833.) Revisiting a favorite vintage Halloween episode, digitized for the current era (and unseen since 1998): A night of rarities, as we salute my favorite holiday in fine style. First, Alice Cooper featured in his sickliest-looking, punk-drunk phase in a rare 1981 French television special. Then we go South of the Border, for a Mexican holiday TV special that mixes up Rocky Horror, Falco, prefab adolescent bands, and face masks that make Ben Cooper appear sophisticated. The final clips salute the intersection of the immortal Boris Karloff and rock ’n’ roll. First, his appearance on Shindig (not the “Monster Mash” that everyone agrees occurred, but no one has footage of, but another pop favorite of the period) and his guest turn on The Dinah Shore Chevy Show. More artifacts proving that Boris was the coolest “monster” ever.

834.) In honor of the man’s passing, this week I present part one of my interview with one of the most lovably silly kiddie hosts in TV history, Soupy Sales. The Soup reveals what it was like growing up as a Jewish kid in the South, talks about our fave cut-rate puppets (the fact that he refers to hepcat lion Pookie as “he” is just one more reason to love the guy), and his immutable laws for the throwing of pies. We also cover the famous Rat Pack piefight, appearances by other show-biz names (sadly not preserved on either video or kinescope), and his pals, White Fang and Black Tooth. He may have had some health troubles in the past few years, but his mind (and sense of timing) is still razor-sharp, as befits a TV comedy legend.

835.) Vintage episode: Part two of our friendly chat with a man who livened up many an afternoon in NYC (and around the country), Soupy Sales. In the concluding installment of the chat, we talk about Soupy’s decision to leave Metromedia TV and call it quits, his movie vehicle Birds Do It (“used as punishment in several states,” sez Soup), a noted Rat Packer (who missed the pie fight) in same, his return to TV (in blazing-red-sweater color) in the late ’70s, and his days in NYC radio on WNBC-AM. All that and plenty of vintage clips—including a guest appearance by the father of "shock rock," Alice Cooper, and another (on his variety show pilot) by Ernest Borgnine “as Judy Garland” (the lady herself then wanders out, and that’s what makes-a da clip history, boss).

836.) There’s no greater curse than receving the Oscar, and so this week I pay tribute to a filmmaker/comedian whose work I still love, but who has been pretty much forgotten here in the U.S. since his Academy Award win more than a decade ago. The gent in question is Roberto Benigni, who I see as the modern era’s only tangible link to the great American (and, natch, Italian) screen comedians of the Golden Era. First up is a short scene from the latest Benigni film, The Tiger and the Snow, which received a cursory theatrical release in the U.S. and which I discovered when it cropped up at odd times on the Sundance Channel. Next we turn to one of the best Benigni films that has remained unreleased in the U.S., his 1985 collaboration with a fellow controversial Italian TV comedian, the late Massimo Troisi. Functioning as a terrific comedy team, the two play dolts who land back in the late 15th century, where they decide to prevent the discovery of America by Columbus. This plot device may be the reason the film has been so underseen on these shores, but the pic is a terrific low key comedy that boasts one of my favorite titles *ever * in movie history (esp. for a comedy), Nothing Left to Do But Cry. We finish out with a film that is legally available here but no one knows it exists: the crazy, vulgar, Marxist comedy Berlinguer I Love You (1977), scripted by and starring Benigni. The film’s plot is unrecountable, but it does feature Roberto as a Mama’s Boy who is looking for political enlightenment, as well as a private place to masturbate to his scarecrow rendition of the leader of the Italian Communist Party (whom Benigni did actually support in real life). Top that, awful Saturday Night Live alumni....

837.) The Kuchar Brothers’ importance in the “underground” film scene of the Sixties cannot be underestimated. That’s why I’m proud to present this week part one of my interview with Mike Kuchar, the more visually inclined of the brothers, and the man who gave us the deranged mini-feature Sins of the Fleshapoids (more on that cult classic in part two!). In this installment of the interview, Mike discusses his latest “pictures,” which are elegantly stylized shorts shot on mini-DV and edited with a digital effects editing box (much as the Funhouse itself is). He reflects on the “underground” label, and also dispenses his philosophy of filmmaking. In addition, he supplies recollections of his youth in the Bronx, his love of Hollywood product (both A- and B-grade), and the use by he and his brother George of their voluminous collection of records to “score” their 8mm, super 8mm, and 16mm films.

838.) The Kuchar-fest continues with the second and final part of my interview with Mike Kuchar. In this episode we focus on his work with his brother George on a series of wonderfully outlandish no-budget 8mm and super-8mm shorts, shot in the apartments (and streets, and on the roofs) of the Bronx. Mike reflects on the Kuchar Brothers’ relationship to their contemporaries (Jacobs, Warhol, Mekas), and the wonderfully kitschy humor they exhibited in their finest works. We move on to discuss Mike’s Sixties masterwork, the no-budget, robots-with-human-emotions 16mm cult classic Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), which is currently the only Kuchar film available on U.S. DVD (out of literally hundreds that the brothers have made). We close out with Mike’s thoughts on working as a cameraman for other “underground” and low-budget filmmakers, and the Kuchar “legacy.”

839.) Following on the heels of my recent foray into the unknown work of the once-fashionable-but-now-sadly-forgotten-in-the-U.S. Roberto Benigni, this week I offer a look at two as-yet-unreleased films by the multitalented Takeshi Kitano. “Beat” Takeshi, as he is known to fans, was also a very fashionable figure on the arthouse circuit in the Nineties, but his last three films have gone undistributed in America. Kitano cuts an imposing figure as a performer, but is a mercurial filmmaker who is as likely to go for a deadpan joke as he to tug at the viewer’s heartstrings or offer a moment of brilliantly elided violence. His 2007 film Glory to the Filmmaker is his own 8 1/2, an odd meditation on what his next film should be, that includes parodies of several genres on its way to becoming an extremely bizarre sci-fi parable involving an eccentric mother and daughter duo. His last release to date as a filmmaker, Achilles and the Tortoise, is two art-world satires in one: the film begins as a touching study of a boy who loves to draw but doesn’t have much talent, and winds up a series of bizarre deadpan sequences about a painter, played by Kitano, who wants to find fame at any cost.

840.) In the 21st century Christmas specials are dim specters of what they used to be. A collection of Yuletide songs sung by celebs, or a tongue-in-cheek evocation of the variety-show excesses of the past can’t compare with the real thing, so this year I’m reaching back to one of the past masters of “family” Xmas special-dom, Andy Williams. Williams, whose variety show lasted from 1962-69, was second only to Bing Crosby in terms of presenting a family Christmas show that served as both a perfect time capsule of its era (whenever that might’ve been) and also a complete refutation of it (in favor of the Norman Rockwell/Currier & Ives American Xmas that never, ever existed...). I’m presenting clips from Andy’s 1971 Christmas outing, from a “mail-order” copy that is quite possibly the worst visual quality of anything I’ve ever shown on the Funhouse. But content is what matters here, so never mind the loss of color (we watched most of these shows on b&w sets anyway), the occasional video “quiver,” and the spooky, spectral quality of the copy (being a foreign country, the past is always slightly spooky anyway). The special itself revolves Andy and his clan performing the holiday rituals – no wrapping of presents, but there is the unwrapping and the inevitable big family dinner. I excerpted a few of the show’s musical numbers, which oddly, given the family bent of the program, are performed by Andy solo in the empty house, pre-Xmas celebration (Williams’ variety show had a similar Andy-is-to-be-onstage-as-much-as-possible quality). Thus, we have Williams warbling some of the hits of the year to delightfully kitschy effect, plus – yes, I had to include it, even though it is perhaps the most haunting and lyin’-est Xmas song of all – performing his beyond-ubiquitous holiday hit, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” His delicate-voiced, then-wife Claudine Longet duets with him on a then relatively new John Lennon tune; I’ve learned since we shot the show that the two were already legally separated for a year when this special aired – making them the equivalent of the post-divorce Sonny and Cher. To offer some non-seasonal Sixties weirdness, we explore “the gift that keeps on giving” with clips from the episode of the sitcom The Mothers-in-Law that featured a very rockin’ appearance by the Seeds (fronted by 2009 D.A. Sky Saxon). The clash of the “old” and “new” in Sixties culture is in full effect in this show, and that’s what the holiday season on TV used to be all about.

841.) To ring in the New Year, I offer up a vintage episode that celebrated a different sort of New Year many, many years ago. The ep in question features Stan Freberg’s 1962 special “The Chun King Hour,” which was shown on the eve of Chinese New Year, and is one of the smartest, craziest TV “spectaculars” ever. Freberg does indeed hawk the full line of Chun King products, but he also offers wry commentary on the “vast wasteland” that was TV in the early Sixties (how little we knew back then about where it was all gonna end up); laugh tracks; old movie clichés; violence on TV; and “Sing Along with Mitch” (spoofed in a very mind-blowingly Mad mag style). Along the way we see and hear from Stan’s repertory company of talented folk, and a guest star (who used to have Stan open for him on the road) shows up as a Chinese food-loving messenger boy. Freberg rarely attempted this kind of long-form weirdness, and the show was never rerun on any subsequent Chinese New Year’s Eve….

842,) As a follow-up on my episodes saluting the unreleased works of once-in-fashion/now-nearly-forgotten-in the-U.S. arthouse faves Benigni and Kitano, this week I show a vintage episode centered around three movies from Aki Kaurismaki that were never officially released in the U.S. Kaurismaki’s movies come in two varieties and we’ve got ’both this evening: Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana, is one of his deadpan tales of backwoods hicks (Scandinavian hicks, that is) encountering life outside the sticks, while Drifting Clouds is a touching character study of a married couple trying to make ends meet. Along the way, they may turn to Kaurismaki characters’ usual pastimes – smoking, drinking, and listening to grungy rock’n’roll – but this time ingenuity (and, yes, a cute dog) is added into the mix. The final feature I Hired a Contract Killer retells a common theme for noirs – a man hiring a killer to murder himself, and then reconsidering – but adds a neat twist. Namely, a laid-off French office-worker (Funhouse icon Jean-Pierre Leaud) hiring his depressed killer in a run-down working-class section of England. All three movies haven’t played anywhere in the U.S. except at film festivals and in one-shot screenings at rep houses, so we’re proud to show scenes from them for the first time on U.S. television. I love these pictures.

843.) The Sixties and early Seventies variety shows were all about the blending of the absolute best and the positive worst in American culture; they also saw the old colliding with the new, in a gloriously awkward fashion. I’m thus extremely pleased to review on this week’s Consumer Guide episode three relics from the era. The first, The Mama Cass Television Program, is a 1969 special that finds Cass dueting with some of her immaculately talented folk-rock friends, as well as sharing the stage (and yes, singing) with Buddy Hackett and Martin Landau and Barbara Bain (why? Because!). The second recent release is Pat Paulsen’s Half a Comedy Hour, a 13-week wonder from 1970 that found the deadpan perennial presidential candidate welcoming various guests and participating in a number of fairly off-the-wall sketches. The final relic is by far the most extreme, the 1967-69 Jerry Lewis Show, edited so that only the comedy sketches are showcased. From Mama’s quiet, lovely melodies to Jerry’s knockabout farce is quite a steep drop, but that’s the kind of thing that the variety show was all about.

844.) This week’s vintage episode is the second part of my interview with very busy character actor Antonio Fargas. In this installment, Fargas talks about his memorable turns as gay characters in Car Wash and Next Stop, Greenwich Village, and his work for Louis Malle in Pretty Baby. We close out the chat with a discussion of films like I’m Gonna Git You Sucka that have paid tribute to the blaxploitation era Mr. Fargas was a part of.

845.) Vintage ep from 2008: The 15th anniversary of the Funhouse is celebrated with an episode that is not a “clip-show” of past episodes, but instead works like a birthday program in which I indulge in three objects of obsession. The clips are all new to the show and are wonderful (I can say that because I didn’t make ’em). First up is yet another tribute to Serge Gainsbourg, featuring melodious moments from the film that united him for the first time, and quite a long time, with Jane Birkin, Slogan (capsule review: it’s a better soundtrack than a film). Next we turn to the indefatigable Mr. Sammy Davis Jr., with snippets from YouTube offerings of some of his rarer TV appearances. And closing out the program is my mini-mix of lesser-known Monkees tunes as they were presented on the TV series (but rechanneled for stereo by some overly generous bootlegger).

