It's Movie Time.
I hate to get November started on a bummer of a note but today's movie post is about 2 movies that track the lives of two people blessed with brilliance and cursed with a penchant for self-destruction.
We're going to start off with a drama from 1974 starring Dustin Hoffman and directed by Bob Fosse, Lenny.
Dustin Hoffman plays Lenny Bruce, a stand up comedian who started in the 1950's. He told jokes and funny stories like any good comedian but he gained noteriety for pushing against censorship.
The censorship of not just words but also of ideas.
Besides peppering his act with repeated uses of the word "fuck", he dared to speak out against religion, the government and the incessant dullness of homogenized American society.
As a result, Lenny Bruce often found himself behind bars and in front of a judge, answering for his temerity not to conform.
The film jumps around time as we see Lenny in his prime, profane but still funny and near the end of his life, pacing with a microphone, muttering curses at the world, profane but not funny.
Interwoven between these moments of the rise and fall of Lenny Bruce, we follow his relationship with his "Shiksa goddess," a stripper named Honey. Lenny and Honey have a child together but the responsibilites of having a family do nothing to curb Lenny's iconoclastic nature.
Honey waivers in her support for this mercurial man. When Lenny is good, he's very good, on point, sharp as a tack, funny as hell. But when he gets caught up in his own messianic complex, he's a hard man to live with.
And it's a hard life to keep living. Worn out by a lifelong battle against authority and society, Lenny Bruce overdoses on morphine and dies in 1966.
Given his own curmudgeonly resistance to the Hollywood establishment, one might wonder if Dustin Hoffman was typecast as Lenny Bruce. Hoffman gives a raw and visceral performance as the tortured comedian.
Director Bob Fosse makes Lenny feel more like a documentary than a drama.
Lenny is not an easy movie to watch but it is a powerful portrait of one of the 20th century's most daring and provocative performers.
The next film up for today's post is a documetary about a cable movie channel and the visionary who brought it to life, perhaps at the cost of his own. From 2004, this is Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession.
Debuting in 1974, Z Channel was one of the first pay cable TV stations in the United States.
To call Z Channel a movie channel is something of an understatement.
Z Channel ran an incredibly eclectic line up of movies:
- foreign language films
- silent movies
- documentaries
- director's cut editions
- forgotten classics
- overlooked masterpieces
- under-appreciated films
- erotic movies
- And even mainstream films.
All uncut, without commercials and in letterbox when possible.
At the center of this centrifuge of cinema was Jerry Harvey, Z Channel's programming director.
To say Jerry Harvey loved movies would be yet another understatement. His passion for cinema was unsurpassed, the depths of his knowledge about the movies, his uncanny network of contacts that garnered prints of the most escoteric films to show Z Channel.
Unfortunately, the power of his passion for the movie was matched by the power of the inner demons that ravaged Jerry Harvey's mind and soul.
Jerry's story ends with death for himself and his wife in a murder-suicide in 1988.
And sadly Z-Channel itself would not live long past Jerry's demise, showing it's last film, John Ford's My Darling Clementine on June 29, 1989.
Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession was directed by Alexandra Cassavetes and serves not just as testament to Jerry Harvey's pain and passion but also as a love letter to the movies he cherished and the channel that brought those movies to light for a new generation of cinephiles.
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Next Saturday's Movie Time Post, I will try to find a fun film or two to talk about.
Tomorrow is a Doctor Who themed post.
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