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MOVIES AND TELEVISION

Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus A new film exposes academic Jew-Hatred . Andrew Harrod

“Today on American college campuses, there is only one group of students that you are allowed to attack and you can attack at will, and those are Jews,” states the narrator in the new film Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus. This latest production from Americans for Peace & Tolerance, the makers of the J Street Challenge, engagingly examines how demonization of Israel’s Jewish state is reviving anti-Semitism in American academia.

Hate Spaces extensively documents what has become a nationwide campus “hostile environment” for Jews, according to Susan Tuchman from the Zionist Organization of America. Student signs at colleges like Columbia University appear in the film with statements such as “Israel is a swollen parasite…the Jews: Too fat…Too greedy…Too powerful…Fight the Jewish mafia.”

Quoted in Hate Spaces, University of California (UC)-Los Angeles Hillel President Natalie Charney notes an “anti-Israel culture” in which “singling out the only Jewish state creates an environment where it’s ok to single out Jewish students.” The film focuses on one of Israel’s main campus adversaries, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a leading supporter of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel with deep links to the Muslim Brotherhood. The film notes SJP members chanting “Allahu Akbar” to celebrate the nonbinding 2013 UC-San Diego student council decision for BDS and a SJP chapter president’s 2010 assault upon a Jewish UC-Berkeley student.

Former SJP member and current “pro-Israeli Muslim” Rezwan Ovo Haq notes that “SJP largely masquerades behind the human rights issue” of support Palestinians as part of a broader human rights agenda. Yet in SJP he was “slandering Israel and I had deep-seated hatred for Israel.” Corresponding to this ugly reality, a University of Tennessee SJP member once tweeted: “What is the difference between a Jew and a pizza? The pizza leaves the oven.”

Eminent law professor Alan Dershowitz notes in a film interview that “antisemitism used to come mostly from the right, now it’s coming mostly from the hard left.” Hereby “one of the strangest alliances on university campuses today is between the hard left” of minorities like blacks and Islamist groups like SJP. Accordingly, San Diego State University student journalist Anthony Berteaux discusses once identifying with SJP as a gay, Asian man.

Wall Street Journal editor Bret Stephens wonders at such leftwing “useful idiots of the twenty-first century.” “Why is it that the liberals and progressives who espouse a certain set of values are so intent on demonizing and de-legitimatizing the one country that shares their values” in the Middle East, he asks. By contrast, past African-American civil rights leaders such as W.E.B Dubois, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Bayard Rustin “have been Zionists, from socialists to liberals to conservatives,” notes African-American Zionist Chloe Valdary.

Faux progressive condemnation of Israel, Dershowitz notes, arises largely because “there is no subject today in the world which has more distortion, more lies, more dissembling, than discussion about Israel.” Hate Spaces shows women from Israel’s Arab minority joining Israel’s parliament and winning the Miss Israel beauty contest, belying a sign in the film condemning Israel as the “Fourth Reich. During speaking engagements, Dershowitz challenges listeners “to name a single country in the history of the world faced with threats comparable to those threats faced by Israel both internal and external that have had a better record of human rights.”

Joe Morgentern‘Silence’ Review: Torturous Tests of Faith Martin Scorsese’s film follows two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who travel to Japan in the 17th century

In the filmmaking world a passion project can be prompted by anything from cherished books first read in childhood to obscure oddities that no one wanted to finance. Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” redefines the category. It’s a film that Mr. Scorsese has wanted to make for almost three decades, and passion is its subject—the spiritual passion of two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who travel to Japan in the 17th century to find their mentor, a priest believed to be an apostate, and living as a Japanese with a Japanese wife. This is filmmaking as an act of devotion, and exploration—not just of the nature of faith but of faith’s obverse, abject doubt. The production is physically beautiful, and evokes the beauties of classic Japanese films, but the substance makes few concessions to conventional notions of entertainment. What the missionaries endure at the hands of their Japanese tormentors—torture, isolation and more torture—is almost unendurably violent, and, at a running time of 161 minutes, punishingly repetitive.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Shusaku Endo; Jay Cocks and the director wrote the screenplay. Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver are the missionaries, Rodrigues and Garrpe. Their performances are obviously not meant to be entertaining, and never venture into so much as the outskirts of enjoyable. But they’re notable, all the same, for their intensity and focus—two modern movie stars giving themselves over entirely to roles that require steadfast self-effacement. (Liam Neeson is Ferreira, the mentor they seek.)