846.) A vintage Deceased Artiste episode spotlighting three actors from different countries. The first is Japanese actor Ken Ogata, best known for his work with Imamura and for playing legendary renaissance man Yukio Mishima in Paul Schrader’s splendid Mishima. Next up I salute Guilluame Depardieu who left us at the rather young age of 37 after having had a tumultuous life in and out of the shadow of his famous father Gerard. I interviewed Guillaume when he was in town promoting Leos Carax’s dense and inscrutable Pola X, so I’m glad to pay tribute to him by re-airing segments from the chat and clips indicating his range as a performer. Finally we hit a mega-star, Paul Newman. Instead of showing the usual sublime clips of Newman’s biggest movies, I show scenes from two of his lesser known works: the terrific Bicentennial flop from Funhouse favorite Robert Altman, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, and the never-ever shown 1955 musical TV version of Our Town in which Newman appeared in the male lead role, playing opposite Eva Marie Saint and “Stage Manager” Frank Sinatra.

847.) The Funhouse was constructed on the medium of VHS, and so I’m glad to return to it for trash and treasures the relate to the Sixties, which is (again) “the gift that keeps on giving.” We start off with sequences from two short films made in 1969 starring Diana Rigg, in which she plays a sort of Emma Peel spy-girl being placed into a series of predicaments which she escapes using her wits, charm, and a lethal judo flip. The Avengers they ain’t (for one things, there’s absolutely no dialogue, only music), but she’s as gorgeous (and ass-kicking) as she ever was. Next it’s one of the stranger artyfacts, Savages, a Merchant-Ivory film (yes, a Merchant-Ivory film, featured on the Funhouse) that attempts to channel the spirit of the times with a totally oddball tale of a group of primitive tribesmen and women who search for the “narotic leaf,” but find instead the sartorial and leisure-time pleasures of the upper crust in 1930s Long Island. Funhouse favorite Michael O’Donoghue co-scripted this one, and it could only have come from the cinematic bonanza of strangeness that was the Sixties. We close out with Beyond the Doors, Larry Buchanan’s incredibly strange 1984 conspiracy theory pic, in which it is posited that Jimi, Janis, and Jim were all killed by a CIA plot. The pic features some really awful soundalike music (copyright, the bane of all no-budget cineastes) and some really wonderfully rancid dialogue. Turn on, tune in, drop out, be here now. Just don’t miss it.

848.) From enlightenment (of a kind) to art on the show this week, as the Consumer Guide department features compilation DVDs released on the Kino label (now Kino Lorber). The first two items are a pair of comp discs wonderfully assembled by the “A/V Geeks Film Library”: How to Be a Man and How to Be a Woman. The first collection emphasizes how educators and establishment-types saw every teenage boy as a potential juvenile delinquent or impregnator of girls; the second spotlights the ways in which girls were seen as future consumers who could be sold to while they were still attending grammar and high school. The films are utterly delightful, and feature the usual weird signifiers of the eras they were made in, as well as some awesome location footage and some suitably cheesy rock and approximations of “things to watch out for” (namely pornographic materials and loose women). The featured set up for review is Kino’s third collection of Avant-Garde and Experimental Cinema. Included are several warped renditions of fairytale material, shorts inspired by silent cinema, filmmakers obviously infatuated with Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks, and yet another great Lettrist feature-length provocation (this time with pretty young lasses).The range in material is rather wide here, but that’s what we’re happiest with in the Funhouse.

849.) A vintage Consumer Guide episode finds me once again pouring over the work of a Funhouse favorite, the singularly obsessed Italian cineaste Marco Ferreri. The occasion is the release of the Koch Lorber box The Marco Ferreri Collection, which contains remastered versions of eight of the manic maestro’s works, as well as a rare Italian video documentary, and… the Funhouse interview with him, now enhanced by accurate Italian subtitles! Hopefully the box will earn Ferreri some new American viewers, as it features not only his most notorious features (La Grande Bouffe, Don’t Touch the White Woman, Tales of Ordinary Madness) but two VHS-only releases (El Cochecito and Seeking Asylum starring a young Roberto Benigni), and two impossible-to-find rarities (the no-budget apocalyptic Adam-and-Eve saga The Seed of Man and the fascinatingly touching yet cruel senior-citizen romance The House of Smiles). If all that weren’t enough, also included is a film I’ve featured time and again, the one and only Bye Bye Monkey. I review the box, and then present the TV premiere of parts of the subtitled Ferreri interview (I’m fascinated and baffled by his mention of the oil crisis’s connection to La Grande Bouffe). This is the first official “archiving” of a Funhouse interview, and I’m proud to be a small cog in a wheel that might make some folks aware of the very singular, very strange, and extremely obsessive Marco Ferreri.

850.) Much attention has been paid in the U.S. to four of the five “Cahiers possse” members of the French New Wave, but Jacques Rivette remains the mystery man of the group to American audiences. Thus, I’m very pleased to start off a series of episodes paying tribute to Rivette’s work with a little “JR 101” show, centered around clips from his 1961 debut feature Paris Belongs to Us. The film contains the elements that became Rivette’s stock-in-trade over the next half-century: plotlines that start off slowly but then escalate tension and narrative incidents; a dreamlike atmosphere that hints that the characters could well be having a dream (or a nightmare); an interest in the creative process (not the result); and, my favorite aspect, plots in which characters discover they are being “directed,” or controlled by a secret conspiracy. Paris… is a cool b&w missive from the turn of the Sixties that oddly prefigures the zeitgeist of the decade — and has a cameo by our other favorite New Wave filmmaking icon. To close out the episode, we leap ahead to 1984 with short scenes from Rivette’s Love on the Ground starring Jane Birkin and Geraldine Chaplin. The films in this and future episodes about Rivette are all commercially unavailable in the U.S.

851.) The first of two Funhouse tributes to things found on the shelves of the now-defunct St. Mark’s rental emporium Mondo Kim’s. In this show, I pay tribute to the work of a small but very talented ripple in the French New Wave, Monsieur Luc Moullet. Moullet is a well-respected critic and film teacher who has made a sizeable number of shorts and relatively few features in his four-plus decades of filmmaking (six are available on these shores on DVD). His first feature is a perfect Nouvelle Vague paean to Paris called Brigitte et Brigitte which contains a scene in which you will learn who the three best (and worst) American directors are, according to Moullet’s mock-cinephiles. He moved from the b&w Sixties into the radical Seventies with a very strange Western comedy called A Girl is a Gun starring Funhouse favorite Jean-Pierre Leaud, and a terrific low-key mediation on feminism and the average schlemiel called Anatomy of a Relationship. The last Moullet film to get a DVD release is his 1993 telefilm Up and Down, based on an idea by Alfred Jarry, depicting a bike race that seemingly has an infinite number of contestants, plus no clear beginning or ending.

852.) Vintage, but mighty wild: The discovery of a so-bad-it’s-good cult movie is rare indeed these days, so I thought I should dedicate an entire episode to the latest midnight-movie sensation on the West Coast, The Room. The brainchild of independent producer-director-writer-actor Tommy Wiseau, he of the name that sounds as if it was made-up in French class (oiseau=bird), the film is part torrid theatrical-style drama, part soap opera, part sitcom, part “Skinemax” softcore pic, and all odd pacing and repetitive dialogue. I discuss the high points of the pic, its cult following, and the fact that it’s either the product of a very shrewd comic mind, or is indeed just an imminently watchable piece of wonderfully miscalculated drama. I include a big chunk of Wiseau’s explanatory interview from the DVD so that viewers can make up their own minds about whether he’s sincere in his dramatic intentions (I think he is) or just a very wise bird indeed.

853.) There are several patron saints in the Funhouse, and one of them is most certainly Hugo Haas. The vastly underappreciated Czech filmmaker made a string of unforgettable melodramas and film noirs in the Fifties that I’m proud to have celebrated on the show since we began. The vintage episode this week aired originally in 1998 (and hasn’t been seen since), and it continues along with the career of the big Hugo. We cover two of his more torrid creations, the first of which is the amazing concept feature Hold Back Tomorrow (1955), in which a prison allows a condemned convict (the ever-angry John Agar) the right to have a woman (the always awesome Cleo Moore) in his cell before he dies — and the woman in question is a suicidal stranger who’s hoping the convict will kill her. From that only-from-Hugo scenario, we jump to his most full-blown noir, The Other Woman (1955). In this oddly reflexive picture, Haas gets to reflect on what it’s like to have your film “tested” with a preview audience, as he struggles with the machinations of an angry extra (Cleo Moore) who wants to wreck his life because he didn’t cast her in a speaking role. They don’t make pictures any bleaker than Hugo did, and I am glad to put his pictures back in front of the late-night viewing audience.

854.) Vintage: Fifties television is always a welcome respite from the noisy, brainless fare that constitutes network TV, and so this week I review the DVD release of the second year of the wonderfully laidback sitcom Mr. Peepers. Wally Cox is a Funhouse favorite, and so I’m glad to further explore the adventures of his junior-high science teacher, in a program that truly does classify as a charming “show about nothing.” In this batch of episodes, studly friend Tony Randall is married off, so his “racy” dialogue is neutered, but he continues to have a wonderful rapport with Cox, and Marion Lorne fine tunes her sputter-and-double-takes as the school’s flakiest veteran teacher. I discuss the show’s low-key courtship plotline, as well as Cox’s facility as a comic and the program’s look backward to a “lost” period represented by small town schoolrooms and player pianos. Also, the early appearances by familiar character actors.

855.) The time of the season is here once more: cwazy Cwistian material on the Funhouse to honor the sacred holiday of Easter! This time out, I start out with a lovely blasphemous French comic that explores the private life of our Lord and Savior (it’s hard to get around with a crucifix on your back). Then we take a jaunt over to the Philippines for a comedy that has as one of its plot elements a character getting crucified (sense a trend?). And I close out with the feature of the evening, a film shot in the Indian language of Telugu that depicts the life of Christ in an extremely reverent fashion, albeit with a low budget, oddly polite English subtitles, and only a few musical numbers.

856.) There are certain filmmakers I’m happy to return to time and again in the Funhouse, and this week’s Consumer Guide episode allows me to salute newly available work by four of them. First up, it’s the current Anthology Film Archives festival of the work of the Kuchar brothers, pegged to coincide with the NYC premiere of the documentary It Came From Kuchar. The documentary delves into the brothers’ lives, films, and legacies as master no-budget artists who have influenced filmmakers from “low” to “high” and back again…. Next up, it’s a review of the Criterion release of Bigger Than Life by Nicholas Ray. The package not only represents the first official release of the film, but also includes a rare 1977 TV interview with Ray. Last, it’s the first official release of Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger is Dead, also from Criterion. The release includes not only a pristine restoration of the film, but also various tributes to Ferreri, including some very appropriate words from a younger fan, Bernardo Bertolucci.

857.) Vintage: In part one of my interview with German filmmaker and queer provocateur Rosa von Praunheim, done in conjunction with a festival of his works at the Anthology Film Archive, we start off with a discussion of his notorious filmic manifesto/polemic/slap-in-the-face It’s Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, but the Situation in Which He Lives. From there, we move on to his influences, his use of camp humor and visuals, and the very timely subject of gay marriage (he’s not a proponent, and he explains why). We also explore his love for San Francisco and New York City (where he’s shot several terrific documentaries), and his significant films on the AIDS crisis, which ranged from extremely funny (A Virus Knows No Morals, made back in 1985) to outraged, informed, and aesthetically challenging (Silence=Death).

858.) Vintage: Part two of my interview with German filmmaker and provocateur Rosa von Praunheim picks up where we left off in part one with a discussion of his 1990s campaign of “outing” closeted gay celebrities in Germany. We next discuss the importance of older actresses in his films, in particular the late Lotti Huber. We then turn to a subject of fascination in the Funhouse, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Von Praunheim’s German TV docu Fassbinder’s Women (2000) offers the gossipy side of the Fassbinder mythos, with his actresses and crew members talking about his manipulation of those around him. Rosa candidly holds forth on Fassbinder and other notables in the New German Cinema, and his dealings with Funhouse guest and Fassbinder Foundation head Juliane Lorenz (we on the show like to offer everybody’s perspective — as long as it’s understood we still love all their movies!). We close out with a discussion of Rosa’s absorbing documentary Two Mothers (2007), as well as one of his latest projects and his opinions on file-sharing and the availability on YouTube of one of his documentary features.

