Joe's View

The most recent Robert Klein HBO special — “Unfair & Unbalanced” — debuts on DVD today and shows the 68-year-old comedian is still a master of stand-up.

Klein did the first comedy special on HBO in 1975 — before most of the country had pay cable — and he produced eight more specials over the subsequent 35 years.

The performer has been a broadcast TV staple since 1970 and served as a bridge between the old school comics like Jonathan Winters and Alan King, and the hipper comedians of today, combining elements of Winters’ free-form zaniness and King’s hilarious observational skills, with strong political commentary.

When I saw him for the first time in the early 1970s, Klein’s act was a very savvy blend of 1950s nostalgia and satiric commentary on the Watergate crisis. He had one foot in the world of “The Tonight Show” and the other in concert venues where his baby boomer fan base sometimes saw him as an opening act at a rock show.

The new special was taped in Florida earlier this year and mixes stand-up with a few of Klein’s song parodies — his opening number contrasts the sexual license of the Clinton era with what he hopes will be a more staid Obama administration. Klein is backed by a full orchestra from the University of Miami.

The comedian does a funny bit about Eliot Spitzer and how surprised Klein was that a fellow Jew would pay so much for one session with an escort:
“$3,500 for sex in this economy? I could have gotten him a ticket to a Yankees game! Well, it should end forever that (idea) that Jews always get a good bargain.”

Klein claims that the Minnesota airport bathroom where the ostensibly heterosexual politician Larry Craig did his famous “wide stance” — with a vice cop in the next stall — has become “a bigger tourist attracttion than the Mall of America.”

The comedian seems to be making a very smooth transition to senior citizen status, adding jokes about Crestor and restless leg syndrome to his spiel without losing his political/sexual edge.

Long may he rant.

Last week, producer Harvey Weinstein won his appeal to have the adults-only NC-17 rating on the Ryan Gosling-Michelle Williams picture “Blue Valentine” reduced to an R.

In this country, the Motion Picture Association of America’s most restrictive rating is a commercial kiss of death because most multiplex chains will not book films with an NC-17 (too hard to police in a venue with 20 or more screens, theater owners say).

The squeamishness about “adult” content in mainstream films seems ludicrous in an age of widespread pornography online and “unrated” DVDs of mainstream pictures such as “The Hangover” that restore all of the moments that had to be pruned to get an R.

The Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci has always treated sex frankly in his films so he has been hit with the NC-17 more than once (most recently for “The Dreamers” — below — in 2004). Because he generally controls the final cuts of his films in this country, Bertolucci has taken the NC-17 and run with it.

One of the director’s greatest films, “1900,” was released in a butchered R-rated form in the United States in 1977, but for the reissue in the 1990s he insisted on the original version and Paramount sent it out with an NC-17 that severely curtailed its bookings.

For Bertolucci, sex is a big part of life and should play a major role in movies as well. The Italian’s international breakthrough film “Last Tango in Paris” (above) was given the predecessor to the NC-17 in 1973 — the since-retired X rating — and made a bundle in this country but that was in the pre-multiplex era.

On Wednesday, the Museum of Modern Art is launching a month-long Bertolucci retrospective that will include every film by the director, going all the way back to his 1962 feature debut “The Grim Reaper.”

MOMA is sponsoring the event in collaboration with Cinecitta Luce in Rome which is striking new prints of every film.

The five-hour “1900” is being screened Saturday at 2 p.m. If you’ve never seen this sweeping historical drama, with Robert De Niro, Burt Lancaster, Gerard Depardieu and a huge international cast, I would strongly advise you to check it out at MOMA. The performances, the scope of the storytelling and the camerawork by Vittorio Storaro are mind-boggling (and there are sexual moments that are still shocking — by contemporary Hollywood standards — 33 years after the film opened in Europe).

Admission to movies at MOMA is free with the entrance fee of $20.

For a complete rundown of the Bertolucci schedule go to www.moma.org

In my teen years, one of my major culture heroes was David Susskind, whose TV talk show “Open End” was a family favorite.