And though “Silence” is obviously not a genre film in the usual sense, the story functions as a search, or trackdown, if you will, through fascinating territory—and across land- and seascapes photographed with quiet elegance by Rodrigo Prieto. The feudal Japan that the missionaries discover is a savage place where Christianity is seen as something akin to the plague, an alien infestation to be stamped out wherever it’s discovered, and always by the same methods—threats of death, backed up by pitiless torture, that force Christians into public displays of apostasy. And the Christianity that Rodrigues and Garrpe discover is, as Mr. Scorsese portrays it, a re-enactment of the origins of the faith, with secret gatherings of congregants in caves. CONTINUE AT SITE

Patriots Day Rises to the Occasion Two new films show surprising respect for history. By Armond White

Peter Berg’s Patriots Day, about the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombing, combines action-movie flash with commemorative-movie solemnity. Surprisingly, the competing genres even each other out: Neither insultingly exploitative nor piously dignified, it is a nearly ideal example of pop-art historical filmmaking.

Berg’s directorial career has been the opposite of illustrious (junk like The Kingdom, Hancock, and Battlefield), but in Patriots Day, the former Hollywood actor shows a serviceable grasp of American vernacular. He depicts the devastating events as the story of tough-talking ethnic community — a vulgar and crude but also a unifying story — without ever succumbing to the sanctimony implied by the title.

Given the title’s plural noun, Berg covers a lot of ground and brings together a variety of Americans, starting with brash Boston street cop, Sgt. Tommy Saunders (Mark Wahlberg), who was reluctantly on duty at the Marathon. Berg extends the perspective to Sgt. Jeffrey Pugliese of Watertown (J. K. Simmons), M.I.T.–assigned police officer Sean Collier (Jake Picking), and FBI agent Richard DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon). Fanning out, the story accumulates a range of civilians, two with contrasting immigrant backgrounds: Chinese immigrant engineer Dun Meng (Jimmy O. Yang), whose Mercedes-Benz gets car-jacked by the Chechen-immigrant Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan (Themo Melikidze) and Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff), while they’re on the run after having committed the bombing.

Through these characters (named after the real-life people), Patriots Day sketches home-grown radicalization and terror as undeniably linked with our contemporary culture of diversity. It is the simple yet vivid characterizations that distinguish Berg’s storytelling from Michael Bay’s fanboy fantasy history in Pearl Harbor (2001) and from the seditious nihilism in Day Night Day Night, Julia Loktev’s 2006 suicide-bomber indie movie. The tense rivalry between the Tsarnaev brothers gives us unexpected insight into ethnic and family tradition and the pressures of both radicalization and assimilation. Patriots Day provides the closest look so far into ethnic terrorism’s feral authority.

We first see Tamerlan as he is shaving off his tribal beard, preparing for war; he dominates both his wife (radicalized American Katherine Russell, played by Melissa Benoist) and his younger brother. Dzhokhar’s twisted sense of entitlement points to the irony of American youths’ radicalization. When Tamerlan decrees, “Martin Luther King was not a Muslim, he was a hypocrite, a fornicator,” Dzhokhar retorts, “I’m a fornicator” — a defense of the dorm-room pot-smoking, video-gaming style that eventually won him a place on a Rolling Stone magazine cover. Berg parallels Dzhokhar’s hip sensibility with Officer Collier’s courtship of an Asian-American girl and his video-game recreation with friends, white guys from Boston who recite the rap interlude of Jason Aldean’s “Dirt Road Anthem” (“Better watch out for the boys in blue!”), a different yet equally complex kind of rebellion.

Hollywood often seems unfamiliar with such common American types, but Berg knows them. This is his fourth film with Wahlberg, who once again authentically portrays a working-man type. In Wahlberg’s hot-tempered Saunders, vulgarity becomes an ethnic, class, and psychological trait, the mark of his character. When among the elites at the FBI’s command-center re-creation of the bomb site, Saunders’s beat-cop acumen (he demonstrates what actors call “sense-memory”) serves the investigation.