859.) A digital “upgrade” of one of my lengthier interviews, this week’s vintage episode is part one of my very informal chat with legendary Western director Budd Boetticher. In this installment, Budd talks about his early years (as a boy of privilege named Oscar, a name he loathed) and his first encounters with bullfighting, a pursuit that haunted his life and work. We also discuss his “B” pictures, his brush with film noir, and his terrific film Bullfighter and the Lady (1951) starring Robert Stack. When I initially did the interview in 2001, Budd’s movies were entirely unavailable on DVD, but now that pristine restorations of his classic Westerns are accessible, I felt I needed to rework the episodes based on the interview.

860.) Neil Innes is a consummately talented songwriter and performer who has donned a number of guises in his career. In part one of my interview with him, we discuss the first of those guises, as one of the moving forces behind the incredible Bonzo Dog Band. Mr. Innes talks about the band’s formation and early years, as well as their interactions with the Beatles (whom I posit were influenced by the anarchic, pop-art, vaudevillian Bonzo shows they witnessed before inviting the band to guest in Magical Mystery Tour). He also reflects on the talent of his partner in all things Bonzo, the miraculously brilliant Vivian Stanshall, and the Bonzo’s two-year stint as the “house band” on the afternoon children’s television series Do Not Adjust Your Set, which starred three of the gents who, upon cancellation of the show, went on to form Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

861.) Part two of my September 2000 interview with Budd Boetticher gets a digital makeover this week, with new pristine copies of the sequences that illustrate what we spoke about in the interview. In this part of our chat, we discuss what Budd is best remembered for: his tight, tough late 1950s Westerns with Randolph Scott. He speaks about his relationships with John Ford, John Wayne (who produced, and was evidently not too thrilled with, two of Budd’s best films), and with the young actors to whom he gave scene-stealing turns as charismatic bad guys (Lee Marvin, Richard Boone, Pernell Roberts, James Coburn). We close out with a discussion of widescreen cinematography and the (non-cinematic) artists he cited as his influences.

862.) Over the years on the show I’ve been proud to review professional releases of arthouse, independent, and classic fare. I’ve also presented clips from films that we wish were out from professional sources, but were obtained through my own collecting or from mail-order companies, “alternative” video stores, and enterprising souls with overseas connections. The latest source for extremely rare material is of course the Internet, and so this week I present clips from three extremely rare films by one of our favorite filmmakers on the Funhouse, Chris Marker. Up first is The Koumiko Mystery, about a young woman roaming the streets of Tokyo in 1964 around the time of the Olympics. Next comes the very entertaining Letter From Siberia, made in 1958. And we finish off with Mr. Marker’s memorably titled tribute to his friend Yves Montand, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Singer.

863.) Top-notch DVD releases are reviewed in the Consumer Guide department on this week’s episode. I start off with a newly released collection of vintage Bing Crosby TV specials that spotlights the variety format at its most sublime and later on, in the period when the “old” met the “new” with jarring (but endlessly watchable) results. We turn from classic TV to brilliant arthouse fare with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata, his very timely study of a family in transition, led by a father who is pretending that he still has the job he lost weeks before. Next up is the Criterion release of Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind, released with a wonderful piece of very classic TV. I close out with a review of the new collector’s edition of Vivre Sa Vie which is beautifully restored and comes with several entertaining and informative supplements.

864.) We move from the Bonzos to the Pythons and beyond in part two of my interview with singer-songwriter-humorist Neil Innes. In this installment Neil shares memories of two of his more brilliant, and extremely self-destructive, friends, Python emeritus Graham Chapman and the mind-warping wordsmith Viv Stanshall. I inquire about Neil’s uncanny ability to lampoon not just an artist’s songs but in some cases whole sections of their careers in the space of a single satiric tune. And last we speak about his two TV series, Rutland Weekend Television, co-created with Eric Idle, and The Innes Book of Records, featuring visualizations of many of Neil’s best, post-Bonzo songs.

865.) My interview with singer-tunesmith-humorist Mr. Neil Innes concludes this week with a discussion of his later pursuits, including his creation with Eric Idle of one of the finest musical spoofs of the all time, the Rutles. Neil talks about how he composed and recorded the Rutles’ music, and discusses the ways in which the Rutles underwent a happier breakup than their real-life Fab counterparts. Next we discuss the recent Bonzo Dog Band reunion, and the concert that took place on their “40th anniversary,” which featured several noted British humorists (including Stephen Frye and Adrian Edmondson) in place of the legendary Viv Stanshall. Finally, we discuss the Bonzo reunion album, Pour L’Amour Des Chiens (and you hear part of one of the album’s finest tunes, a cover of a recent rouser not written by a Bonzo -- killer geezer rock!) and Neil’s plan for future podcasts on his new website.

866.) Vintage ep: The third and final part of my interview with legendary Western director Budd Boetticher from Sept. 2000 covers the final “movement” in his career, where he worked for more than a decade (actually closer to 15 years) to get his dream picture made, the life story of his friend, matador Carlos Arruza. Budd wound up losing both his standing in Hollywood and vast amounts of money, landing in prison, being put in a sanitarium, and having his dream pic edited and released by another filmmaker. He offers some reflections on that period, and also supplies the answer to a question posed in his great film Bullfighter and the Lady (1951). We close out with a discussion of the film that never got made, his planned screen adaptation of his autobiography When in Disgrace, and his true feelings about bullfighting.

867.) Vintage ep: A Deceased Artiste tribute to three very talented individuals. This time out, it’s three individuals who took a powder at the very end of last year. First up, I salute Eartha Kitt with her sexy performances from the stilted but invaluable musical New Faces (1954). Then it’s on to an auteur who was known as a specialist in “Southern children” pictures and portraits of moon-eyed horny teenagers, Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Summer of ’42). My favorite film by Mulligan, featured here, is the underrated, low-key neo-noir The Nickel Ride (1975) starring Jason Miller. From Mulligan’s doomed noir hero, we move on to the man whose plays were landmarks in English (and world) theater, the master of modern mis-communication and strategically-placed silence, Harold Pinter. Despite his stylization, Pinter’s confrontations are as raw – although not as verbally violent – as those of his successor, David Mamet. The Deceased Artiste department of the Funhouse is one of the few places these folks could meet, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

868.) Part one of my late 2001 interview with filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa includes an overview of his work to that point, plus his discussion of working within genres (his earliest films were Yakuza crime dramas and low-budget horror flicks). We talk about his low-key serial killer picture Cure, as well as his experiments in crafting atmosphere through sound. My favorite part of the interview is his discussion of one of his influences, the late, great John Cassavetes.

869). In the Consumer Guide this week I revisit some topics of constant fascination. The first review is of the current Kino release of the restored Steamboat Bill, Jr. An alternate version of the Keaton classic has been discovered, and so the two-disc set represents a new look at an old favorite. Next up are three noir titles that have come out from Olive Films, which boast terrific casts of character actors, razor-sharp hardboiled dialogue, and the requisite dark and moody imagery. Last is a review of the DVD release of It Came From Kuchar, the documentary that profiles the Kuchar brothers, offering a look at their lives, their work, and their fans (including several influential indie filmmakers).

870.) Inaugurating a new series of episodes about British standups and TV comedy series that have never been seen in America (and most likely never will be), this week I offer up a look at the work of Chris Morris, the brutally funny satirist who has written and starred in some of the best and most innovative series on British TV. First up is The Day Today, the 1994 fake news program that gave us the blithely ignorant Alan Partridge, as well as establishing Morris’ trademark style, which blends an incredible deadpan delivery with deft wordplay and a gift for surreal whimsy — and dark, dark humor. The second show I spotlight is The Brass Eye, Morris’ series of in-depth news “specials” that concluded with a very controversial parody of frenzied, moralizing documentaries about the hunt for pedophiles (which aired in England years before To Catch a Predator debuted over here).

871). Continuing on with my informal theme of a “summer of unseen British comedy,” this week I present clips of the standup comic Stewart Lee. I’ve become a big fan of Lee’s in the past few months because of his singularly sarcastic take on current pop culture and his wonderfully deadpan delivery. He has been honing his standup skills for the last two decades, and presents chunky pieces of material, which I will present on the show in as much duration as can be managed in 28 minutes. Some of his references are very specific to British culture and entertainment, but surely the context is there, and since we have the same kind of irritation factors over here, a mental “swap” of one nation’s trash for another’s is easily achieved. Lee is currently doing a series on the BBC that is based almost entirely around his wry, brilliant standup (Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle), so I am happy to present a little “crash course” in material that will surely never find its way onto BBC-America.

872.) We disrupt the laughter in this summer’s series of episodes for a little sentiment, as I present the U.S. TV premiere of segments from the anthology film Chacun Son Cinema. Created in 2007 to pay tribute to the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, the film contains 3-5 minute segments by a host of world-famous directors, including several all-time Funhouse favorites. For whatever reason, the film has never found a distributor over here, but it really needs to be seen by American cinephiles, and so I am happy to present a group of the short films, which pay tribute to the experience of viewing a movie in a theater, with an audience and a projector at the back of the room. The entries in this episode were made by filmmakers hailing from a number of places, from Japan to France to Scandinavia. The most touching thing about the film is not just the variety of its content, but the filmmakers and performers that are highlighted as inspirational. And, like many anthology films, some of the entries may feel like they were tossed off, but others are beautifully crafted gems that are even better than some of the directors’ features. 

873.) Given that the mainstream of American TV today is absolute trash, and not enjoyable trash at that, it would be reassuring if someone were to come along and honestly critique it, not in the form of a print review or blog post, but as a presence on TV itself, telling us how absolutely godawful things have gotten. (And we all know that a reviewer’s job is to generally keep convincing the reader/viewer that “TV/music/movies are better than ever!” Or else he/she ain’t got a job anymore….). Thus, I delight in the work of British standup Stewart Lee, in whose hands sarcasm is a lethal weapon. Somehow Lee, a well-regarded figure on the British comedy scene  who is unfortunately unknown over here, wrangled a show from the BBC on which he examines the contemporary social scene and culture’s “last days.” The show is titled Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (first series in 2009; second series planned for 2011), and each episode features Lee doing standup punctuated by short sketches (the latter "watched over" by supervising talents Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris). On this episode I offer segments from two Comedy Vehicle shows, the ones concerning books (and more specifically, the notion of “toilet books”) and another that decimates British TV (and, by extension, TV in general). Lee is a brilliant comic voice, and I’m happy to spotlight his incisive, sometimes brutal, but always funny opinions on the Funhouse. 

874.) Our summer of unseen-in-the-U.S. British comedy  continues this week with a series that is as innovative as hell and about as darkly humored as you get, but which aired on “Auntie” BBC back in 2000. The show is Jam, its creator was Chris Morris, and it was an outgrowth of one of the strangest radio series ever committed to tape. Blue Jam, its 1997-1999 radio predecessor, was an uncategorizable comedy series that Morris referred to as “ambient stupidity,” which brilliantly blended a number of elements in a thoroughly original style: sketches that were the height of black humor, all delivered in a dreamy, deadpan style; monologues by Morris in which he played a character trapped in a different surreal dilemma each week; jarring interludes that included his trademark prank interviews and indelibly whimsical eviscerations of music radio; and songs that fit the dream-like (or is that nightmare?) mood. For the 2000 TV adaptation of the series, Morris had to evoke the “trance”-like mode of the radio series in a visual fashion, and so he shot the sketches, which feature a small ensemble of actors playing all the roles, in a highly stylized manner that immediately affects the viewer on a sensory level, long before the funny bone has even been touched. In this episode, I offer segments from a show that could only be described as “Terry Southern meets Ken Nordine [or the Firesign Theater, depending on your taste] meets David Lynch  in a dark garage, while a very spaced-out and resourceful DJ spins in the background.” As Morris intones at the outset of every episode, “Welcome in… Jam.”

875.) The short films included on this week’s episode may qualify as the most sentimental material I’ve ever shown on the program. But my return to the as-yet-unseen-in-the-U.S. feature Chacun Son Cinema doesn’t present a single moment of Spielberg-like shameless, manipulative tearjerking. The eight entries I’m spotlighting celebrate the joys of moviegoing from a number of angles, including family, community, romance, and perhaps the strongest sensation of all, memory. The filmmakers are “star” names who hail from Europe, Asia, Canada, Brazil, and Iran. Their shorts communicate how deeply moviegoing affects us, especially when it’s done in the old-fashioned way: in a theater with a film projector and an audience just waiting to be transported.

