaths. They are always on the edge of dangerous anger. When not plotting their next move, they are drunk and consorting with prostitutes. They are dirty. Their teeth are rancid. In short, they are probably a bit more accurate representative of the typical Westerner of that time.

On the other side, the good guys aren’t that good either. In fact, the posse that’s hunting them down has been hired by the railroad. The railroad has no interest in justice. It just wants to see the men hunted down and killed. The leader of the posse has a personal stake in the hunt. He was a previous member of the gang who was summarily abandoned by them. The men that he is leading are themselves basically filthy, drunken criminals.

In short, there are no white hats here. These are men who just want to live another day so that they can drink, gamble, and carouse.

The other big difference here in comparison to previous Westerns is the extreme violence. I’m way too young to have seen it originally in the theater in 1969. Because it had such a huge affect on subsequent film, I’ve become somewhat inured to extreme violence. Therefore, I can’t imagine what the movie audience must have felt watching it. The film was barely able to be released in its current form. There are reports of people vomiting as they watched. Apparently close to 150 characters died in the film. There are two huge set pieces. One is the bank robbery gone awry when the bank robbers and their pursuers engage in a wild gun fight as a temperance parade marches through it. The second is at the end of the film where various members of the gang use a mounted machine gun to just mow down soldiers and bystanders alike. Nearly everyone dies in the carnage.

There are a couple of interesting things to note here regarding the violence. First of all, it’s not patient zero for this kind of action. Two years earlier, in 1967, Bonnie and Clyde was released. Much as The Wild Bunch would do for the Western genre, Bonnie and Clyde essentially reinvented the crime genre. It tried to take the romance out of it by showing the bank robbers as violent murderers. The final scene, where Bonnie and Clyde are shot down in their car in an ambush, is an orgy of violence. It’s pretty clear that Peckinpah was influenced by Bonnie and Clyde.

The other interesting thing of note here is the year, 1969. This was a tumultuous year in the US. This was the year after the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention. The revolutionary group The Weathermen conducted their Days of Rage in 1969. In 1968 over 16,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam and about 12,000 were killed in 1969. In total during the conflict, total deaths (all nations) were between 1.5 to 3.5 million.

One of the reasons that Peckinpah made the film so violent was to try to shock Americans into an awareness of all of this horror. In retrospect, instead of being shocked by it, he realized that Americans ultimately reveled in this violence. In later years, he regretted making the film.

Although he might have regretted making it, there is no denying its impact upon American cinema.

WWI Gets Its Oscar Treatment

Film: 1917

Rating: 3 Stars

I’ve written before about my fascination with World War I. Why it started, why this initially incredibly fast moving war turned into a four year quagmire, and how the absolute inhumanity shown to soldiers on all sides as the first fully realized military industrial complex came into being and turned war into a mass killing machine. Given the lack of dramatic moments in a meat grinder war, a war with no real clear good/bad guys (Treaty of Versailles assigning blame to Germany notwithstanding), and long periods of time of soldiers hiding in bunkers covered in mud, it’s never been a particularly popular war to film.

Given that, I was excited for the opportunity to see 1917.

It appears that the Germans are in full retreat and that this is an opportunity for a British attack to finally make a decisive break in the war. During air reconnaissance, this is discovered to be a German deceit. The Germans have retreated a few miles back to an even more fortified defensive position. If the British attack, they will be annihilated.

Two soldiers are recruited by a British general to deliver a message to the commanding officer of the attack to cancel it. One of the soldier’s brothers is part of the planned attack, thus giving him extra motivation to deliver the message and possibly save his brother’s life.

To deliver the message, the two soldiers must cross over British lines, the wasteland between the two lines, the earlier abandoned German lines, and a bombed out town to get to the British regiment. The soldiers must fight over many obstacles, including straggling Germans, in their attempt to complete their mission.

