the Amy Schumer thread

She looks like a cross between an angel on a Victorian greeting card and a Campbell's Soup Kid

This description made me laugh.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Thursday, July 16, 2015 11:32 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think she looks like these plus cabbage patch kid! Last week my dad asked me why Amy Shumacher was so raunchy and was telling me how he tried to explain to my mom that despite looking like a "corn-fed Midwestern angel" she was really filthy.

actually that is just the way corn-fed midwestern angels are

we know that in the midwest, which is why we stay here

amy is raunchy bc instead of being a corn-fed midwestern angel she's a NY-born jew

or like my mom says - she's just the heir to joan rivers' shtick

x-post - *I* know that but he didn't.

http://i.imgur.com/qTGckgq.gif

Are there any modern comedies that hold their nerve, and pursue their radical options to a bitter end?

Bad Santa? Observe and Report?

I thought this was pretty harsh but at the same time convinced me to just skip getting a sitter for this movie: http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/chastened-amy-trainwreck-ant-man-review/

Bad Santa doesn't really

Observe and Report def in a class all its own, no wonder it tanked Jody Hill's movie career

Oh, come on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7YU2WI_HQE

I'd say the "happy" ending is earned by the kid, whose dad is in jail, being gifted a bloody stuffed animal while alcoholic Bad Santa recovers from 8 gun shots, then heading out in his "Shit Happens When You Party Naked" shirt and espousing his life lesson by kicking the bully in the nuts.

probably some of those Bobcat Goldthwait movies

she's just the heir to joan rivers' shtick

she's not even close to Joan's level

oh plz joan doesn't need hagiography she wasn't worlds better than amy

by the simplest yardstick, Joan made me laugh and could construct wickedly funny one liners and Amy does neither

Election stays with it through the end

Are there any modern comedies that hold their nerve, and pursue their radical options to a bitter end?

Citizen Ruth ended with the "pro-choice" and "pro-life" sides in deadlock. Ruth makes off with the bag of money, but does anyone imagine her actually buying a house and turning her life around?

As for Trainwreck, beneath the Apatow Raunch(TM) it's a gender-flipped take on the trope of a playboy converted to monogamy for the love of a patient and virtuous woman.

Election is the modern template to which all contemporary satires should aspire. Even the almost great Dear White People, the best example of cinematic satire in the last few years that I've seen, goes soft at the end.

Trainwreck was fine. Was it world-changing cinema? No but it was an amusing 2 hours. Lebron James was surprisingly really good.

btw if morbs is still on the fence:

Her father is second cousin to U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer.[9][10][11]

So, I watched her TV show finally because frankly i was getting sick of the weird fanboy/girl veneration the Aus media tonguebathed her with on her recent visit.

I dont get it, and didnt find it terribly funny. Is the racism supposed to be edgy?

she's done a joint appearance or two with Cousin Schmuck since the latest armed&crazy shot up a theater where Trainwreck was playing.

which season did you watch of her show? because the second and thir seasons are markedly better than the first and the racial stuff was tempered down a lot.

Yeah the first season. Compared to the youtube stuff I'd seen, it felt really awkward.

Are there any modern comedies that hold their nerve, and pursue their radical options to a bitter end?

Penn and Teller Get Killed!

Obvious child, but i wish it were a better movie

Or appropriate behavior which i just finished and enjoyed
Or tiny furniture which is probably the second best thing lena dunham has done

other than Girls, what else has she done?

buncha stuff of middle level import but i actually meant the "one man's trash" episode of Girls as opposed to the whole series.

Dunham's short film Creative Nonfiction, which is included on the Criterion disc of Tiny Furniture, is easily the best thing I've ever seen from her.

it's on youtube, i'll give it a watch
when dunham is on and focussed, i think she's great; it's just that she's been distracted by becoming an industry and has eighty collaborators and an unrealistic schedule to pump new work out and appears to be having her voice demolished by celebrity

Dunham also (co-)wrote this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1907731/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Haven't seen tho.

i saw trainwreck - most lols are in the first 30 mins, its def too long and idk lots felt off and like sum 4-quadrant pandering but mostly watchable

124 minutes! it's amazing that nobody can ever convince Apatow to cut a comedy down to a suitable running time. at least it's a good 20 minutes shorter than Funny People.

yeah i was gonna say your description of trainwreck is applicable to more or less every apatow movie

oh boy her HBO special was not very good. I like her show just fine, but her stand up was 60 minutes of self-effacing "hey I don't take very good care of herself GET IT?" I mean most comics rely heavily on that schtick, but I expected more from her. Also, there's one bit that borrows really generously from a similar Louis CK bit.