876.) Vintage ep: As part of my ongoing program to present stuff you ain’t seein’ anyplace else, I offer scenes from three foreign features this week that I can guarantee haven’t played on American cable in recent memory. The first comes from north of the border, the groundbreaking Canadian indie Goin’ Down the Road. Best known to Americans through an incisive and affectionate parody by SCTV (“Garth and Gord and Fiona and Alice”), the film is actually a fusion of documentary filmmaking and class-conscious fiction film, of the sort made in England by the likes of Ken Loach and, later, Mike Leigh. We move from Canada to France for Bertrand Blier’s Les Acteurs (Actors), which has been completely unseen in this country. Blier’s absurdist tribute to the notion of the aging character actor features a terrific gallery of familiar French faces, including some superstars who clearly enjoyed the film’s messages (among them, how big a part do you have in the drama of your own life – and how many lines did you get?). Last up is the first Brazilian film to be featured on the Funhouse (my lapse), but if you have to start paying tribute to Brazilian cinema, Antonio Das Mortes by the late, great Glauber Rocha ain’t a bad place to start. The film is a mind-warping revisionist Western, overlaid with characters and events from Brazilian history and mythology. I only have time to present a few minutes of each of these gems, but I’m glad to shine a spotlight on ’em in the Funhouse.

877.) Labor Day is upon us again, and so it is time once more to salute Jerry Lewis. First of all, we revisit the younger, cartoonlike Jerry, courtesy of the very talented animator-turned-filmmaker Frank Tashlin. The featured movie this time out is Who’s Minding the Store?, a Jerry vehicle directed by Tashlin in 1963 that has never made the leap to DVD. The film stars a veritable host of TV supporting actors and boasts a number of visually striking set pieces, including one of Jerry’s signature routines. After that we move to Telethon 2009, to spotlight some Jerry segments as well as those featuring the always energetic and enthusiastic Tony Orlando hosting in NYC.

878.) The end-of-summer Consumer Guide department finds me reviewing everything from silent cinema to a contemporary documentary about a front-rank Funhouse favorite. First up is the Criterion release of three silent classics by Josef Von Sternberg (that’s a description, as well as the title of the set), which look as gorgeous now as when they were first shown 83 years ago. Next up is one of the most exquisite Technicolor movies ever made (ever), Powell and Pressburger’s perfect “nuns in lust” movie Black Narcissus, newly restored and re-released. After those looks backwards, we turn to the present with the strange, dark, and sunshine-filled allegorical mindbender Home, featuring the impeccably borderline Isabelle Huppert. I close out with a review of the new documentary about the one-of-a-kind singer-songwriter-hellraiser Harry Nilsson, Who is Harry Nilsson (and Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? There is no overall theme to the Consumer Guide time out, except for the fact that each entry revolves around a person with immense talent (or several people) — to start with JVS and end with Nilsson demonstrates the aforementioned perfectly.

879.) The Funhouse “summer of British humor” has now stretched into the fall, but that’s fine with me, as none of the material I’m showing has ever played in the U.S. This week I offer the second and final part of my little tribute to the very original, very strange, and extremely dark TV series from Chris Morris called Jam. Based on a mind-warping radio series called Blue Jam, the TV show offers visualizations of the sketches from that radio show, shot in an jarring manner reminiscent of David Lynch at his nightmare-suburbia best. In this episode I offer the “nastier” sketches from Jam, including scenarios involving kids and odd sexual practices. And that doctor who can’t quite practice medicine in a traditional way. As BBC-America now sees fit to show American Hitchcock movies, James Bond pics, and Star Trek: the Next Generation, it’s nice to be able to turn to cable-access to see all the really important British comedy shows they’ve completely ignored.

880.) A year ago I wasn’t even aware of the incredible brilliance of a number of current-day British standups and humorists, but in the time since I’ve become utterly obsessed with a few of the current top-notch comics from the U.K. Chief among them is Stewart Lee, whose wry, deadpan approach to standup has fast made him one of my favorite social commentators with a microphone — and a brilliant, absolutely eviscerating sense of sarcasm. This week I present more clips from the 2009 TV series Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, which more than likely will never see the light of day over here. The topics covered include the current economic downturn, standup comedy, and — ah, yes — religion. The last-mentioned includes Lee’s take on Pope Benedict's ridiculous footwear and the difficulty of making any jokes at all about Islam. Lee has been honing his craft for two decades now and is at the height of his powers. I’m happy to share a ride in his Comedy Vehicle.

881.) A lot has changed in the last 28 years since Wim Wenders decided to have his filmmaking colleagues talk to his camera on their own, in a Cannes hotel room, about “the future of cinema.” I had been looking to see the resulting short feature, Room 666, for about 25 years and now that I’ve been given a copy, I had to share it with Funhouse viewers. The film is anchored by two absolute Masters, Uncle Jean (Godard) and Michelangelo Antonioni, and a few other very noted filmmakers filed through Wenders’ hotel room in the process of his very unconventional inquiry. Given that the film is unavailable in the U.S. at the current time, I am happy to present clips from it spotlighting very different takes on Wenders’ most interesting, and always timely, question.

882.) Vintage ep: As a last goodbye to a NYC institution, the “alternative” video-rental store Mondo Kim’s, I present a potpourri of things found on the store’s shelves. First up are brief bits from a punk documentary from Japan (shot here in our very own backyard, 1978-80) and a documentary on the brilliant, funny, and wonderfully strange Mr. George Kuchar. Next we move to a forgotten Hollywood adaptation of a Broadway show, New Faces. The 1954 film is a record (with awful wraparound) of the New Faces of 1952 stageshow, including the breakthrough roles of a bunch of famous performers from theater and TV, among them the recently-gone Eartha Kitt, Carol Lawrence, Robert Clary, and the comedy troika of Ronny Graham, Alice Ghostley, and Paul Lynde (for the record, the last-mentioned displays the vocal inflections he shared with Ms. Ghostley for the next three decades). My final offering is the closed-circuit television recording of the Broadway and off-Broadway hit Oh! Calcutta! the best-known fusion of avant-garde theater, old-fashioned burlesque raunch, and just plain trippy nudity. The show featured contributions from Beckett, Lennon, and Feiffer, among others, and is a wonderful relic of its era, the kind we love to feature on the show.

883.) My quartet of episodes dedicated to the work of humor visionary/sensory-assault expert Chris Morris concludes (for the moment) with this show discussing his last U.K. TV series, Nathan Barley. Although conceived in the early 2000s and aired in 2005, the show is very much of the moment, as it concerns a thoroughly obnoxious high-tech hipster who runs an alternative website. His interactions with a jaded journalist (Julian Barratt, from the comedy team “The Mighty Boosh”) and his documentarian sister inform the series’ nominal narrative, which examines just how much of a shit a trust-fund kid can be (the issue of where Nathan gets his cash from was explored in the series’ source matter, but never addressed in the series itself). At its best, the show wavers between the social realism and abrasive humor of Mike Leigh’s early telefilms and a masterful dissection of the hipster mentality that now exists in every major American city (Williamsburg is only one of many outposts).

884.) To close out (for a short while) my presentation of rare British TV comedy series that have never seen the light of day in the U.S., I move straight to what could be one of the strangest shows ever, Simon Munnery’s indescribable 2001 series Attention, Scum. Munnery is not your standard comic — he works a lot in character, is willing to “lose” his audience to make a point, and coins terrific aphorisms that stick in the brainpan long after the average set-up/punchline has faded from memory. Attention, Scum is one of his most extreme experiments, a vignette-laden journey through the English countryside by a man called “The League Against Tedium,” whose main message is “Behold superiority!” Other elements flowing through the show’s six episodes include raunchy opera interludes, a drunk, street-corner newscaster, and a monkey sidekick/secretary. This is not “normal” TV, and that’s all for the best.

885.) Vintage ep: The Funhouse makes another invigorating journey back to the Sixties, the decade that qualifies as the “gift that keeps on giving,” as we keep rediscovering gems from that benighted era. First up is a review of Ken Russell at the BBC, a six-film collection of Russell’s kinetic and wildly inventive early biopics. Russell forged his unique style working on these projects and even today they bristle with a wild energy and betray his pure love for the works of the artists, poets, dancers, and composers depicted. From Russell we move on to another film artist, one who made far fewer films, photographer William Klein. The Delirious Fictions of William Klein box contains his three cartoonlike fantasy films, offering savage spoofs of fashion, politics, the media, and the “model couple.” We finish our journey back to the joyously confused Sixties with a review of the new Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour box, a compendium of the best the era had to offer from a mainstream show that stepped off the ledge, and produced some timeless moments of entertainment and outrage.

886.) Vintage ep: The Consumer Guide department merges with my favorite “rare footage” feature, as I feature two “mail order” items you ain’t seein’ anyplace else on TV. First up is a collection of European shorts that includes the work of Lars Von Trier, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jan Svankmajer, and a certain Uncle Jean, among others. Then we turn from the European auteurs to an American filmmaker quite beloved in “on the continent,” back when he was a gag-meister. Some rare b&w Woody Allen on TV, from a British special which consisted of nothing but Woody doing his stand-up — with an Irish lounge-singer guy as his guest (but I’m not showing the lounge singer).

887.) Vintage ep: Some filmmakers just can’t be replaced. Their works are just so unusual that terms have to be created to describe them. In the case of Deceased Artiste Ray Dennis Steckler, who left this mortal coil a few months ago (but we still love him, and have no need for time limits on obit-tributes), the phrase used to describe his movies — and that of several dozen other bizarre exploitation/genre moviemakers — was taken from the name of his best known-work. Thus, we salute this week the “incredibly strange” movies of RDS with commentary by yours truly and a slew of clips including scenes from his famous pictures, Rat Pfink a Boo Boo and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies, as well as his other gonzo action/horror/comedy/musical features and his more prodigious output, namely soft and hardcore porn. Although we’re using only “hard R” segments, I hope to convey Ray’s strange way with post-dubbing his porn: anytime you hear a male narrator, it’s most likely Ray himself — and if you hear some guy just making odd noises and sounds, affecting a silly voice, or just repeating a phrase over and over, that’s Ray too. The man was one of a freakin’ kind. Plus: two additional Deceased Artistes, whose own beloved brands of “incredibly strange” talent make them perfect complements to Steckler.

888.) Vintage: It’s been about seven months now since it happened, but my interest in film buff topics never diminishes, and so this week’s show is a visual counterpart to my blog entry about the “death” of the arthouse distributor New Yorker Films (located here: http://mediafunhouse.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-yorker-films-unspools-its-last.html). I offer some background and commentary at the outset, but then we plunge headfirst into two lengthier, masterful French films that New Yorker represented, did release on VHS, but buried when DVD became the medium of choice. The first is The Mother and the Whore, Jean Eustache’s 1973 portrait of a verbose young man and his two lovers, as incarnated by two terrific actresses and the wonderfully energetic Jean-Pierre Leaud. Eustache’s epic-lengthed b&w talkfest is a supreme achievement that sums up the malaise of the early Seventies like few other French features. I decided to pair Eustache’s film with one of the best-known works by one of his mentors, the wildly underrated Jacques Rivette. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) was indeed his “greatest hit” on these shores, but it hasn’t been seen much in the last few decades thanks to the fact that it is indeed a longer film that viewers “sink into,” and the fact that it had a high-priced VHS release and never showed up subsequently on disc. New Yorker was indeed a valuable and extremely important link in the chain of film fandom as a theatrical distributor in the Sixties and Seventies, but as a video label it was not exactly a buff’s best friend....

889.) Part one of my interview with innovative and influential British comic visionary Chris Morris. In this part of our chat, we discuss his feature debut as a filmmaker, Four Lions, from a number of perspectives and also touch on his radically brilliant radio and TV comedy. Topics include the darkly comic tone of Four Lions (the questions is not whether the screw-up terrorist characters will die, it’s more who among them will die and when), the film’s documentary tone, Morris’s research into real-life terrorist screw-ups, and the characters’ use of different media to spread their confused message. We close out with two questions linking the film with his past work, the first concerning his extraordinary ability to craft characters who speak nonsense with certitude, and his wonderful “vox pop” (man in the street) interviews done for radio and TV, in which he involved average English citizens (and later famous politicians and pundits) in discussions about ridiculous fictitious scourges.