Visually it did not disappoint. The trenches, the casual death, the desolate wasteland between fronts, and the horror of a carnage taking place on the same piece of lands for years are all shown here. Rotting horses and soldiers are everywhere. The soldiers fight both boredom and madness while trapped in their trenches. The film did a good job of bringing the little known aspects of WWI fighting to light.

There is a gimmick to 1917. It is filmed in something approaching real time, apparently as one shot. Like Birdman, it is not actually one long shot. It’s a series of long takes that are cleverly stitched together. There are tremendous set pieces that must have been extremely difficult to film in this manner. Specifically, in the climatic scene, where one of the soldiers is sprinting horizontally along the length of the British lines as the other soldiers climb up over the trenches and commence their attack, is pretty amazing.

It’s a technically virtuoso cinematic feat. I do wonder how necessary it actually was. I understand that doing so brings an immediacy to the journey for the viewer. However, it could have been communicated just as well using conventional film making. This just seemed to be an example of showing off. How much of this was the director doing something just because he could and not so much because of its impact upon the story?

My other nitpick about the film is the plot itself. A small group of men conveyed with a mission that spans the entire battlefront is essentially the plot for many war films ranging from Saving Private Ryan to Apocalypse Now. I understand that this plot allows the protagonists to experience many different aspects of battle, but by now it just seems a little tired. Similarly, sending multiple individuals on a shared group mission serves as an announcement to the film audience that some in the group will experience grief as their number inevitably dwindles.

I enjoyed the film. I just wonder if the film would have received the same acclaim if the long shot gimmick wasn’t employed.

Did Sam Mendes watch Birdman and think to himself that I could do that and get me an Oscar?

Death Comes For The Dick

Title: Pulp

Rating: 4 Stars

This was a book apparently designed for me. I enjoy hard boiled crime noir novels. I love absurdist humor. I like meta novels that poke fun at their own genre.

Nicky Belane is a hard boiled private dick. He spends nearly all of his time either in his office killing time or in a bar killing more time.

One day a beautiful femme fatale comes in. She calls herself Lady Death. She is on the hunt for a missing person, but not just any missing person. She hires Belane to look for Celine, the French author. Not a big deal but Celine has been dead for over thirty years.

Later Jack Bass visits Belane’s office. He has a much younger wife and he’s worried that she’s having an affair.

A man named Hal Groves also wants to hire Belane. He believes that a woman named Jeanne Nitro is an alien from another planet. Groves wants Belane to get her out of his life.

Finally, a man named John Barton wants him to find the Red Sparrow.

Belane takes all of the cases. With his going rate of $6 an hour (this is set in the 1990s), he is really going to bring in the cash!

It’s an absurdist tale. Belane can scarcely be bothered to leave his office. When he does leave it, it’s usually only to stumble to the nearest bar, order a drink, and to abuse the bartender and the other patrons.

Despite his claims to being the greatest private dick in LA, the cases pretty much solve themselves with no intervention of his own.

He accidentally runs into the not dead Celine at a local bookstore. He catches and videotapes Bass’ wife having sex. Unfortunately it’s with Jack Bass. Jeanne Nitro is in fact an alien from another planet, but gets arbitrarily sent back to her home planet.

He has no brilliant insights. He does not beat the pavement and hunt for clues. His tough guy antics are pretty much exclusively directed at ancillary characters.

Behind all of this lies an undercurrent of death. Lady Death is truly a harbinger of death. When Belane finds Celine, she immediately has him killed in an automotive accident. When Belane is nearly killed by being choked, at the last minute she swoops in and saves Belane’s life by giving his attempted murderer a heart attack. Even so, she keeps telling Belane that his time is coming. Ultimately, the Red Sparrow is a metaphor for his death.

This becomes more poignant when you discover that Bukowski was himself dying as he was writing Pulp. It is his last novel. In his novels, he wrote so much of himself into them that he managed to incorporate even his own dying and death into his last one.