Unlike the late-night 1960s TV chat shows hosted by Johnny Carson and Joey Bishop, Susskind’s program was a prime time syndicated show which one of the independent channels in Philadelphia carried. (I think it was on Sunday night.)

You never knew who was going to be on with Susskind or what topics might be discussed.

One week there would be a hilarious panel made up of show biz mixed-marriages with Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller and Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson and the following week Susskind would have people talking about civil rights or the sexual revolution.

Once or twice a year, Gore Vidal would come on and Susskind would give him most of the show for a “state of the union” session in which the acerbic novelist and essayist would take the pulse of the nation (and the world) as only Vidal can.

I still remember the roundtable of comedians Susskind had on one night that included Mel Brooks — a few years before he started writing and directing movies — who was just about the funniest conversationalist I had ever heard up to that point in my life.

A new biography, “David Susskind: A Televised Life” by Stephen Battaglio (St. Martin’s Press), points out that the TV talk show was only one aspect of Susskind’s amazing life and career as a movie, stage and TV producer.

During the 28 years he presided over those scintillating weekly evenings of chat, Susskind also produced the landmark TV show “East Side/West Side” with George C. Scott and Cicely Tyson; the film versions of “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight”; and such stage productions as the legendary one-night musical flop “Kelly.”

Susskind’s company, Talent Associates, also produced “Get Smart” and a well-reviewed sitcom, “He & She,” with Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin, that failed to find an audience but influenced later smart and funny series such as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

The Susskind company backed two key 1970s films, too — Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” and Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”

Battaglio points out that Susskind wasn’t always an easy man to work with — and the women staffers sometimes had to ignore his male chauvinism in the pre-feminist era — but he was a tremendous force in liberating television with his talk show and some of the series he produced.

“East Side/West Side” (below) wasn’t a big hit with audiences, but it brought a gritty New York sensibility to network television for the first time. Cicely Tyson was one of the first black actresses to star on a dramatic series and Susskind refused to bow to the pressure when some people objected to her Afro hairstyle, several years before that style became widely fashionable in this country.

Battaglio interviewed everyone from Gore Vidal to Mel Brooks to Pete Hamill and the result is a lively and very informative book about a man who did enough to fill the pages of two or three standard show business biographies.

A light romantic thriller set in Venice co-starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp.

Sounds yummy, doesn’t it?

Jolie delivers what is needed from her in “The Tourist” — pure unadulterated Hollywood glamour — but Johnny Depp rather perversely makes his co-star do all of the heavy lifting and the result is a romantic caper film (think “Charade” or “Arabesque”) without much of a sexual tingle.

I’m second to no one in my admiration for Depp — he’s long overdue for an Oscar — but you can see that his heart wasn’t in playing a light, frothy romp opposite Jolie.

“The Tourist” is about a sensationally attractive woman (guess who?) being pursued by a Euro-gangster operator of casinos and whorehouses who wants the $2 billion her boyfriend stole from him.

Depp plays a math teacher from Wisconsin — recently dumped by his girlfriend — who decides to vacation on his own in Italy.

The woman of mystery needs to fool the crooks who are following her by making them think Depp is the embezzler, so she draws the meek American into her adventure.

Depp doesn’t look his best and he plays the part dourly as if a teacher from Wisconsin would have to be a frumpy bore — the whole performance feels like a Method acting experiment gone wrong.

Basically, the movie tells the same story as last summer’s “Knight and Day” — where a spy played by Tom Cruise got an innocent bystander (Cameron Diaz) involved in his shenanigans against her will — but “The Tourist” lacks the spirit of fun and the real connection between the attractive stars in the Cruise/Diaz summer romp.

Jolie is such a stunning creature to look at — reminiscent of Sophia Loren in her peak years —that she redeems a few scenes near the beginning of the movie where we just watch her before she meets Depp.

Once her co-star enters, however, the movie goes into a tailspin and never pulls out.

I missed the HBO film “The Special Relationship” when it debuted on pay cable last spring.