890.) My particular joy in doing “Consumer Guide” episodes is not only noting the existence of great new DVD releases, but also being able to show snippets of footage from titles that run the gamut of Funhouse fascinations. In this show, I offer four reviews, each representing a different kind of release. The first is a purely musical offering, the live concert DVD An Evening with Frank Zappa during which... The Torture Never Stops. That is followed by the newest film from actress-turned-filmmaker Marina De Van (a former Funhouse interview subject), which finds writer Sophie Marceau being mysteriously transformed into her “other self,” (played by the equally sexy Monica Belluci); De Van’s scenario adds one other small problem: Marceau’s hubby, kids, and surroundings are also transforming by slow degrees…. Next up is the “lost” vintage TV musical “Evening Primrose,” written by James Goldman from a story by John Collier with original songs by this guy named Sondheim; the plot is pure Twilight Zone (never a bad thing) and the star is Anthony Perkins (always a good thing). We close out with the supplement-filled Criterion release of Lars von Trier’s magisterially disturbing Antichrist; the supplements detail von Trier’s crippling depression before and during the shoot, and provide the opinions of both lead actors (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe) , as well as interesting glimpses into how von Trier crafted his hypnotic images, intended as a tribute to his hero, Andrei Tarkovsky.

891.) The second and final part of my interview with British humorist and filmmaker Chris Morris incorporates a number of items dear to my heart in the Funhouse: dark humor, British comedy, the magical medium of radio, a tribute to comedy giants (in this case, Morris’s two influences, the mighty Viv Stanshall and Peter Cook), and a discussion of the vagaries of new media, including the fact that entire bodies of work can be found thereupon. Included in the show is a Funhouse first: audio clips featured as prominently as the video, since Morris did some visionary work on radio, and Stanshall and Cook are best represented in this context by their audio recordings. Along the way we also touch on the “fake news” phenomenon — Morris and Armando Iannucci having done the concept to a fine, surreal turn on British TV two years before The Daily Show appeared in the U.S., and an example of how talking with a brilliant individual can sometimes be like a chess match.

892.) The death of the most commercial filmmaker in the French New Wave, Claude Chabrol, led me to look back at his body of work to discover some absolute masterworks and uneven wonderments. This first Deceased Artiste tribute to this very singular (and sometimes singularly weird) body of work focuses on his first four films, made from 1958-60. The films are extremely dark in tone compared to the other New Wave debut features (even Rivette’s) and each one of them is a skillful blend of excellent acting, cruel dialogue, and a bleak outlook on human behavior. I also discuss the important influence of screenwriter Paul Gégauff on Chabrol. Gégauff was a womanizing, fascistic gent who had a turbulent private life and wrote some terrifically compelling films for Chabrol and other filmmakers. Chabrol’s masterwork from this period, Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), has a “Gégauffian” tone, as a quartet of shopgirls discover little joys and major sorrow in Paris; the film bombed at the box office upon its release, but is now recognized as one of Chabrol’s strongest statements on man’s inhumanity to (wo)man.

893.) Close off your Christmas Day with an unconventional holiday celebration, and some brilliant and occasionally blasphemous standup in the latest Consumer Guide episode. In this case I’m reviewing titles released by Go Faster Stripe, an indie Welsh DVD company that records the shows of various “alternative” British standups who are Edinburgh Fringe vets and who have fast become Funhouse favorites (say that three times fast). First up is Simon Munnery, whose portmanteau disc Hello finds him moving from conventional standup to character comedy (with a sidestep into some wonderfully odd crucifixion puppetry) and then to his strong suit (a very rare thing in this day in age) the fabrication of very memorable epigram-jokes. Next we turn back to Stewart Lee, whose superb show ’90s Comedian includes his most audacious routine about a drunk night’s encounter with Christ. I close out with Robin Ince’s annual celebration of a “rationalist” Yuletide, called Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People. The show has been put on in London for the past three years, and blends the best “alternative” standups with musicians and scientists. My review highlights include Lee’s former partner, the imaginatively blasphemous comic Richard Herring, and that atheist icon named Dawkins. For your post-holiday perusal, I guarantee amusement, enlightenment, and at least one tacky kitsch item purchased in Atlantic City.

894.) Vintage: You have to catch the legends while they’re in town, and so I was very pleased to talk recently with filmmaker Ken Russell, who was in NYC directing his first play, the psycho-thriller Mindgame. I got to spend a good amount of time with him and covered a number of topics. In this first part of our conversation, we discuss his reasons for taking on the play, as well as the female audience reaction to its scenes of torture and menace. From madness on stage we turn to madness on screen, and talk about the terrific biopics that Russell made for the BBC back in the Sixties, and then brought — with an even more vivid imagination and bigger budgets — to movie screens in the Seventies. We close this part of our talk with a mention of the late, great Oliver Reed, who starred in six of Russell’s films.

895.) Vintage: Part two of my career-spanning interview with director Ken Russell centers in on the period in which he achieved his first international renown, right before his biggest box-office hit, Tommy. Russell’s reputation as an over-the-top filmmaker ignores his three lower-key (but still feverishly intense) adaptations of the work of D.H. Lawrence, a writer he considers quintessentially English. The other focus of this episode is Russell’s absolute masterpiece about religious, political, and sexual hypocrisy, The Devils (1971), which to this day has remained heavily censored in prints available in America, as well as never having had a DVD release of any kind. Mr. Russell closes out with a childhood memory of what Fritz Lang’s pictures meant to him during wartime.

896.) In celebration of the recent 80th birthday of Funhouse deity “Uncle Jean,” aka Jean-Luc Godard, I am very proud to present the U.S. television premieres of two of his short video essays and scenes from two other brilliant video pieces. The pieces range in date from 1993 to 2002, with the biggest discovery — in terms of Funhouse “conceptual continuity” — being JLG’s “sampling” of a Serge Gainsbourg song in one of his videos (with an appropriately dense visual overlay as it plays). The shorts that will be seen in their entirety are the very short-short Je Vous Salue Sarajevo, which analyzes a photo of the conflict over there, and De l’origine du XXIeme siècle. The latter is a beautiful creation: a summation of the 20th century in a mere 15 minutes that spotlights the tragedies and horror of the century, counterpointed with gorgeous sequences from classic films (including a Jerry Lewis citation, utilized for its “chromatic” aspect). The end is a terrific metaphor for the century, taken from Ophuls’ Le Plaisir. Godard continues to be arguably the most significant filmmaker alive, and these shorts are evidence of how great his work has been in his “senior” period.

897.) Vintage: An interview with the French filmmaker Cedric Klapisch, on the occasion of the NYC opening of his film Paris. Klapisch has specialized in the last few years in Altman-esque ensemble pieces, but he has also made a wonderful “small” character piece (When the Cat’s Away), an equally Altman-esque filmed play (Un Air de Famille), and even a sci-fi feature (Peut-etre, unreleased in the U.S.). I speak to M. Klapisch about his screenwriting, his work with noted actors (Juliette Binoche in Paris, Audrey Tautou in L’Auberge Espagnole and Russian Dolls), and the excellent work he’s done in conveying the environments his characters live in. His films are closer to Truffaut than Godard, with their chief joys being lyrical moments in which the characters “indulge” (parties, dreams, drugs, booze) and we get a sense of the cities they inhabit, from Paris to St. Petersburg.

898.) The best British sitcoms are the ones that follow the Fawlty Towers model and do six episodes and let the show rest for a year or two before the second season. A perfect example of this phenomenon is Armando Iannucci’s brilliant The Thick of It, which I’ll be featuring this week on the Funhouse. Iannuci’s sitcom offers stinging political satire that also works, like The Larry Sanders Show, as a beautifully detailed portrait of an office where backstabbing is a way of life. The show is made particularly memorable by its cursing, for which Iannucci employs a “cursing consultant,” and by the performance of Scotsman Peter Capaldi, who is ostensibly the show’s star but functions more like a brilliant scene-stealer, playing the part of an “enforcer” for the Prime Minster’s office. One bit of trivia I don’t mention on the show: Iannucci has signed with HBO to do an American political sitcom called Veep (to star Julia Louis-Dreyfus) supposedly based on Thick of It.

899.) Part two of my Deceased Artiste tribute to the late, great Claude Chabrol focuses on his misfires in the Sixties and Seventies. A number of the titles featured in this episode are not available on DVD in the U.S., but I’m happy to present them in the spirit of comprehensiveness. A few of these misfires (Les Godelureaux, L’Oeil du Malin) were actually great films that just had a dark, “unpleasant” tone and never acquired an audience, while others were “commercial” concepts (Bond-ish spy comedies), downright mistakes (the dubbed-in-every-country, sexist-comedy international coproduction High Heels starring Belmondo, Mia Farrow, and Laura Antontelli), or bizarre twists on familiar material (Sylvia Kristel in an existential but not sexually-oriented Alice in Wonderland update). When you discuss Chabrol’s work it’s important to emphasize his masterworks, but it’s also a lot of fun to probe his fascinating flops.

900.) David Bowie has had a pretty rich career in and out of music, and has made some pretty interesting choices as an actor. This week I present two such curious and ambitious choices, both having a connection to Weimar-era Germany. The first is the never-screened-in-the-U.S. television version of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal (1982), directed by Alan Clarke. Clarke tried to find a cinematic/televisual equivalent to Brecht’s “epic theater” style for the piece, and so uses split screens, on-screen titles, a profusion of wide shots, and, of course, stylized acting. Bowie stars as a sleazy but charismatic poet-musician who seduces women and ultimately kills his best friend, all while delivering Brecht’s original songs with only voice and banjo accompaniment. The second feature of the evening is Just a Gigolo (1979), directed by Blow-Up star David Hemmings. The film features Bowie as a WWI vet who takes on the titular profession when he can’t find another job. Hemmings emphasizes Bowie’s model looks in various moments in the film, but he also sets up a farcical tone (which later is broken by a dramatic ending — I ain’t saying the movie is flawless) in which Bowie is pursued by various females including the always daunting Ms. Kim Novak. Also making her final screen appearance in the film is the ultimate Weimar era dame, Miss Marlene Dietrich, who does actually sing in the film, for what was the very last time in public.

901.) Vintage: The Kuchar Brothers’ importance in the “underground” film scene of the Sixties cannot be underestimated. That’s why I’m proud to present this week part one of my interview with Mike Kuchar, the more visually inclined of the brothers, and the man who gave us the deranged mini-feature Sins of the Fleshapoids (more on that cult classic in part two!). In this installment of the interview, Mike discusses his latest “pictures,” which are elegantly stylized shorts shot on mini-DV and edited with a digital effects editing box (much as the Funhouse itself is). He reflects on the “underground” label, and also dispenses his philosophy of filmmaking. In addition, he supplies recollections of his youth in the Bronx, his love of Hollywood product (both A- and B-grade), and the use by he and his brother George of their voluminous collection of records to “score” their 8mm, super 8mm, and 16mm films.

902.) Vintage: The Kuchar-fest continues with the second and final part of my interview with Mike Kuchar. In this episode we focus on his work with his brother George on a series of wonderfully outlandish no-budget 8mm and super-8mm shorts, shot in the apartments (and streets, and on the roofs) of the Bronx. Mike reflects on the Kuchar Brothers’ relationship to their contemporaries (Jacobs, Warhol, Mekas), and the wonderfully kitschy humor they exhibited in their finest works. We move on to discuss Mike’s Sixties masterwork, the no-budget, robots-with-human-emotions 16mm cult classic Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), which is currently the only Kuchar film available on U.S. DVD (out of literally hundreds that the brothers have made). We close out with Mike’s thoughts on working as a cameraman for other “underground” and low-budget filmmakers, and the Kuchar “legacy.”

903.) Vintage: There’s no greater curse than receving the Oscar, and so this week I pay tribute to a filmmaker/comedian whose work I still love, but who has been pretty much forgotten here in the U.S. since his Academy Award win more than a decade ago. The gent in question is Roberto Benigni, who I see as the modern era’s only tangible link to the great American (and, natch, Italian) screen comedians of the Golden Era. First up is a short scene from the latest Benigni film, The Tiger and the Snow, which received a cursory theatrical release in the U.S. and which I discovered when it cropped up at odd times on the Sundance Channel. Next we turn to one of the best Benigni films that has remained unreleased in the U.S., his 1985 collaboration with a fellow controversial Italian TV comedian, the late Massimo Troisi. Functioning as a terrific comedy team, the two play dolts who land back in the late 15th century, where they decide to prevent the discovery of America by Columbus. This plot device may be the reason the film has been so underseen on these shores, but the pic is a terrific low key comedy that boasts one of my favorite titles *ever * in movie history (esp. for a comedy), Nothing Left to Do But Cry. We finish out with a film that is legally available here but no one knows it exists: the crazy, vulgar, Marxist comedy Berlinguer I Love You (1977), scripted by and starring Benigni. The film’s plot is unrecountable, but it does feature Roberto as a Mama’s Boy who is looking for political enlightenment, as well as a private place to masturbate to his scarecrow rendition of the leader of the Italian Communist Party (whom Benigni did actually support in real life). Top that, awful Saturday Night Live alumni....