The fact that there is so much absurdity, humor, and death imagery in this last novel as he is facing his own pending demise shows himself to be an exceptional and perceptive artist.

Chinaski would have been so proud.

A Town Trapped

Title: The Plague

Rating: 4 Stars

I’m not really a huge fan of Camus. I consistently rate his work pretty high because I recognize the skill and craft of them, but they don’t really pull me in any emotional direction. I just read them and appreciate them but they really leave no mark on me.

So it is with The Plague. The setting is a town in French Algeria named Oran. It appears to be a pretty typical, somewhat bustling sea town. Suddenly, rats start dying. They start dying by the thousands. Townspeople begin to display flu like symptoms. Dr Rieux tries to help the afflicted but the first patient dies. More and more people begin to show symptoms. Doctors realize that this is not just a regular case of the flu but is in fact the plague. At first, the town leaders want to ignore the problem but ultimately so many people get sick that action must be taken. The entire town is quarantined. No one is allowed in or out. All gates are manned by guards.

Most of the novel takes place during the time of the quarantine. In addition to making general statements of how the townspeople are reacting to being trapped, the novel focuses on several main characters.

Dr Rieux is one of the main characters. He works heroically if doggedly as the number of deaths approach over one hundred a week. As a doctor, he knows that he cannot cure anyone. All he can do is to show up when someone is reported as sick, diagnose them as having the plague, and then arrange transport of the patient to a hospital bed and the patient’s family to quarantine. At first, the families curse him but as the plague continues to ravage the town they become resigned to their fate. Dr Rieux works himself such that he’s nearly in a constant state of exhaustion. He understands that he’s not really healing anyone in any sense of the word but feels that this is all that he can offer.

Jean Tarrou helps Dr Rieux as much as he can. Growing up, Tarrou watched with horror as his prosecutor father worked to get a defendant condemned to death. From that point forward, he pledged to only work for the good of people. Although an atheist, he wants to attain the state of being a saint. Here is his chance. Just as dogged as Dr Rieux, he endlessly works setting up volunteers to help out plague victims. He never complains and tries to always be positive.  He ends up being one of the last victims of the plague.

Father Paneloux is a local Jesuit priest. When the plague first starts, he gives an impassioned sermon basically saying that we asked for this. We have turned out hearts against God and God sent us this plague as punishment. Later, he also volunteers with Tarrou and sees first hand the results of the plague. This softens him, especially after witnessing the death of a child, and he later gives another sermon in which he says that the plague is a test of our faith. He later also dies, although its not clear if it was from the plague.

Another interesting character is Cottard. Before the plague, he is suicidal. During the plague, his personality changes. He becomes positive and sociable. During the quarantine period, he conducts covert and illegal activities. As the plague runs its course, his personality undergoes another change. Once the quarantine lifts, he closets himself in his apartment and shoots at people in the streets. The police ultimately capture him and he’s taken away mad.

Through all of this, the town progressively loses hope. People stop trying to escape the quarantine and seem resigned to their fate. Christmas is scarcely celebrated. Even when the plague shows sign of abating, the townspeople barely allow their hopes to rise. Only when it’s clear that the plague is in full retreat do people begin to celebrate. Once the quarantine is lifted, families and lovers long separated for so many months begin to reunite to much joy.

Even with all of that joy, it is tempered because of the loss of so many people.

All Bow To Our Incompetent Overlords

Title: Boomerang

Rating: 5 Stars

Back around 2010 or 2011, I was a bit obsessed with the 2008 financial meltdown. Even now, when I think about it, it leaves me amazed.

It baffles my mind that the most highly educated people from elite institutions firmly ensconced in positions of power and influence and making gushing, cascading sums of money, could be so bad at their jobs. In fact, they could be so bad at their jobs that the world’s economy came dangerously close to collapsing. I’m not talking a ten percent stock market correction. I’m talking getting us back pretty close to bartering with goats in the town square.