Berg may have learned his craft from Tony Scott and the British TV-ad style of incessant montage and excitation — quick shots of bloody limbs mixed in with documentary footage and dramatized mayhem is sometimes aesthetically offensive. Yet this is the same craft that takes Patriots Day beyond the usual Hollywood procedural suspense and builds a captivating narrative about national allegiance, fortitude, and resolve. When the manhunt spreads beyond Boston, Berg’s action-movie bluntness takes on riveting purpose. Issues of class and professionalism come together wonderfully. (Saunders advises the FBI, “We got to let [the people of] Boston work for us” — an unimaginable idea for a less parochial town like, say, New York.) An especially excellent scene is the examination of the radicalized Tsarnaev wife by a police investigator (Khandi Alexander); their exchange has a political and sexual bravura worthy of Oliver Stone at his incendiary best.

In one clip, President Obama consoles, “This country shall remain undipped.” His Ivy League cadence and rhetorical sophistication are that of a leader who deludes the public. Berg’s vulgar panache shows a gutsy, nearly tactile respect for the people.

Patriot’s Day – A Review By Marilyn Penn

A well-deserved tribute to Patriot’s Day, the docudrama about the terrorism at the Boston Marathon, is that despite its Hallmark message of love triumphing over hate, it remains a riveting, compelling movie on many levels. It’s a tense whodunit, and an even more excrutiating “how-and-when-to-do -it” as the decision of whether to release the surveillance photos of the two suspects will help or hinder attempts to find them It illustrates the power plays between various levels of local government and federal investigators and enforcers It doesn’t shy away from explicitly showing the horrific injuries sustained by survivors nor the depths of grief at the loss of life It focuses on the dedication of medical workers and the willingness of ordinary, untrained people to rush towards helping victims as opposed to running away in fear. Perhaps, even more bravely, it restores the role of heroes to the men in blue and other first responders – a role too quickly forgotten after 9/11 This is a movie that should be seen by all Americans who too hastily jumped onto the bandwagon of Black Lives Matter and various politicians to condemn our policemen en masse for the actions of a tiny fraction of their colleagues

Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg have successfully collaborated on other disaster films but this one strikes most closely to home, dealing with an activity in which people of all ages could participate – as athletes, as recreational runners, as spirited observers of a thrilling contest or just patriotic fans of their own city. This last category figures prominently in the final uplifting slogan of Boston Strong as we see the Red Sox trade their team jerseys in their post-marathon game for ones featuring the single word BOSTON. Sadly, this movie is all too timely as various other attacks by Muslim jihadists continue to recur throughout our country and the world – most recently in Berlin The ideology behind jihad is skimmed over lightly in this film with more emphasis given to the notion that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older more charismatic brother, dominated both his wife and younger brother Dzhokar into complying with his personal agenda – one which the younger brother might not have pursued independently. In a climactic scene in which the two brothers are fleeing Boston and driving to New York with two more bombs in the car, Dzhokar is seen resisting one aspect of his brother’s plan – an action that provokes Tamerlan, an amateur boxer, into a physical confrontation in which he beats and threatens to kill his brother if he doesn’t do exactly as instructed This scene (which had no witnesses) dramatizes as fact the subsequent legal strategy of Dzhokar’s defense team in trying to avoid the death penalty for their client. It stands out as one of the few instances in which there is no hard evidence for the audience to gauge whether the events we are watching ever took place In the courtroom, jurors would hear the prosecution’s rejection of that theory, which they ultimately preferred when they sentenced Dzhokar to death But, since most of the film uses surveillance film from many sources, we tend to accept the “truth” of what we are shown, forgetting that this is a feature film and not even a documentary It was an odd choice on the part of the filmmakers to not hedge the presentation of this slant as something suggested by a friend or family member (hearsay) instead of showing it as a re-enactment which appears to be true.

FENCES: A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN

After the opening shot establishing Denzel Washington and his buddy as garbage men making small talk while driving through Pittsburgh on the back of a truck, the movie closes in, metaphorically fencing in the audience to a small set that could be the staged version of this play. As director, Washington clearly wasn’t interested in opening up the play to be more cinematic – we are watching people whose damaged lives have been circumscribed by their race, their economic vicissitudes, their war experiences and mostly, their character flaws. Troy, the husband and father, was kicked out of his home at the age of 14, ending up in prison for a stint of 15 years, during which he discovered his talent for baseball. Ironically, prison was the only place where he had the freedom to play as he discovered when he was released in the years before Jackie Robinson integrated the sport.