904.) In part three of my Deceased Artiste tribute to Claude Chabrol, the most prolific and most uneven of the New Wave directors, I delve into what is considered his “golden age,” a period from 1968-’73 when he had made a series of smart and disturbing thrillers set among the haute bourgeoisie. We start off with the lesbian personality-theft pic Les Biches and move through what is called “the Helene cycle” — as there was always a female character named Helene, usually played by Chabrol’s then-wife, the marvelously sexy and talented Stephane Audran. The cycle concluded with the feverish, James M. Cain-ish, middle-aged l’amour fou tale Les Noces Rouge, but I offer a bonus in the form of scenes from Une Partie de Plaisir (1974). Partie is one of the strangest Chabrol films ever, a weird act of “catharsis” for its very colorful (and seemingly not very delicate avec les femmes) Paul Gégauff.

905.) It’s been nearly a year since softcore filmmaker Joseph W. Sarno died, but the Funhouse obeys no standard clocks or calendars. Thus, this week I’ll be presenting the first of two planned tributes to Joe, with clips from the first two “periods” of his work. I start out with his “suburban roulette” period, where he introduced two of the main tenets of his work: dark, compelling visuals and storylines that emphasized the characters’ angst over their sexual behavior (something that was quite uncommon in the sex film, then and now). This period was set in motion by Joe’s seminal Sin in the Suburbs (wherein a swinging sex club at the local motel brings to mind Kubrick’s much later dip into similar waters with Eyes Wide Shut) and ended when Joe started to make movies in Sweden. I explore these pics by focusing on his successful pair of Inga features, and for those viewers who’ve seen my past tributes to Joe’s work (and my late-’90s interview with the man), I will indeed be once again showcasing the terminally catchy “Inga” theme from the pre-ABBA Benny and Bjorn.

906.) Continuing the ongoing theme in the Funhouse of “great British comedy series you won’t be seeing on BBC-America,” I’m very pleased this week to present commentary on, and clips from, Armando Iannucci’s strange, very funny, and extremely nasty take on 21st-century culture, Time Trumpet. The show, which aired in 2006, “looks back” at the first decade of the century, from the vantage point of 2031. Iannucci and his team of “social pundits” discuss various pop-culture and political phenomena, all the while decimating the talking-head “we love such-and-such-a-decade” shows, deceitful politicians, talentless celebrities, and reality TV.

907.) The culture of the Sixties is a seemingly bottomless well that I love to return to time and again (indeed, “the gift that keeps on giving”). Thus, this week I present an episode featuring clips from, and commentary about, the mind-warping film called Futz! (1969). Directed by Tom O’Horgan (the Broadway director of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar), the film was based on a play presented at La MaMa about a young man of the country who loves and wants to marry his beloved pig. Although the movie probably disappointed those who came to see it for orgiastic nudity (that’s in there, but it ain’t onscreen for very long), the film still offers a cornucopia of Sixties wonderment, including early performances by the scintillatin' Sally Kirkland and Coppola mainstay Frederic Forrest. The two most important contributors to the picture were cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who provided exquisite imagery and horror/fantasy genre specialist Joseph Stefano (best known for Psycho and The Outer Limits TV series). Why would a horror scripter be involved with an ecstatically weird of underground theater on film? Well, you’ll just have to watch out and find out.

908.) An offhanded reference by Funhouse guest Neil Innes led me to discover the subject of this week’s episode, English humorist Mark Steel. Steel is a very special kind of comedian who found his perfect vehicle in the TV series The Mark Steel Lectures (2003-2006). The show was not comprised of lectures, but rather historical biographies told with a blend of serious historical fact and smart, savage humor. Steel centered his sights on “people with a passion” and then argued about their relevance to the way we live today (or the way we should be living our lives). His mixture of old ideas and new interpretations is spotlighted in two episodes (Lord Byron, Karl Marx) from the Lectures, which I’m featuring — in condensed form, naturally — in this episode.

909.) One of the many joys of doing the Funhouse is not only introducing viewers to different artists and performers they might not have otherwise encountered, but also in tracing their careers and “digging deep” into their filmographies and TV output. This week we dig deep into the world of Serge Gainsbourg (who would’ve been 83 this past April 2nd) and discuss his third film as a filmmaker, and the only one in which he starred, Charlotte For Ever (1986). As the title indicates, the film revolves around one of Serge’s great loves, his daughter Charlotte. The two spend time locked in the hothouse environment of an apartment, debating whether Serge’s character “killed” Charlotte’s mom in an auto accident. Gainsbourg was surely inspired by Tennessee Williams in the creation of the film, but also is able to indulge his bibliophilic tendencies and his taste for young women. The film has never been widely available with English subtitles, so I’m happy to “premiere” scenes from it on American television.

910.) Easter is a time for blessed blasphemy on the Funhouse, and this year will be no different. Since the well of Christian kitsch is relatively dry this annum, I turn to an English stage show that was condemned by fundamentalist Xtians and was nearly the subject of a criminal charge of blasphemy (eventually struck down). The show is Jerry Springer: the Opera, a 2002 creation of the composer Richard Thomas (no, not “John-Boy Walton”) and Funhouse favorite Stewart Lee. While it starts out simply as an incisive, brutal Springer parody, the show takes a wide turn in the second act, when Springer descends to hell and is called upon to referee disputes between the Devil and Jesus, Adam and Eve, and Jesus and Mary. The parallel construction of the show — in which the actors who played rednecks, adulterers, and fetishists in the First Act play Biblical figures in the Second — stirs the pot quite well, and some quick, pointed jokes in the dialogue surely qualify the show as a work of “blasphemy” – intelligent, inventive blasphemy. Plus, Thomas’s songs are catchy as, er... hell.

911.) I do my best to present the very best in “unseen” entertainment week after week in the Funhouse, but one small thing has been left out in the past few months — and that’s the very worst! So tonight, I rectify that as I commemorate the passing of Hollywood’s “last star,” Elizabeth Taylor. Expanding upon my blog post about her “flamboyant flops,” I show clips from three of them and discuss her screen persona in the late Sixties and Seventies. We start out with the biggest cult hit among her misguided movies, Boom (1968). A collaboration between Tennessee Williams, Joseph Losey, and Taylor and Burton (not forgetting Michael Dunn) should have produced unforgettable fireworks, but instead the film is just blissfully tacky and esoteric. A later solo Liz picture, The Driver’s Seat (1974), is a whole other kinda kitsch that finds Taylor involved in all sorts of sex-related situations and giving yet another shrill performance. We close out with Peter Ustinov’s strange and uneven comedy Hammersmith is Out, a Faustian saga with Taylor and Burton that actually works pretty well in its first half when it’s a sarcastic comedy (which is all I’ll be dealing with on the show; check out the feeble allegorical drama in the second half on your own). All those tributes to the lady on network and cable TV, and yet no one showed these films….

912.) Political humor still exists in the U.S., but it is mostly toothless. Standup comedians aim for big bookings and thus don’t want to fire from the hip, and TV comedy shows need to satisfy their sponsors and/or their wildly cheering studio audiences, and so political humor over here doesn’t get very sophisticated. In England, however, there are a handful of supremely talented, “engaged” left-wing comedians, and one of the most interesting is Robert Newman. Newman was half of an immensely popular comedy team in the 1990s and since he split with his partner he has worked simultaneously as a novelist, a political activist, and a standup comedian. One of his finest accomplishments as a standup is the TV special History of Oil, which I’ll be showing scenes from this week. The program offers an illustrated lecture on the ways in which that crude substance has motivated American and British political policy throughout the last century. Newman is a charming performer who conveys a serious message with a wonderfully light touch, and Oil is the kind of show that I wish was produced for American TV. It’s certainly not going to show up on BBC-America, and thus I’m happy to premiere scenes from it on the Funhouse.

913.) We journey back to the Sixties once more this week, as I discuss and excerpt clips from the film Loin du Vietnam (Far From Vietnam). Of course America is “far” from that war chronologically, but the lessons learned from that long debacle — by both the right and the left — are an intrinsic part of today’s governmental policy and news coverage. The film was a collective effort by a group of “New Wave” directors, assembled by Chris Marker. I’m offering clips from different parts of the film, but for the purposes of the Funhouse’s 28-minute time limit I’m focusing primarily on the sequences that can definitely be attributed to a specific filmmaker. Thus I will be spotlighting (who else?) Uncle Jean’s contribution, wherein Godard talks on-camera about his conflicted feelings about depicting, or even discussing Vietnam, in a film, and also William Klein’s chronicling of the reaction to the war on the streets of NYC. Some vintage views of parading peaceniks and angry, hate-filled war lovers alternate with Klein’s stylishly warped views of American advertisements. Given the discussions in the past few years (and days) about whether Americans should view the caskets of soldiers coming back from the U.S.’s ongoing Mid-East occupations, or photographs of atrocities inflicted on military prisoners — or the execution of terrorist leaders — the Vietnam war is not very far away at all.

914.) I am extremely pleased to provide the U.S. “premiere” of solid British comedies that ain’t never going to show up on the uncommonly hopeless BBC-America (really — the Kevin Costner Robin Hood movie? Really?). This week I introduce Funhouse viewers to the charming Graham Linehan (The IT Crowd) creation Black Books, a Britcom set in a small bookstore run by a very cranky and indulgent Irishman. I follow scenes from that show with clips from performance DVDs released by the show’s two stars. The costar, Bill Bailey, is a long-haired, sharp-witted observational comic with a surreal edge and great talent as a multi-instrumentalist; he is also so popular in the U.K. that he’s headlined at Wembley. The show’s star and co-creator, Dylan Moran, is a top-notch standup who treats familiar topics with a fresh eye and acid wit. I believe both of them should be known over here — Bailey’s trippy comedy and musical pastiches are great, and Moran definitely stands beside Stewart Lee in the Pantheon of poetically sarcastic current-day comedians.

915.) Few things are as admirable as a life well lived, and so this week I offer a Deceased Artiste tribute to the actress Annie Girardot, who started out as a sex kitten in the Fifties and wound up being a respected character actress from the Eighties through the Aughts. I’ll be focusing on the most colorful section of her career, when she essayed very odd characters for Funhouse favorite Marco Ferreri and also played middle-aged women caught up in the psychedelic worldwind that was the Sixties. There’ll be a bit of Mme. Girardot with “B.B.” and a bit of her acting for Il Grande Marco, but the feature presentation is most definitely Erotissimo, a super-psych comedy about a wife who wants to win back her husband’s affection and thus starts exploring the sexier side of pop culture. The film lifts entire chunks from the visual playbook of a certain Uncle Jean and its music sounds like the work of a certain Serge, so it was an absolute must for the Funhouse.

916.) I’m pleased to use the Funhouse as a vehicle to acquaint NYC TV viewers with the work of certain British humorists, and so this week I return to the marvelous Mark Steel Lectures, which provides biographical portraits of historical figures laced with fact, jokes, sarcasm, jarring metaphors, and (gasp) knowledge. Steel is the ideal teacher, a gent who revels in “people with a passion” and inspires viewers to view artists’, philosophers’, and scientists’ work from a contemporary perspective (and to check out their writings, as well as their biographies). Tonight’s episode features segments from the second season of the Lectures — be prepared to see the punk-classical nexus and a gent who provided a clear link between the American and French revolutions.

917.) You’d think that presenting the “best moments” of a recent-vintage standup comedy DVD would be simple, but that’s far from the case when the comedian in question is Stewart Lee. Lee is currently at the top of his form, and he delights in constructing routines that go on for a good 20-30 minutes and are fashioned like a house of cards — if any one element is removed, the whole thing tumbles to the ground. Thus, I carefully considered what I’d show to turn folks on to Lee’s disc If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One, and decided, true to Lee’s mission, to present the DVD’s most “difficult” routine. The 33-minute set-piece in question (which I had to internally edit to preserve its rhythms, but also to fit our 28-minute mandate) is an odd reverie that starts out in one place, moves to another (physically), and then winds up with Lee turning from his trademark sarcasm and virtuoso deadpan to tackle something even more difficult (as he puts it): sincerity. The result is an savagely brilliant piece of material that may not be the best place to become acquainted with his work (for those who haven’t seen my previous episodes about him), but represents something new and fresh and thus very unusual in the world of comedy.

