Big Miserable Love, Juvenile Attell, by Ric Meyers

Welcome to the January doldrums, where, even if the Writers Guild of America wasn’t on strike, there’d still be precious little good new product, since this is the season where studios dump their loss leaders … I mean, this is the month where studios allow their most challenging productions to find their audience.

Actually, both estimations are true, and the titles considered in this column will reflect that. But since I also have a little breathing space, I want to take the opportunity to toast the year of the bummer. If the movies produced at the end of 2007 are any evidence, we’re all feeling really bad. How else do you comprehend a holiday when the most lauded films share a p.o.v. so bleak and unremittingly tragic that the bitter ending of Gone With The Wind seems positively giddy? 

No Country for Old Men, Sweeney Todd, There Will Be Blood, and Atonement – all … to quote George Harrison in A Hard Day’s Night: “a drag, a well-known drag.” In fact, Atonement not only shoves your face chin-deep into misery, but holds out a small, shiny piece of possible happiness, only to take great pleasure in then ramming it into your eye socket so it can shatter against your brain. Not to say that these aren’t great films, but to quote John Cleese in the fine farce Clockwise: “It’s not the despair. The despair I can handle. It’s the hope…!”

This is where the HBO Comedy Special DVD Dave Attell: Captain Miserable comes in. I’ve been a fan of this “functionally alcoholic” comedian since the days (or should I say nights) of his Comedy Central series Insomniac, where he’d go out after his act and see what the town he was playing in had going on in the wee hours. This is his first HBO special, following in the footsteps of George Carlin, Robert Klein, and Chris Rock, among others. 

The thing that sets Attell apart is his structure and delivery. His comedy is like balancing on a bobbing ship at sea. It rolls and rocks and roils up and down, creating expectations that he’ll then shift with sudden lurches of profane logic that entertain, shock, catch you by surprise, or all of the above. The concert is Attell at his best, but also comes with deleted jokes (which are funny, but easy to excise since they don’t lead to more elaborate examination) and three Insomniac-esque featurettes of Dave at a rock festival, on a comedy cruise, and, most interestingly, doing a USO show for our troops in the middle east.

Probably my highest compliment is I wish all three featurettes were longer – in fact, a full thirty minutes each. Even so, Attell’s work is a nice balance of self-deprecating bitterness and laugh-out-loud effrontery, so it makes a great palate cleanser between cinema agony-fests. Speaking of agony-fests, here comes Big Bang Love, Juvenile A – from the Asiaphiles over at AnimEigo in a two-disc set. If you like your angst with energy, mystery, and existentialism, this is the film for you.

It’s the latest offering from revolutionary Japanese film director Takeshi Miike, who has shocked and exhilarated audiences with Audition and Ichi the Killer, among others. Compared to those milestones of bizarre subject matter and ultra-violent content, Juvenile A (it’s original title translating out as 4.6 Billion Years of Love) is a walk in the park. It sorta concerns an otherworldly reform-school-slash-prison where two hunky guys discover a mutual bond beyond time and space which sparks a surreal murder mystery exploration … maybe.

The second disc of special features gives ample evidence of the filmmakers’ approach. The “making of” doc is filled with actors explaining that they “didn’t get” the script, and writers announcing that they felt the original novel the film was adapted from was unfilmable, while both maintain their faith in the director’s skills to make it all work. Then there’s an interview with the director, which has Miike suggesting that his film be watched when you’re really, really tired. “Just let it wash over you,” he basically suggests. 

Not a bad idea, but Juvenile A also lends itself to intense, wide-awake, study as well. It’s that kind of a ready-made cult film. As always with AnimEigo, the DVD includes exceptional subtitling and video program notes to truly immerse you into the culture the film came from. The great thing about this movie, as in the work of Brecht, Pinter, Ionesco, and Beckett, is that it’s open for interpretation. It doesn’t have to be a bummer at all, if you decide you don’t want it to be … unlike some beautifully made but staggeringly unhappy, mean, and depressing films I could mention. 

Ric Meyers is the author of Murder On The Air, Doomstar, The Great Science-Fiction Films, Murder in Halruua, For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films, Fear Itself, and numerous other books and has (and sometimes still is) on the editorial staff of such publications as Famous Monsters of Filmland, Starlog, Fangoria, Inside Kung-Fu, The Armchair Detective and Asian Cult Cinema. He’s also a television and motion picture consultant whose credits include The Twilight Zone, Columbo, A&E’s Biography andThe Incredibly Strange Film Show.