For the first half of the film Troy is seen as the victim of a punishing father and a racist society that kept black men from developing their potential. His saving grace seems to be his happy marriage to Rose, played to perfection by Viola Davis, as a woman with enough strength to accept second place to a blustering, bigger than life man. Rose seems to be a woman capable of working on Tony and getting him to do the right thing despite his protestations to the contrary. She lets him talk his head off, gesture theatrically to his small audience of friend and family, but she pulls him into line when he’s let his steam off and gets him to do her bidding.

Suddenly the plot changes course and we discover that Troy has some secrets from Rose and the audience, ones he appears to feel guilty about initially though this soon gets rationalized into his entitlement as a man. His behavior becomes shockingly dense and abusive and our allegiances turn from his charismatic nature to the quieter less dramatic Rose whose behavior has some surprises for us as well. Though the mise en scene is kitchen sink reality, the language and entrance of minor characters are stagey in a formulaic way. Critics have compared this to Death of a Salesman and that is legitimate in its format as well as theme – there is a dated quality to how the characters interact even when the problems raised are beyond the boundaries of time, place and society’s conventions.

Blah La Land A Review By Marilyn Penn

Ask any knowledgeable critic for a unique American contribution to entertainment and the answer you will get is the “musical,” the art form that frees characters to incorporate song and dance as part of their activity, as opposed to standing center stage for an aria. In addition to the singularity of Broadway shows, we have a treasury of Hollywood films that have captured the semblance of spontaneity in perfectly choreographed dance routines executed by the most talented people in their respective fields. What makes these movies so magical is what Italians call sprezzatura – the illusion that creating a complex work of art is effortless. Think Fred Astaire with any partner, Gene Kelly with a tapper like Debbie Reynolds or a ballerina like Leslie Caron – they move so gracefully that they hardly seem earthbound. Think of the singers – Judy Garland, Doris Day, Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby. Think of the great composers who lent their genius to this form – Gershwin, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Bernstein, Sondheim, Lerner & Lowe – these are but a handful of a most impressive list.

And now comes La La Land, a movie whose opening number on an LA highway with predictably stalled traffic can only be called dizzying and klutzy, a warning to lower our expectations for finesse. There was obviously thought behind this movie – its writer/director Damien Chazelle created the outstanding Whiplash a few years back and it’s clear that he was purposely choosing actors with little expertise in singing and dancing. Whatever thought he had in mind is now irrelevant; what does matter is how mediocre and uninspired this movie turned out to be. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are two magnetic stars, both excellent actors who have played together before, yet in this film they lack the chemistry that comes from doing what you do best. Listening to Emma sing is like listening to your friend’s untalented child – you like her and wish you could say her performance was terrific, but the lie is so big that you trip on its utterance. Ryan Gosling fares better as a jazz pianist since the music itself is more dynamic than the tepid songs suitable for Emma’s limited vocal range. The plot is boiler-plate – ambitious musician falls in love with ambitious actress in LA, both seeking to fulfill their dreams of success, yadda, yadda, yadda. The action is divided into seasons and by the time we reach Fall, we can’t wait for a winter storm to knock out the electricity and hasten the end. We have been spoiled by tv shows like American Idol and Dancing With the Stars that feature ordinary people with extraordinary talent or celebrities not known as dancers who surprise us with great proficiency in their routines. Now, asking us to watch a big budget musical with singing and dancing that is less accomplished than a Coke commercial can only makes us wonder at the decision to go for mediocrity when there is so much incredible talent available in this genre.