918.) At its best, late-night TV has always had a hallucinatory feel to it. You wake up the next morning (considerably improved) and wonder if you dreamt the program you watched the night before. Fortunately for us, recording devices exist, and so I happily present to you, to celebrate my turning “another year older and deeper in debt,” one of my favorite hallucinations from earlier in this year, the local talk/variety show All Night With Joey Reynolds. I’ve written two detailed blog posts about the show, but a video is worth a thousand words, and so this week I present some comments on, and excerpts from, All Night. The clips from this show should be viewed on a TV set, since it’s one thing to watch a program that’s a “runaway train” (as All Night was) on your computer, but it’s quite another thing to take the old-fashioned route and watch TV clips on your TV set! And they’ll be appearing in the late-evening hours… when you can convince yourself it’s all a hallucination....

919.) Vintage show: Inaugurating a new series of episodes about British standups and TV comedy series that have never been seen in America (and most likely never will be), this week I offer up a look at the work of Chris Morris, the brutally funny satirist who has written and starred in some of the best and most innovative series on British TV. First up is The Day Today, the 1994 fake news program that gave us the blithely ignorant Alan Partridge, as well as establishing Morris’ trademark style, which blends an incredible deadpan delivery with deft wordplay and a gift for surreal whimsy — and dark, dark humor. The second show I spotlight is Brass Eye, Morris’ series of in-depth news “specials” that concluded with a very controversial parody of frenzied, moralizing documentaries about the hunt for pedophiles (which aired in England years before To Catch a Predator debuted over here).

920.) This week I adjourn to the Consumer Guide department once more, as I tackle a trio of familiar subjects, spotlighted here because of recent DVD releases that I believe will be of major interest to the regular Funhouse viewer. First up is a “catch-up” title, one that has been out for a short while on disc, the documentary Two in the Wave. While I don’t believe, as the documentarian does, that the friendship between Truffaut and Godard was the linchpin of the entire French New Wave, this interesting docu contains beaucoup de rare newsreels, TV interviews, and movie clips. Next up I discuss two Fassbinder films that were released this month for the first time on DVD, the big-budget, English-language feature Despair and the incredibly great (and wonderfully titled) telefilm I Only Want You To Love Me. I turn from the sublime to… well, Skidoo (!) for the last review of the evening. I’ve spoken before about Otto Preminger’s bizarre, star-studded acid comedy (which bows on DVD next week), and I’m quite happy to be reviewing the first official release of the film in the U.S. (which also represents the first time it’s ever been seen letterboxed on home screens). Skidoo needs to be seen, and once it has been seen, it can never be forgotten....

921.) When we shot the host segments for this week’s show there was no indication that the superb British political sitcom The Thick of It would ever be shown again on American TV. After we shot the segments, BBC-America announced that they will be airing episodes from the series much later in the year, most likely as a tie-in to the American revamp of the show, the upcoming HBO series Veep. I’m still very proud to discuss the program and show short clips from its brilliantly scripted and wonderfully acted second and third seasons this week, since I am pretty certain that the American commercial channel on which it will appear will: skip the politically “dense” second season; edit the episodes for time (check out what they're doing currently with their "Ministry of Humour" shows on Saturday nights); and edit for language. The series is, of course, the creation of the mastermind of UK TV comedy, Armando Iannucci, and features a stellar ensemble of performers led in every sense of the word by Peter Capaldi as the foul-mouthed and foul-tempered spin doctor Malcolm Tucker. Since Malcolm drops the “f-bomb” like most people use the word “the,” I am glad to offer up an episode that offers commentary on the program, as well as both a consideration and several examples of the fine art of cursing with a Scottish burr.

922.) Continuing our “summer of British comedy,” this week I close out a trio of shows about the terrific series, unseen in the U.S., The Mark Steel Lectures. Steel makes education entertaining with his irreverent presentations of historical fact, surprising bits of contextual information, and present-day comparisons. The theme for the Lectures was “people with a passion,” and for this episode, I’m presenting clips from three episodes from the show’s final season (in 2006). Spotlighted are one of the world’s biggest movie stars, the woman author who wrote the first sci-fi novel, and the revolutionary who unwittingly became a fashion icon.

923.) As I have journeyed through modern British comedy (of the brilliant variety) over the last year on the show, I intentionally left out one name until I could give the gent a proper tribute of his own. And so this week I salute the work of one of the busiest standups in the UK and a very active podcaster (deemed “the Podfather” by the British press), Richard Herring. Herring began as the partner of Stewart Lee — the stooge to Lee’s sarcastic straight man — and has since had a very busy career as a solo act, fashioning themed one-man shows as well as regular standup sets. First up are segments from his show Someone Likes Yoghurt, a performance that includes some top-notch blaspheming (Herring is a master blasphemer) and also some wonderfully self-referential bits that, to borrow Funhouse fave Marco Ferreri’s phrase, “construct themselves as they deconstruct themselves.” Next are scenes from his themed concept show Hitler Moustache, in which he tries to “reclaim the toothbrush moustache for comedy” in the name of Chaplin. I close out with a video of the live recording of his sketch comedy podcast As It Occurs to Me, which is a sheer absurdist delight.

924.) As I attempt to connect the dots between various British comedy performers, I come to an act that qualifies as arguably the best comedy team (and certainly the most original) in several years, the two gents known (collectively with their “supporting cast”) as The Mighty Boosh. Julian Barratt (familiar to Funhouse viewers from Chris Morris’ Nathan Barley) and Noel Fielding are massively successful over in England and have a solid but smaller cult over here; their success is well-warranted, as the deranged and wholly surreal “tripcom” they created out of their stage act features fantasy storylines, memorably cartoonlike characters, and classic comedy team-style crosstalk verbal routines. On this episode I run through the tenets of their humor, with short clips of their brilliantly silly banter, their wonderful musical-genre homage/parodies (all written by Barratt), and their finest invention, a type of synchronized-rap-cum-nursery-rhyme creation called a “crimp.” I promise you, the tunes and crimps will stay in your mind for some time after the program is over.

925.) Vintage: Following on the heels of my recent foray into the unknown work of the once-fashionable-but-now-sadly-forgotten-in-the-U.S. Roberto Benigni, this week I offer a look at two as-yet-unreleased films by the multitalented Takeshi Kitano. “Beat” Takeshi, as he is known to fans, was also a very fashionable figure on the arthouse circuit in the Nineties, but his last three films have gone undistributed in America. Kitano cuts an imposing figure as a performer, but is a mercurial filmmaker who is as likely to go for a deadpan joke as he to tug at the viewer’s heartstrings or offer a moment of brilliantly elided violence. His 2007 film Glory to the Filmmaker is his own 8 1/2, an odd meditation on what his next film should be, that includes parodies of several genres on its way to becoming an extremely bizarre sci-fi parable involving an eccentric mother and daughter duo. His last release to date as a filmmaker, Achilles and the Tortoise, is two art-world satires in one: the film begins as a touching study of a boy who loves to draw but doesn’t have much talent, and winds up a series of bizarre deadpan sequences about a painter, played by Kitano, who wants to find fame at any cost.

926.) The subject of tonight’s episode left this mortal coil some months ago, but we never tire of saluting the work of our favorite artists and entertainers, and so this week I present the second part of my Deceased Artiste tribute to NYC softcore filmmaker Joseph W. Sarno. In this episode, I start out with three comedies Joe made in NY in 1974, focusing on the “incredibly strange” schlemiel comedy A Touch of Genie. I next turn to the three pictures Joe made in Germany in that same year (which included Veil of Blood (aka Vampire Ecstasy, which we featured on the show several years ago). The emphasis here is on Bibi (aka Girl Meets Girl), an overwrought hot-pants drama in which an ambitious and greedy young lady seduces literally everyone in sight, acted out by (camp alert) a German cast who add a certain lilt to the line “zere’s somesing about a waterfall… somesing untamed…” And I finish off with Sarno’s final softcore films, a series of quiet and intense suburban melodramas in which the participants frequently switch partners and harbor simmering feelings — some of which are blatantly incestuous. I’m happy to close the show out with the scene that I think is perhaps the most emblematic of Sarno’s work, a tortured bit of erotica that taps into the guilt and angst that symbolizes this fine filmmaker’s best work in the sex genre.

927.) Vintage: The Sixties and early Seventies variety shows were all about the blending of the absolute best and the positive worst in American culture; they also saw the old colliding with the new, in a gloriously awkward fashion. I’m thus extremely pleased to review on this week’s Consumer Guide episode three relics from the era. The first, The Mama Cass Television Program, is a 1969 special that finds Cass dueting with some of her immaculately talented folk-rock friends, as well as sharing the stage (and yes, singing) with Buddy Hackett and Martin Landau and Barbara Bain (why? Because!). The second recent release is Pat Paulsen’s Half a Comedy Hour, a 13-week wonder from 1970 that found the deadpan perennial presidential candidate welcoming various guests and participating in a number of fairly off-the-wall sketches. The final relic is by far the most extreme, the 1967-69 Jerry Lewis Show, edited so that only the comedy sketches are showcased. From Mama’s quiet, lovely melodies to Jerry’s knockabout farce is quite a steep drop, but that’s the kind of thing that the variety show was all about.

928.) The Consumer Guide department allows me to blend together different Funhouse fascinations as I wend my way through recent DVD releases. This week, I start out with an unusual box set, the three-disc release of the Seventies syndicated series Celebrity Bowling. The guests, clothing, and classic promotional endorsements carry the day in this collection, as does the odd pairing of celebs — where else would you see Roy Rogers face off against George Foreman, while both are paired with standup comedians? Next, I turn to the work of filmmaker Francois Ozon, whose Potiche reunites Deneuve and Depardieu, and presents for me an interesting “battle” between the tackiness of the Seventies and the melodramatic tropes of the Fifties. I close out with the wonderful Ernie Kovacs Collection, which offers both the most memorable Kovacs bits as well as the rarest kinescopes of his work that were archived by his wife, costar, and legacy keeper, the wildly underrated Edie Adams. I can say with confidence that the Funhouse is one of the only places you’ll see reviews of these releases on television (and most definitely the only place to review ’em all).

929.) The time has finally come when I have to address the end of the Jerry Lewis Telethon on the Funhouse. Curiously, this comes while Jerry is still alive and well, and so this year’s Labor Day Jerry tribute is a strange one, wherein I discuss what might have led to him being ousted from his post as National Chairman of the charity that he (without question) brought to public prominence. To commemorate the institution that was the Telethon (what exists in its place will contain none of the things that we have prized so dearly), I offer the “alpha” and the “omega,” scenes from the first telethon we have access to (chronologically the second Martin and Lewis-hosted ’thon to benefit MDA), from 1953, and the very last (I find it hard to even type that phrase) Jerry-hosted telethon, from 2010. You will be able to compare and contrast Jerry’s initial low-key approach with his later, in-your-face attitude, and can see the ad-libs that occurred when he hosted in tandem with the completely unflappable Dean, and those that emerged when he worked solo. The MDA might’ve decided they can do without the Jer, but the Funhouse most certainly cannot.

930.) Vintage: I'm proud to present the U.S. TV premiere of segments from the anthology film Chacun Son Cinema. Created in 2007 to pay tribute to the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, the film contains 3-5 minute segments by a host of world-famous directors, including several all-time Funhouse favorites. For whatever reason, the film has never found a distributor over here, but it really needs to be seen by American cinephiles, and so I am happy to present a group of the short films, which pay tribute to the experience of viewing a movie in a theater, with an audience and a projector at the back of the room. The entries in this episode were made by filmmakers hailing from a number of places, from Japan to France to Scandinavia. The most touching thing about the film is not just the variety of its content, but the filmmakers and performers that are highlighted as inspirational. And, like many anthology films, some of the entries may feel like they were tossed off, but others are beautifully crafted gems that are even better than some of the directors’ features.