I won’t go into a lot of detail. Just know that there were instruments called Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) that were (simplifying here) a collection of home mortgage loans. These were considered to be super safe because Americans have a good history of paying this type of loan off. The ratings agencies pretty much gave them an automatic AAA rating.

If you wanted to be even safer, you could buy insurance on them called Credit Default Swaps (CDS) that would compensate you in the unlikely event that the CDO failed.

All well and good. However, CDOs became so popular that there arose a huge demand for mortgage loans. The legitimate home owners already had their mortgages, so the mortgage brokers went out scouting potential customers that had no chance of ever paying off their loans. The brokers didn’t care because as soon as the loan was made, they just immediately resold it anyway. Not their problem.

These now very questionable loans were bulk loaded into CDOs and got the same AAA credit rating (after all, Americans always pay off their mortgages). CDSs were still in use but nearly all of them were being issued by one insurance company, AIG. If a system failure ever occurred, there was no way that AIG would ever be able to pay off them off.

All of this loan activity drove the housing prices higher and higher, resulting in even more loans that were never going to be repaid.

Ultimately, a slight wind came along and blew down the whole house of cards. Major financial institutions holding AAA rated funds now had no idea what value to assign to them. They had insurance policies from which they would never be able to collect. These Masters of the Universe that thought they had eliminated risk had only managed to obscure it from themselves,

The story doesn’t end there. These practices that were ‘perfected’ in America spread like a deadly virus to other countries. Boomerang is the story of some of these countries.

Lewis starts with Iceland. For a thousand years, its economy was based on fishing. Fishing in the waters off of Iceland required hard work, decisiveness, camaraderie, and fearlessness.

The Icelandic government fairly recently made university free for its citizens. Now, these highly educated people didn’t want to fish anymore. They decided to, um, get into high finance. Using the same attributes that were effective for fishing, they aggressively began to buy and sell real estate amongst themselves and then taking those profits to start almost randomly buying investments in Europe. As economic history dictates, this caused an extreme bubble in asset prices. All bubbles must burst and all of their banks were ruined. From the wreckage of this economic hangover, people finally started asking whether or not a nation of a couple of hundred thousand fishermen should really be leading international finance.

It then moves onto Greece. Greece needed to get to the stability of the Euro, so did all kinds of machinations (ie lies) to meet the Eurozone requirements. Entire governmental debts were simply ignored. Greece had taxes and tax collectors. It’s that Greeks don’t particularly like paying taxes, so they didn’t. Here, interestingly enough, the bankers aren’t the villains. They were trying to legitimately do the right thing but the entire system was corrupt. Once all of this came to life, it appeared that Greece would be the first Euro nation to default its debts. Severe austerity measures were placed on Greece to secure loan relief. The Greeks responded to their crisis of accountability by rioting.

Next up is Ireland. Now we’re back to bankers behaving badly. Bankers worked with property developers to develop housing and office spaces that completely exceeded the requirements of the entire population of Ireland (4.8 million). As usual, things were fine as money continued to roll in from all over the world and property values skyrocketed. That is, until the prices stopped skyrocketing. At that point, the three main Irish banks had some 100 billion Euros in bonds that they couldn’t pay. Instead of letting the banks fail and the bond holders lose their money (which after all, is the risk when you buy a bond), inexplicably the Irish government stepped in and guaranteed them. That is, 100 billion Euro in bonds primarily held by non Irish bondholders now have to be paid back by the 4.8 million Irish.

Finally there is Germany. Throughout all of this, Germany was looking down its nose at those profligate nations and their spendthrift ways. Why can’t they follow the Teutonic model? While it’s true that within Germany they actually did act with financial restraint, what they don’t mention is that it was German banks that was funding a good chunk of the crazy ideas of those other countries. While very sober within its borders, they spent money like a drunken sailor on leave in other countries. The knowingly losing investment bets that Goldman Sachs artificially created for its ‘special’ customers were sold to Germans. In the final days of the CDO action in America, they could only be sold to “Idiots in Dusseldorf”. They were so desperately seeking high returns that they didn’t do anywhere near the necessary due diligence for their investments.

