Your Official Movie Reviews

[PatsFan2003]

Have you read the book? I've wanted to for a while, but have never gotten around to it.

I agree, solid movie.

I haven't actually. I should read it too.

 

[DragonfromTO]

The King of Comedy

Film Review and Analysis

RATING: 5/5

Having grown up a millennial, I cannot fully understand nor appreciate the culture of the 1980’s. Most of what I know about it comes from the influential movies I’ve seen from that era; Raging Bull, The Thing, Scarface, Once Upon a Time in America, The Terminator, Back To The Future, etc. All of these films have that vintage 1980’s feel- a likable protagonist (or at least one we root for), a dramatic conflict, a central villain, cocaine, thoughts about future technology and what the world will have in store as the second millennium approached. Perhaps that is why The King of Comedy feels so unidentifiably misplaced- like a movie that should have been made in the past five or ten years. Maybe this is what caused the movie to flop at the box office- a $19 million dollar budget versus a $2.5 million dollar return, or why early reviewers were quick to dismiss it. Indeed, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote: “De Niro in disguise denies his characters a soul. De Niro's 'bravura' acting in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and New York, New York collapsed into 'anti-acting' after he started turning himself into repugnant flesh eggies of soulless characters.....Pupkin is a nothing.” Whether or not one time has played a role, The King of Comedy has nonetheless aged gracefully, and, on a personal level, is my favorite film from the 1980’s, or the 20th century for that matter. De Niro, whose performances I have not always gravitated towards (to put it nicely), delivers one of the best characterizations of how I and I imagine many others feel regarding achieving stardom, yet all the while being a nobody. It’s his role, and Scorsese's sure-handed direction with the script, that makes this movie an unforgettable classic.
Rupert Pupkin is an aspiring comedian and entertainer, who happens to be mentally-deranged and has thoughts and views that are oftentimes separate from reality. When we first meet him, he is waiting outside of talk show host Jerry Langford’s (Jerry Lewis) show, something we come to realize he does quite often, if not every night. After forcing his way into his car amidst a mob of fans, an excited Pupkin tells an unenthusiastic Jerry that he too wants to be a comedian, and if he could just set up a meeting, the two could talk. Jerry tells Pupkin to call his office and they will talk, and he leaves. Later, the film acknowledges what we already knew; that Jerry told Pupkin to call his office as a means of getting away from him; that he was not genuinely interested in hearing what Pupkin had to say. Pupkin should appear distraught, but instead takes it on the chin and hatches a plan to kidnap Jerry so that he can appear on the show. Eventually, Pupkin gets his big break and appears on the show, and the movie ends. It does not seem like a lot happened in the 109 minutes of screen time, but when one digs under the surface, there is more to the plot than the words I wrote above.
Let’s examine Rupert Pupkin (often mispronounced and misspelled). His hair plastered to his head, a pencil mustache, and a cheesy, happy smile always categorize Pupkin as he follows Jerry around and dreams of becoming a performer. He epitomizes the over enthused star-worshipping fans of our generation, but his mental illness takes it a step farther. Pupkin often daydreams, somewhat unhealthily, of becoming a star, even having life-sized cardboard cutouts of Jerry Langford and Liza Minnelli in his basement, in addition to a cardboard cutout of a live audience cheering him after his performance. Pupkin, as we learn from him, possibly as an unreliable narrator, is a character who had received a tough life growing up. Both his parents were alcoholics, and kids at school frequently beat him for his inadequacies. It is no wonder that he dreams of one day becoming a star, where he believes everyone will love and adore him unconditionally. Yet, like so many people from our generation, he is not interested in working hard at his craft, and starting at the bottom, rather, he would like to circumvent the process and rise all the way to the top immediately, even if he has to take drastic and possibly psychotic routes to do so.
Certain aspects of De Niro’s performance and the writer’s screenplay point to Pupkin’s psychosis. For one, he is hounded by visceral dreams of how he would like everything to be; Jerry accepting him, Jerry asking him to take over the show for six months, Jerry choking his neck, and appearing on the show where his high school principal marries Rita (Diahnne Abbott) to him. All of these scenarios involve people adoring and catering to Pupkin’s wish. Even the choking scene, while somewhat ambiguous and confusing, could possibly be viewed as a sign of homosexual love that Pupkin feels towards Jerry. It is almost an intimate scene, and if Pupkin did not take pleasure in it, why is it included in his wishful dreams? The fact that Pupkin dreams like he does is a strangely happy and fulfilling thing to watch. It reminds me of the innocence