The movie sounded very enticing.

Another modern political historical drama by Peter Morgan, who wrote “Frost/Nixon” and “The Queen,” with Michael Sheen and Helen McCrory returning to the roles of Tony and Cherie Blair that they played so memorably in “The Queen.”

The movie is coming out on DVD next Tuesday and it pains me to report that it is a shallow and rather trashy look back at the “special relationship” between England and America and Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bill Clinton during the late 1990s.

Dennis Quaid and Hope Davis are both quite convincing as the Clintons, but Morgan doesn’t dramatize this period with the same wit and taste he brought to his earlier political stories.

The Blair side of the story gives us the feeling of an up-close-and-personal examination of the couple, but the Clintons-alone scenes are so discrete or truncated that they keep stalling out the dramatic momentum.

Blair became Prime Minister just before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and the British politician had to handle his response to it with great care in order not to offend one of his closest allies.

Most of us who lived through that tawdry episode were probably left with one key unanswered question — Why did Hillary Clinton stay with the most flagrant adulterer in modern American history?

As the HBO movie reminds us, the news media gave us almost non-stop pornographic accounts of what happened between Monica and the president, but what went on behind closed doors between the president and his wife during the worst moments of the crisis remains a mystery (unless you believe their public statements after the fact).

The most powerful moments in “The Special Relationship” show us Mrs. Blair’s disgusted response to the Bill and Monica affair (“She’s a child!,” Cherie says to Tony when she first hears about the 23-year-old Lewinsky).

I’m not suggesting that Morgan should have added sordid speculation to his screenplay, but you can’t keep teasing a viewer with the idea that we’re about to get the inside story, and then close the door just when things start getting interesting between our former president and his first lady.

“The Special Relationship” ends up being half trash wallow — with tacky jokes about Bill Clinton’s sexual equipment — and half authorized biography. The two halves cancel each other out.

Like a lot of other theater snobs, I used to resist shows like “Stomp” and “Blue Man Group” and “De La Guarda” that have taken up prime Manhattan theaters for years at a time.

They’re not plays, they’re not really musicals.

What the hell are they?

Well, Saturday night I was invited to see “Fuerza Bruta” which has been running in the Daryl Roth Theatre off Union Square for more than three years, and while it doesn’t qualify as a play or a musical, whatever it is, I had a very good time at it.

The show is an import from Argentina put together by the same people who did “De La Guarda.” While it doesn’t tell a story, “Fuerza Bruta” starts by painting a stage picture of the seeming futility of modern life — the first thing we see is a a man in a business suit walking on a treadmill (above) which goes faster and faster but leaves him running in place.

Next up is a Bunuelian visual about this poor guy’s inability to get a meal in a restaurant. The tables and chairs and customers all keep sliding past him into a void.

It is at this point that the show breaks loose from any fixed visual perspective and things start happening all over the huge open space (which used to be a bank). The standing audience is herded around the venue to get out of the way of mini-stages that roll in and out.

The climax is the lowering of a giant swimming pool — with a clear Mylar bottom — until it is pressing in on the crowd. Then the actor/dancers do a sort of water ballet, forming patterns with their bodies, as they dive in and out of the aerial pool. It’s a stunning stage effect, made more dramatic by the pounding techno music and fantastic lighting effects.

Lots of reviewers were put off by the show when it opened in the fall of 2007, including Charles Isherwood of The New York Times who called it “theater for people who don’t really like theater”:

“For true enjoyment, a powerful affection for thumping techno music would probably help. So would a delight in being befogged by acrid smoke, blasted by bright lights and shuttled around in packs like cattle. Also getting wet in public. The key demographic…is probably clubgoing, overstimulated college kids not worried about soiling their togs from H&M. Not to mention all those on the dark side of 30 who wish they were still clubgoing, overstimulated college kids.”

Isherwood complained that there were only women in the Mylar pool sequence when the show opened — “there’s something a little sexist about the absence of male performers in this aquatic sequence” — so he would be happy to learn that the producers have now added regular Saturday “boys night” shows in which the pool is occupied by the very buff men in the cast.