It’s important for me to dip back and to occasionally read a history from that time. Whenever you see some smooth-talking self-confident condescending piece of shit banker like Jamie Dimon, just keep in mind that he and his ilk quite literally almost broke the world and yet hear they are, over ten years later, still thinking that they are infallible Masters of the Universe.

Fuck them.

The Greatest Movie Ever Made Just For Me

Film: Dick

Two of my favorite things are history and juvenile humor.

Twenty years ago or so, a movie came out that piqued my interest.  It was advertised as a comedy about Watergate.  The move was named Dick.  Intrigued, I went to see it.  I think there might have been three other people in the theater.  It was in the theaters for maybe two weeks.  It died without a trace.

All of these years later, I still smile when I think about it.  It had a really silly premise.  There were two giggly teenage girls (played in total ditz mode by Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams).  They end up inadvertently bringing down the entire Nixon administration.

There were all kinds of weird, inside jokes.  One of the girls lived at the Watergate.  On the night of the break-in, the burglars applied tape to an exit door to keep it from locking.  A security guard discovered it and removed the tape.  The girls later snuck out for some reason that I don’t remember now.  So that they don’t get locked out, they applied tape to the same exit door.  The guard came along later, got suspicious when he sees the second piece of tape, raised the alarm, and as a result the burglars end up getting caught. Although obviously there were no girls involved, this is indeed how the Watergate burglars were caught.  A security guard found tape on a door, removed it, and then found it re-applied again, thus raising his suspicions.

This is, in a nutshell, the problem of the movie.  As far as I know, at least in my universe, the intersection of people that would understand the reference and the people that would be amused by the shallow slapstick nature of the girls endeavors is exactly one.

At one point in the movie, one of the girls develops a crush on Nixon and proceeds to write her name and Nixon’s name enclosed in hearts all over her Pee-Chee (her previous crush was on some teeny-bop singer).  Her other friend calls her on it while they are roller-skating together at a rink.  They’re having an animated conversation over the loud booming music.  At a certain, the music stops, for just a second.  At that point in time, the girl with the crush yells…”I love Dick”, to the general shock of everyone at the rink.

This is very typical of the level of sophisticated humor in this movie.  There’s a plot involving marijuana laced brownies that the girls feed Nixon and Kissinger that leads to a very successful peace summit with Brezhnev.  Woodward and Bernstein are portrayed as complete idiots. At the end of the movie, Nixon (I don’t remember the exact details now) has somehow screwed the girls over and they vow revenge.  As a direct result, Nixon ends up resigning in disgrace.  He boards the helicopter, does his last two handed peace sign wave, and flies away.  As the helicopter flies away, he looks down at the roof of an apartment building.  The two girls have climbed to the roof and have unfurled a banner that says…”You suck, Dick”.  Nixon responds by giving them the double-barreled finger.

At some point you have to wonder, who green lit this movie?  Who thought that an adolescent empty-headed film crossed with a history lesson was a good idea?  Who was their target audience?  It wasn’t really silly enough to draw in the teens.  It wasn’t sophisticated enough to draw in history buffs. It was apparently designed for people who enjoy history and really stupid humor.

In other words, me. Thank you Hollywood for the custom crafted movie.  I really appreciated it.  I hope that my matinee priced ticket was worth the I’m sure tens of millions of dollars that went into creating it.

When Gilbert Gottfried Saved America

One of the podcasts that I listen to is Good One. In it, a comedy journalist (is that even a thing?) brings on as a guest a comedian. They play one of the comedian’s bits and then spend close to an hour dissecting it. It seems kind of boring, but I find it quite interesting. I hear comedians that I don’t know. The comedians have dramatically different approaches to joke writing. Some of them spend years meticulously crafting a joke, writing it down and even figuring out where to place the beats for maximum laughs. Other comedians walk up on stage with only the barest of notions of what they want to talk about and it’s largely an improv exercise.