of children when they are young, dreaming about being baseball players or musicians. Eventually, through the means of society or other factors at play, most of these dreams are weeded out as children grow into adolescence, and they accept the cruel fate of whatever the world brings upon them. Rupert Pupkin, although deranged, has a glow to him that draws the audience and causes them to root for him. Most of the time that people root for a psychopath, it is because they are an anti-hero, like Walter White or Billy Costigan from The Departed, and we enjoy watching their immorality or villainy. De Niro, on the other hand, plays Pupkin in just the right away that we are saddened by his plight; saddened that his parents were alcoholics; saddened that children at school beat him; saddened that he has such an infatuation with being famous with no connections to propel him into stardom.
At the conclusion of the film, Rupert kidnaps Jerry, as previously mentioned, and ties him up in Masha’s (Sandra Bernhard) basement, while he ransoms Jerry to the TV executives to appear on the show. Through events that might take suspension of disbelief, but altogether are not entirely implausible, Rupert gets his final wish; to appear on national television and do what he loves: tell jokes. While we are all expecting Rupert to bomb his jokes and expose himself as a crazy fraud, his jokes are decent, or at least passable. They are not laugh out loud hysterical; they are not excerpts you would find in Eddie Murphy: RAW or The Colbert Report, but they do not make you cringe either. The audience laughs more than a moderate amount, and we are left to wonder- do they really love Rupert’s jokes, or is it the fact that he is believed by experts and executives to be funny enough to appear on the biggest TV show in America, and they are prompted to laugh by a monitor, that leads them to laugh? Then we wonder what really differentiates Rupert from Jerry. Humor is subjective, but even with that, most people can say who is and who is not genuinely funny. Is Jerry funnier than Rupert? Is Rupert funnier than Jerry? Or are they, for all intents and purposes, about equal? The fact that this question is even raised tracts more sympathy towards Rupert- if audiences can perceive him to be about as funny as Jerry, why does Jerry have the largest show in America, while Rupert dwells in his basement? It is disheartening, but also revelatory, to conclude that many things in life depend on luck and chance. From a young age, we are taught that you get out what you put in, and while Rupert never bothered with late-night clubs, or as he calls it, being a “schmuck,” he has proven that an audience can embrace and love him just like they loved Jerry.
Later, Jerry goes to Rita’s bar, where he watches himself on television, his dreams being fulfilled, before he is carted off to a six year term in jail, of which he only serves two years and nine months. When he is released, he has a best-selling autobiography in the stores, and a movie adaptation to boot. He is the most talked about person in the media, with his only performance garnering 87 million views (before Youtube was available, as well). In the last shot of the movie, Rupert takes the stage for a supposed TV comedy special, with the audience cheering enthusiastically and excitedly as an announcer repeats his name over and over, and we get one final look at Rupert’s cheesy grin, as he is finally completed; having made it in show business with tons of adoring fans. We are left to wonder if the final sequence is real, or just a dream in Rupert’s head like so many other dreams in the movie. I believe that the moment is real, as there is no reason not to believe that Rupert would get his own television special provided the hype and limelight he was given from his act of illegality and subsequent performance. What has received more questioning is what Scorsese meant to signify by not having Rupert begin his performance, instead smiling for too long while his name is repeated. Many believe that the film is trying to tell us that Rupert does not have anything to say; that his performance nearly three years earlier was the exhaustion and pinnacle of his comedic talent. I do not subscribe to this theory; rather I believe that Rupert is just milking in all of the adoration of his fans, an appreciation he always wanted and never received. Rupert still has more decent material left in him, and the audience will laugh and cheer until he is finished, because he has been finally given his stage. For being a schmuck his whole life, Rupert could never be happier, as his obsession with being accepted and loved has transformed him from “King For a Night” to “The King of Comedy.”

Holy fuck bro. Paragraphs.

 

[TheDayMan]

I haven't actually. I should read it too.

I got the audio book and am getting toward the end. Highly recommend it if you still haven't gotten to it. As you might expect, it's got everything you might have thought was lacking in the movie. The only thing, it was written in 85, and most of it is set in the 90s, I've had to remind myself to go with the imagined future aspects of a past I'm familiar with. The movie being made in the mid 90s was obviously able to compensate for that aspect and just make it set in the modern time.