I think the big problem with the Times review was to treat the show as “theater” and send one of its stage reviewers. If you were going to put “Fuerza Bruta” in a category it would probably be listed under dance or performance art.

The show might be impossible to categorize but it’s a terrific way to spend an hour in downtown New York. For more information, go to www.fuerzabrutanyc.com (Photos courtesy of Sascha Moeller)

British writer-director Philip Ridley’s “Heartless” opened in New York City a few weeks ago to reviews that were not nearly as good as this beautiful and unsettling film deserved.

The movie is not receiving national theatrical distribution but is available on cable from IFC On Demand and is must viewing for fans of offbeat horror.

Ridley is a major visual stylist and he takes us into contemporary London as viewed through the eyes of an emotionally damaged young man named Jamie Morgan (Jim Sturgess).

Jamie was born with a heart-shaped birthmark on his face and lost his beloved and supportive photographer dad at an early age. Jamie’s mom (played by Mike Leigh regular Ruth Sheen) does her best to bolster her son, but he is convinced that his face will make a “normal” relationship with a woman impossible.

Jamie retreats into his photography and memories of his father.

Ridley slowly makes it clear that the slightly off-kilter London we see is Jamie’s vision of the city rather than “reality.” The combination of this nightmarish urban vision and Jamie’s overactive imagination is reminiscent of “Taxi Driver” and its terribly isolated protagonist Travis Bickle.

Travis would have been a completely unsympathetic character without Robert DeNiro playing him, and the same thing is true of Jim Sturgess in the role of Jamie.

Ridley has said in interviews that he wouldn’t have done “Heartless” without Sturgess and it is easy to see why. The rising young British star (of “21” and “Across the Universe”) keeps us caring about Jamie even after we begin fearing that the violence he sees all around him is a mostly a projection of his own thoughts.

It’s unfortunate that a movie as original and as well-made as “Heartless” has had to sneak into this country via a cable on demand service.

The new issue of n + 1 is packed with the usual mixed bag of goodies, from “Four responses to ‘Freedom’” to a long and well-reported piece on the financial collapse of California and the death of the American dream that state has represented for many years.

n + 1 appears three times a year and maintains the most rigorous high standards of any of the literary/political journals. If you haven’t been reading it, you’ve been missing some of the wittiest and smartest reporting and commentary on the contemporary cultural scene.

The importance of Jonathan Franzen’s blockbuster novel, “Freedom,” is reflected in a special section of “Number Ten” in which the four founding editors of the journal all weigh in on the book.

n + 1 has never devoted this much space to a single book before and all four writers agree that, for once, a highly touted American novel lived up to its advance hype (including a Time cover and two positive pre-publication reviews in The New York Times).

Marco Roth starts the section by noting, “A current of excitement surrounded the book, which was itself exciting; since I first entered the world of advance copies, back in 2004, this was the first novel to inspire such fervent passion among the professional reader class in which I now have to count myself.”

The n + 1 critics did not give in to a contrarian impulse to find fault with the most talked-about novel of recent years; instead they serve up four very different analyses of what made the Franzen book so important in 2010.

Nikil Saval’s piece “Golden State” — about the financial collapse of California — is reminiscent of peak-years work by Joan Didion on the West Coast zeitgeist. Didion wrote of the excesses that came with California’s position as the last Anerican frontier and the dreams that were fueled by the movie and pop music industries centered there. Saval writes about the end of those dreams.

“The death foretold in the early months of the economic crisis was that of high finance. It has turned out instead to be California’s. Like the larger recession, the crack-up of the country’s wealthiest, most populous state has been long in the making,” Saval begins.

The piece goes on to analyze a whole host of collapsing cultures in California, with a special emphasis on the devastating financial crisis in one of the state’s greatest resources — the fabled public university system.

Almost every sweeping trend in American society has tended to emanate from the West Coast, so what is happening in California now does not bode well for the rest of the country’s “recovery” from the current financial crisis.