One of my favorite episodes featured Gilbert Gottfried. The joke that they discussed was the infamous Aristocrats joke.

A lot of people already know about this. There was even a documentary about it. It has a legend (perhaps slightly fabricated) of being the joke that comedians would tell each other but never (as you will see why in a minute) perform on stage.

The setup and the punchline is actually quite simple. An all American family, father and mother, son and daughter, enter a talent agent’s office. They are beautifully innocent with sparking blue eyes and blond air. They have an act that they like to show to the agent. The agent, dazzled by their sweet appearance, encourages them to go ahead.

They then proceed to absolutely brutalize each other. The father rapes the daughter. The mother rapes the son. Live, rabid animals are inserted into bodily orifices. By the end, there is blood, vomit, saliva, and semen wallpapering the walls of the agent’s office. This is where the comedians’ creativity come into play. They go hard and as disgusting as possible. Maximum shock value is the point.

At the end, the agent, aghast at the horrifying spectacle, ask what they are called. All four stand up, spread their arms in a salute, and say, “The Aristocrats!”.

What made this episode bizarrely hilarious is how seriously the journalist probed Gottfried to understand what he was trying to achieve with each part of the joke. Example: “When the mother inserted the bloody, rabid rat into her son’s anus, what was the point?”. Gottfried couldn’t stop laughing at the absurd questions for the entire length of the interview.

Gottfried has had a long career at many famous roasts. Of all of his jokes, why did he want to talk about that one?

Therein lies a tale.

Picture New York City immediately in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. We’re talking a number of days or a few short weeks after. There is still a smoky pall over the city. Bodies are still being retrieved from Ground Zero. There was some question whether or not the attacks killed modern ironic comedy. The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart openly sobbing, had just gingerly started up again.

In the midst of this sorrow and despair, in New York City, the Friar’s Club decided to have a roast. It was their attempt to try to bring some normalcy back to the city.

Gilbert Gottfried took the stage. Again, just days after the 9/11 attack, he did a 9/11 joke. The crowd rioted. People were yelling and screaming at him. People were furiously standing and shaking with rage. One person near the front kept yelling “Too soon! Too soon!”. This is believed to be the first occurrence of this phrase in the context of a too topical joke.

Gottfried was done. He’d completely lost the audience. There was absolutely no way to win them back. Perhaps his career was ruined.

In the true spirit of a hard edged comic with absolutely zero fucks to give, he decided to go out hard. He dropped all of his planned roast material. He no longer cared who was on the dais with him. Instead, he did the longest and raunchiest version of The Aristocrats of his career. He put everything he had into it.

After a shocked interval, the crowd got into it. By the end, he had a standing ovation. People in the crowd were openly sobbing.

In that moment, telling that horrific joke, Gottfried proved that humor in America was not dead. He proved that we will rise up again. Despite all of the horror of the attack, we will persevere.

Gilbert Gottfried saved America.

The Black Knight of the Founding Fathers

Title: Burr

Rating: 5 Stars

This is an outstanding example of historical fiction. The characters are clearly drawn and are interesting. George Washington is a military mediocrity yet his implacable stolidness is the face that a young America needs. Thomas Jefferson is an eloquent sphinx. Alexander Hamilton is a vivacious cherub.

At the center of it is Aaron Burr. At the end of his life, he is considered by all good Americans to be the devil incarnate. Even now, in his late seventies, he is still scheming to make his fortune. The fact that he is, once again, doomed to fail is acknowledged by even him, but that in no way stops him from trying.