Things to Come A Review By Marilyn Penn

Perhaps it was A.O. Scott’s coronation of Isabelle Huppert as “the world’s greatest actress” that sealed my assessment of her latest film, “Things To Come” (L’Avenir in French). In it, Ms. Huppert plays the part of a middle-aged philosophy professor whose biggest problem is her aging, intensely neurotic and demanding mother, a character played more for laughs than for pity. The rest of Isabelle’s life is purring along smoothly; she is adored by her students, her husband, children, publisher and hunky former student who invites her to his home for the weekend, a tease for the audience. Within short order, all the preceding perfections fall apart and Isabelle does get one chance at a good cry. But faster than you can say Mon Dieu, she perks up and resumes her purposeful career, her terrific relationship with her students and a new role as grandmother. It led me to think that Mme Huppert’s stiff upper lip was more British than Gallic and that this part might have been more believable played by Kristin Scott-Thomas who at least is half of each.

This is a movie that remains superficial. Picking up on the banal philosophy quotations sprinkled throughout the script as shorthand for gravitas, the dialogue is sterile and boring. It lacks depth and emotion and Huppert’s performance, as is true of most of her work, lacks affect. By contrast, think of the short scene in Manchester By The Sea in which Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck meet on the street and she insists on explaining her past actions – a few restrained minutes packed with more poignancy, fragility and heartbreak than the total screenplay in Things to Come. Surely being discarded by a long-term husband who shared your life-work, your parentage and your taste in music is worth more than the brief remark “I thought you would love me forever.” Audiences should not be intimidated by serious critics implying that there is more to this film than most of them will experience. It’s a dud. So is Isabelle whose facial expressions remain frozen for its duration. The small bursts of color allotted to us are in the various sundresses and sportswear worn by the actress and these are hardly designer clothes. On the positive side, there is a soundtrack that includes Woody Guthrie, German arias or lieder and the slow harmonic version of Unchained Melody sung by the Fleetwoods – a haunting and unforgettable thing of beauty revived from the fifties. Would that the screenplay had summoned as much feeling as this poetic song.

Hate Spaces A new film reveals a toxic bigotry on American campuses. Richard L. Cravatts

On a November night in 2004, almost four hundred students at Columbia University sat crowded into the theater of the University’s Lerner Hall to watch a troubling 25-minute film that was finally being released to the public, “Columbia Unbecoming,” produced by Dr. Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser. The film, which exposed instances of student intimidation at the hands of some professors in Columbia’s department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Culture (MEALAC), was shocking, and revealed what many had already suspected about Columbia’s program—and other Middle East studies programs elsewhere: that under the veneer of purported scholarship and high-minded academic goals, there had developed a hothouse of intellectual rot, an entire area of academic study guided by what Middle East scholar Martin Kramer has called “tenured incompetents.”

In the twelve years since the release of the Columbia-focused film, of course, the situation on campuses across the country has worsened significantly concerning the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and not only as a result of distorted and pseudo-academic scholarship by anti-Israel, anti-Western faculty. Now, as part of the toxic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, student activism is driving the cognitive war against Israel, with the major portion of that activity orchestrated and imposed on campuses by the virulent student group, Students For Justice in Palestine (SJP).

Witnessing the increasing ferocity and incidence of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic radicalism on U.S. campuses, Jacobs and Goldwasser, from Americans For Peace and Tolerance, have now produced another film, “Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus,” in which they reveal not only the motives and dark mission of SJP, but also provide a shocking view of the tactical assaults on pro-Israel students and faculty, and an unrelenting enmity by campus radicals against Zionism, Israel, the so-called “Israel Lobby,” Jewish control of the media, and American complicity in the occupation and oppression of the perennially-victimized Palestinians.

As “Hate Spaces” chronicles, SJP has a long history, since its founding in 1993, of bringing vitriolic anti-Israel speakers to their respective campuses (now numbering over 200 with chapters), and for sponsoring the pernicious Israeli Apartheid Weeks, building “apartheid walls,” and sending mock eviction notices to Jewish students in their dorms to help them demonize Israel and empathize with the Palestinian cause. And SJP members apparently wish to live in a world where only their predetermined virtues and worldview prevail, and feel quite strongly that, in the case of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, at least, the answers are black and white, there is a moral side and an immoral side, and that anyone who does not, or cannot, see things as clearly and unambiguously as these enlightened students do is a racist, an oppressor, or a supporter of an illegal, apartheid regime trampling the human rights of the blameless, hapless Palestinians.