931.) Three dissimilar but highly enjoyable new DVD releases are reviewed in the Consumer Guide department this week. First up is the British “new wave” musical drama Breaking Glass. The picture features the very familiar rise-and-fall of a pop star scenario, but with a social conscience and set to the strains of some bouncy synthopop from star-composer Hazel O’Connor. We next move backward in time to discuss The Complete Jean Vigo from Criterion, a collection that contains the complete works of the pioneer of poetic realism who died at the age of 29 after making only four films — one of which is masterpiece of youthful rebellion and another is indisputably one of the most romantic films of all time. I close out with a Sixties underground classic, David Holzman’s Diary, which follows a young man filming everything he does (foreshadowing nearly everything in the online world in the present day). Gorgeous NYC location footage alternates with some mind-bending pop culture “signposts.” You will enjoy this one…

932.) Back in the British comedy department, I have an update on the career of that most deadpan and sarcastic of comics, Mr. Stewart Lee. This week’s episode includes commentary on, and clips from, the very recently aired second season of his Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. This year the show had less of a budget (thus, only one short sketch per show, at the close) but contained a “devil’s advocate” in the form of producer Armando Iannucci (I’m Alan Partridge, The Thick of It). Iannucci persecutes Lee in every episode (“will there be any jokes this week, Stew?”), and the show is all the better for it. I am happy to put the spotlight on one of the more bizarre episodes, in which Stew renders onto us a Tristram Shandy-like discussion of charity that winds up being about crisps, his grandfather’s racism, and the King of Monsters.

933.) Consumer Guide episodes are a joy to do because they allow me to revisit the work of some personal favorites, First up in this episode is The Buster Keaton Short Films Collection, which contains 19 shorts from Buster’s “golden era,” copious background information about the shorts, and some fascinating Keaton-related rarities from the era (1920-23) in which they were made. Next is the Criterion release of Kubrick’s sublime caper noir The Killing, one of the last truly seminal noir features. Among other items included in the release is Kubrick’s earlier Killer’s Kiss and a kick-ass interview with the inimitable Sterling Hayden, relaxing and being wildly honest and authentic in his California home in the Eighties. I close out with Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune, a touching portrait of the singer-songwriter-activist whose music was (and is) sublime but whose life was tangled in a web of extreme emotions.

934.) Same as last week (due to a Playback screw-up in Access HQ).

935.) I’m always extremely happy to share with Funhouse viewers TV they won’t see anyplace else, so this week we take a ride — possibly for the last time? (we’ll have to see if it gets renewed) — in Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. For latecomers to the deadpan Mr. Lee, I offer commentary and background, and the clips this time out focus on Stewart’s wry (well, actually pretty vicious) take on “observational comedy” as it is practiced in the 21st century. Thus, a discussion of appliance-based humor is in order, as is some discussion of what “alternative” comedy in the Eighties wound up consisting of. The second highlighted topic is national identity — herein we find that Stewart is actually Scottish by heritage, and that he has discovered a hitherto hidden secret about British history with the aid of his friend, the genius comic-book writer, Mr. Alan Moore.

936.) Months after it went off the air, I'm still processing the wonderment that was the local late-night cable talk show All Night With Joey Reynolds. In order for me to fully deal with what I witnessed, I must (naturally enough) share it with you, and try to see if it was indeed a hallucination or was truly the most bizarrely structured gabfest in TV history. This week, as the second part of a projected three-part journey through the show's unique moments, I offer up more of Joey's oddly self-destructive meditations on pop culture in general and network television in particular. I also spotlight some unusual moments with his guests. Joey frequently boasted that the show was "unscripted," and it truly was. The program showcased some immensely talented people doing what they did best, but it also contained an enormous amount of tangents, on-air flubs, and startling leaps in (il)logic. I still can't believe it was ever on television, but it will be once more when I keep you "All Night with Joey Reynolds"....

937.) Time for Funhouse viewers to get acquainted with yet another exceptional “alternative” British comedian. The gent in question goes by the name Johnny Vegas (real name: Michael Pennington), and he has perfected a stage persona that has two very different aspects. The first is a sadsack comic who laments his life (think a fat, working-class British variant on Rodney Dangerfield); it is this aspect that was showcased in the DVD Who’s Ready for Ice Cream? directed by Stewart Lee (yeah, him again!), in which Vegas is held hostage during the Edinburgh Fringe by his new “sponsor” and a show-biz “rehabilitation” expert. The second side of the Vegas character is the anarchic vulgarian who appeared on British TV panel shows and hosted the very short-lived variety show 18 Stone of Idiot, in which he got his guests drunk (all except Elvis Costello), did ridiculous physical stunts, and devised some wonderfully weird on-the-streets interaction with the British public. As of this writing, Vegas has mostly shed his vulgarian and self-deprecating sides and works as a serious character actor, but I’m sure that “Johnny” is always waiting to come to play....

938.) Vintage: Neil Innes is a consummately talented songwriter and performer who has donned a number of guises in his career. In part one of my interview with him, we discuss the first of those guises, as one of the moving forces behind the incredible Bonzo Dog Band. Mr. Innes talks about the band’s formation and early years, as well as their interactions with the Beatles (whom I posit were influenced by the anarchic, pop-art, vaudevillian Bonzo shows they witnessed before inviting the band to guest in Magical Mystery Tour). He also reflects on the talent of his partner in all things Bonzo, the miraculously brilliant Vivian Stanshall, and the Bonzo’s two-year stint as the “house band” on the afternoon children’s television series Do Not Adjust Your Set, which starred three of the gents who, upon cancellation of the show, went on to form Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

939.) Same as last week (due to a Playback screw-up in Access HQ).

940.) The strangest TV experiences must be shared, and so I offer up the third and final episode of my exploration of the local late-night cable talk show All Night With Joey Reynolds. This installment of my journey through Joey’s mind — and oddly structured chat program — contains clips that I’ve saved for the end, including some of my favorite guests from the show’s three months on the air and some of Joey’s oddest on-air pronouncements. I attempted to convey the very special (and wildly self-indulgent) nature of what Joey was doing on the Funhouse blog, but video clips will best illustrate exactly how unique, unintentionally kitschy, and downright hallucinatory the show was.

941.) Funhouse viewers will be very familiar with the work of Armando Iannucci, the brilliant writer-producer of shows like The Day Today, I’m Alan Partridge, and The Thick of It (not forgetting Time Trumpet and Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle). This week’s episode features scenes from the only traditional sketch comedy show he ever starred in, the eponymous Armando Iannucci Shows (2001). Iannucci’s strong suit is acidic satire, thus the surprise to find him playing a Woody-like nebbish character in this themed (but still somewhat random) series. Traditional topics are tackled with the deadpan sarcasm and surreal whimsy that characterizes the best British comedy — find out the secret to being witty at a dinner party, who best threatens household appliances, and why it is sometimes necessary to taunt animals.

942.) I revisit the work of three favorite filmmakers in this week’s Consumer Guide episode. First up is Bertrand Blier, whose wonderfully raunchy and dark Going Places has been re-released on disc. I think Blier is wildly underrated, so I’m happy to celebrate a new release of one of his best-known titles, which was a breakthrough for four of its young stars. Next up are the Criterion releases of the first two Chabrol films, seen recently on my “Deceased Artiste” tributes to the “Gallic Hitchcock.” I discuss the excellent transfers (good for the moody Henri Dacae lighting) and the supplements included on these discs. Last, but by no means least, is the recent box set of the three films Aki Kaurismaki made about those fictitious cartoonlike Siberians with pointy hair and even more poiny shoes, the Leningrad Cowboys. No segment on them is complete without hearing the Red Army Chorus performing a classic rock tune (or two).

943.) Every few years another TV writer-producer is hailed as a “genius” who is scripting “the finest program to ever air on television.” There are a number of these individuals, but one who gets forgotten in the shuffle because he (thankfully) never, ever did series television is the visionary writer Dennis Potter. Potter’s “teleplays” are inarguably among the best things that ever aired (although many weren’t seen in the U.S.), and so tonight I return to his mother lode of TV perfection with the character study Moonlight on the Highway. Written and presented in ’69, the show concerns a super-fan (Ian Holm) whose only way out of his own bleak reality is the music of his hero, Thirties crooner Al Bowlly. Moonlight is best known for containing a “rough draft” sequence for Pennies from Heaven and Singing Detective (in which our beleaguered antihero lip-synchs to an old recording), but it also offers up a character who suffers from dilemmas that Potter himself had. It’s a very personal, and a very touching drama, thanks to Potter’s immaculate writing and a superb lead performance by Holm.

944.) Combining two favorite Funhouse categories, this week’s episode presents a Consumer Guide focusing on British humor, all titles from the indie Welsh DVD label Go Faster Stripe. The first items up for review are two rare audio releases from Stewart Lee, one of which is both his most whimsical and darkest creation ever. Next we move to underground cartoonist turned character comic Simon Donald, who makes a specialty of playing abrasive characters that have no idea they’re so abrasive (or do they?). Lastly we turn to a wordsmith who happens to be funny and writes very catchy tunes, poet John Hegley. Hegley is indeed a serious talent who devotes himself to whimsical topics, as you will see in the short sampling of clips I offer. Plus, he’s accompanied by master keyboardist Tony Curtis (no, not that one).

945.) The holidays always bring up specters of the past, so I’m happy to return to the subject of Sixties variety shows for the Yuletide season. This week’s ep contains no Xmas content, but it’s an in-depth view of the latest variety series to get the box set treatment, The Dean Martin Show. In the first of two episodes devoted to a discussion of, and short clips from, the series, I focus on (when else?) the Sixties, when Dean was still “working out the kinks” in the rather strange arrangement he made with NBC for his program: namely, that he wouldn’t be present all week while the crew and cast rehearsed, and would join them only for the taped version of the show. Besides the interesting (and sometimes odd) array of guests, the best thing about the program was Dean’s solo singing and duets with his guests; that aspect was, how shall I put it, “tighter” (steady on there, pallie), in the first half of the show’s nine-year run. The show is a window into the time period when it aired (albeit a smoky, whiskey-drenched, very un-p.c. window) and, as such, it makes a very nice Xmas present….

946.) To celebrate the ringing-out of the Old Year and the arrival of a New Annum in which several no-doubt-wonderfully-unforeseeable disasters will take place, I once again beckon yez all to join me in the past. In the second of two episodes devoted to a review of the first The Dean Martin Show box set, I delve into the Seventies half of the equation (minus the inclusion of any of the ballads expertly sung by Dino, which were all left out of the box). As the years went by, the show entrenched itself in politically incorrect humor, but not the National Lampoon or Norman Lear sort — rather the leering Vegas humor that predominated on the Carson show as well. Even during this time when the sketches were getting much sillier and the “special material” musical numbers got harder to wade through, the line-up of standup comics and comedy legends got stronger and stronger. Thus, a run-through of some of the guest-comics who were household names (and unforgettable presences) in the early Seventies is what you’ll encounter this week, along with the usual pungent, jovial commentary and brisk (but highly-labored-over) editing.

947.) The bard of British TV, Dennis Potter, is saluted again this week with clips from two of his transitional works. First up is Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton (1965), a pseudo-autobiographical account of Potter’s time running for local political office. Nigel Barton beautifully illustrates Potter’s superb facility with both dialogue and situations, while the later item I’m spotlighting, Follow the Yellow Brick Road (1972), reflects his desire to play with the medium of television (while brutally commenting on its lack of quality) and his fascination with hiding the deeply personal in fiction. In this case it's a narrative about a bitter TV-commercial actor who’s having a mental breakdown — or is he just too "aware"?

948.) In the first of my Deceased Artiste tributes to Ken Russell, aka “Unkle Ken” (his own spelling on Facebook), I pick up where we left off in the airing of my in-depth 2008 interview with the visionary who remained an enfant terrible well into his senior years. (Technical troubles in Access HQ Playback put the interview on “hold” for some time.) In this never-previously--aired part of my chat with the great man, we start off discussing the feature that he frequently declared his favorite of all his films, Savage Messiah. We move on to his memorably kinky sexy thrillers, including two that have been excerpted in years past on the Funhouse, the horror/sex/comedy Lair of the White Worm and the brilliantly sleazy Crimes of Passion. The episode closes out with a mention of the balance he struck in his work between the kinky pictures and the softer, calmer fare he based on historical fact or adapted from classic novels.

The fourth and final part of my very friendly and informative 2008 interview with visionary filmmaker and perennial troublemaker “Unkle Ken” Russell returns to the subject of his love for classical music and his sublime visualizations of favorite pieces. We also discuss his later TV work (a few of the better films were seen on Bravo — can anyone remember when that was a great arts network?), including excellent composer-biopics that were never seen in this country. Finally, we touch upon his other recent-vintage endeavors: his side-career writing erotic (self-published) novels and his jaw-dropping stint on the massively popular and extremely trashy Celebrity Big Brother. Mr. Russell was always game for a new experiences, and as he hit his 80s, he branched out into theater, fiction, micro-budgeted digital filmmaking, writing a column for a major British newspaper, and yes, becoming famous in England all over again by snoring and reminding people “it’s only a game” on a reality show.