He has brought a young clerk named Charles Schuyler under his wing. Schuyler, studying to be a lawyer but desperately wanting to be a writer, thinks he has a golden opportunity in capturing Burr’s reminiscences. In the midst of the 1836 presidential campaign, there are political operatives hoping to use this memoir to slander the candidate Martin Van Buren. Burr is using this as an opportunity to clear up what he sees as the many slanders that have been slung at him.

Many famous historical characters pop up throughout the book. In addition to obvious people like Andrew Hamilton, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, there are quick character studies of William Cullen Bryan, Washington Irving, Benedict Arnold, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and oh so many more.

I think the novel is excellent. Given the subject matter, in the hands of a talented novelist it would seem to be difficult to write a dull novel. If nothing else, Aaron Burr lived a full life. In fact, he’s one of the most interesting characters in American history.

Here is a partial list of notable facts from Aaron Burr’s life:

• His father was one of the founders of Princeton University.
• His grandfather was Jonathon Edwards. Yes, the Puritan minister Jonathon Edwards that wrote the most awesome sermon of all times, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. If you haven’t read it, it’s pretty amazing. First of all, the fact that you can get from Puritans to the Founding Fathers in two generations shows again how young our country is. Secondly, to go from the Puritan era of harsh judgment to Burr’s libertine habits in two generations is hilarious.
• He had a daughter named Theodosia. First of all, she was that rarity in that she was very highly educated (fluent in multiple languages). Secondly, she was lost at sea. One theory is that the boat that she was on was captured by pirates and she was made to walk the plank.
• He enlisted in the Continental Army at the age of nineteen. He took part in Benedict Arnold’s ill fated attempt to capture Quebec. By twenty one, he was a lieutenant colonel. He wintered at Valley Forge. He took part in the Battle of Monmouth. Ultimately, he was invalided out of the army.
• He was the third senator ever for the state of New York.
• He was a candidate for President in both 1796 and 1800.
• In 1800 he tied Thomas Jefferson in the Electoral College. This threw the election to the House of Representatives. Since it was the Federalist dominated lame duck House that would choose the President, there was a real chance that their fear and hatred of Jefferson would drive them to choose Burr. Although Burr knew that the people (or at least the small percentage of Americans eligible to vote then) wanted Jefferson, he was conspicuous in his silence. Jefferson was ultimately chosen and a clarifying constitutional amendment was hastily rushed through to separate voting for President and Vice President. How many people can claim to be responsible for a constitutional amendment?
• Through his actions, he managed to become the enemy of both the republican Thomas Jefferson and the Federalist Alexander Hamilton. That is quite the feat.
• While Vice President, most famously he fought and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.
• He founded the Manhattan Company, a New York bank. After some mergers, it became Chase Manhattan and now is JP Morgan Chase & Co. Yes, Burr’s fingerprints are on one of the largest banks in the world.
• After serving as Vice President, he decided, in a complicated scheme, to try to get the US into a war with Spain. Under that subterfuge, he planned to overthrow Mexico and set up himself up as king.
• There are theories that as part of that operation he was also trying to peel away parts of the Western United States.
• It was this action that got him arrested on charges of treason. It was here that he had an encounter with another slippery character from the Revolutionary era, James Wilkinson. At the time, James Wilkinson was the head of the US army. And oh, by the way, simultaneously he was an active secret agent in the pay of Spain. Wilkinson tried to forge letters proving Burr’s treason. The forgery was easily discovered, Wilkinson was discredited, and Burr was acquitted.
• Although acquitted, his reputation was in ruins. He escaped for a while to Europe. After a couple of years, he returned back to America. From that point forward, he quietly practiced law.

He wasn’t quite done.

In his late seventies, he married a woman that was one of the richest widows in the country. He promptly tried to use her money to carve out a territory in Texas. Seeing her fortune rapidly begin to disappear, she instituted divorce proceedings within months of her wedding. The divorce was finalized quite literally on the day of Burr’s death.

And the name of her divorce lawyer? Alexander Hamilton Jr.