Of course, this vituperative activism has not gone unnoticed by pro-Israel groups and individuals on campus, even resulting in SJP chapters being suspended for their errant behavior, as happened in 2014 at Northeastern University, as one example, after “a series of violations, which included vandalizing university property, disrupting another group’s event, failure to write a civility statement, and distributing flyers without permission.”

In general, however, SJP has been unimpeded in spreading its calumnies against Israel, fending off any criticism of their invective as attacks on the rights of free expression and academic freedom. The problem for SJP, unfortunately, is that while they are perfectly content to propel a mendacious campaign of anti-Israel libels, and base their analysis of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on falsehoods, distortions, and a false reading of history and fact, so certain are they of their moral authority that they will never countenance any views—even facts as opposed to opinions—which contradict their hateful political agenda.

A Basketball Game that Put Israel ‘On the Map’ Dani Menkin’s new documentary, ‘On the Map,’ recounts how the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team’s 1977 triumph galvanized Israel By Matthew Futterman

Sports and sports movies are at their best when the players involved understand something far larger than just a game is on the line.

Israeli filmmaker Dani Menkin proves this with his documentary “On the Map,” the story of the 1976-77 Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team. The team won for Israel its first European basketball championship and forever changed Israelis’ view of their country and its sporting prowess. It opened in Los Angeles last month and premieres in New York Friday.

Menkin was a boy in Tel Aviv when former U.S. collegiate star Tal Brody led Maccabi to the pinnacle of European basketball. He watched Israelis pour into the streets to celebrate the shocking win over Russia’s CSKA Moscow team.

“Everyone remembers where they were when Tal Brody said we are on the map and we are here to stay,” Menkin said in a recent interview from Los Angeles, where he lives now. The exact quote, delivered by a delirious Brody after the 91-79 beatdown of the Russians on February 17, 1977, in a small gym in Belgium, was: “We are on the map. And we are staying on the map—not only in sports but in everything.”

Brody chose Israeli basketball over the NBA in 1966. On a post-college trip, he learned firsthand that the country, especially Tel Aviv, wasn’t a desert backwater but rather a soulful and hedonistic oasis.

“The social life was very attractive,” said Brody, who has lived in Israel for most of the past 49 years.

THE COMEDIAN- A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN

One of the consequences of lowering the bar on scatology and extreme vulgarity on cable tv and the intenet is its seepage into mainstream entertainment. Exhibit A could be “The Comedian,” directed by Taylor Hackford with an all-star cast headed by Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Danny De Vito, Leslie Mann, Edie Falco, Patty Lupone – with cameos by Cloris Leachman, Charles Grodin, Richard Belzer and Billy Crystal. The plot is a very thin excuse for a series of shticks by an aging Jewish comic named Jackie Burke (ne Yakov Bernstein) played by De Niro, who at one time was a huge tv star (think Jackie Gleason, Kevin Hart or a slew of others) but now has fallen on hard times, made harder by a jail sentence for smashing a heckler with his microphone. For his stand-up comedy, think Andrew Dice Clay – someone who is no longer appealing to a much younger generation but is trying to make a comeback. Jackie is hardly a sympathetic character, he mooches off his brother and antagonizes just about everyone who is part of his life, yet he strikes up an unbelievable relationship with a beautiful, much younger woman he meets at the soup kitchen he’s assigned to as part of his community service sentence. That she turns out to be the daughter of a wealthy nursing home owner and real estate mogul in Florida is just another rung in a series of unlikely – never would happen circumstances that pepper the plot.

All the usual subjects are casualties of Jackie’s lacerating humor – women, gays, oldsters, non-lookers, parents, chilldren, sexuality, marriage – a fraction of it on target and funny – most of it simply prurient without benefit of cleverness. You will be guaranteed to feel as Jackie does after an unpleasant encounter with a comedian who steals his material – that you yourself need a power wash. The relationship between Jackie and Harmony (the soup kitchen lady) is stretched beyond credulity (much worse than unbelievable) as is its eventual consequence. The epilogue which takes place 8 years later is embarrassing to everyone concerned – actors and audience. If you feel the need to get down and dirty, just go to Cable TV. If you feel the need to see otherwise talented people sink to squeamish levels of acceptability on the big screen, here’s your opportunity. You won’t feel good about yourself after………….