Good, pretty low-key interview with Alec Baldwin.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/htt-amy-schumer/

I like Amy Schemer, but "Trainwreck" - or at least the first half I've seen so far - is a drag. The tone is just off, imo, as it was in "Bridesmaids," which basically plays out like a drama but awkwardly shoehorns in these bits and gags that seem better suited to silly comedies a la "Anchorman." So you (or I) get this weird disconnect, where you hear the jokes, and see the jokes, and recognize them as jokes, but they're sort of not funny. Kind of a bummer.

Trainwreck and Bridesmaids both all-time classic

TW is a little long tho it's true. but both crack me the f up

All time classic in the sense that if it isn't already it'll soon be on cable all the time, and every time you come across it you'll be like eh OK?

I liked Bridesmaids and would watch that again before this, but I don't think I'd ever see either again. Just ... movies. With movie people and movie lighting saying movie things.

Trainwreck doesn't get better.

I laughed twice I think, by the end. It was too long and also felt like it had been cut by a third, which is not a good combination.

As I was more or less watching it, I perked up when some character mentioned that six weeks had passed. I assumed it was taking place over the course of a week! So she went six weeks without introducing her celebrity surgeon boyfriend to her sister? He went six weeks without realizing she was a borderline sociopath with substance abuse issues? And then out of nowhere they bring it back to her magazine story, which was ridiculous to begin with, but which I totally forgot about.

Also, what was up with the fascinating with gore? Close-up shots of knee surgery, her dad getting stitches over his eye, the doctor getting sprayed in the face with the basketball player's blood ... were they supposed to be funny? Gross? Subversions of gross-out humor by being gross but not funny?

I guess I liked all the (easy) Lebron stuff, though it was weird that no one recognized him wherever he went. Or that he was always in NYC. Or that a celebrity sports surgeon would make so much money that Lebron would be more of a financial peer than he is made out to be. I looked up "celebrity sports surgeon" and found a real life analog to Bill Hader, and this dude is worth $100 million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Andrews_(physician)

And oh man, that final intervention with those sports figures and Matthew Broderick? WTF? They thought that was a good idea? I could barely endure.

I dunno. Apatow is weird and has a weird thing going on.

i don't think of TW as an apatow movie, it's just like watching an hourlong episode of her show with a plot weaving it together. also i think i am better at suspending disbelief at trivial inconsistencies than you are lol

two-hourlong*

It's not just trivial inconsistencies, though! Unlike her show, here the comedy is the inconsistency. Mostly it's like a pretty run of the mill brightly lit rom-com, but like I said before, these random bits are just awkwardly shoehorned in. It's like they had a boilerplate script, and a formulaic story, but then every once in a while it just goes on hold so they can riff on some stuff, with really erratic results. Vs. a movie like, I dunno, Anchorman, which is the opposite - all riffs and silly bits and gags, with a story that occasionally pops up, but not really. (I thought Bridesmaids sort of had the same problem; I still think it would have made a good drama, and probably would still be a solid drama, minus, say, long scenes of everyone shitting themselves.) But this ... maybe it was funny in the theaters, with a de facto laugh track? 'Cause it was a struggle at home. If I had to tell someone the funniest scene, I'd say ... what? I have no idea. It's just there. And I like Schumer.

Bridesmaids works for me although it's a bit long and the cop romance is p snoozeworthy - really the relationships between the women are the interesting parts. Wiig is a sympathetic failure type character and her redemption arc serves as a good framework for all the extended gags/setpieces.

That being said I don't like Schumer at all and Apatow should probably stop making movies (I have a bit more faith in Feig at this point), so I won't be seeing this.

yeah feig is pretty artless as a director but he's capable of delivering the goods on some level, like i would never tell someone 'you have to see the heat' or 'you have to see spy' but his comedies don't forget to be funny (how much they succeed is arguable i guess, but it's still their primary goal) and he's capable of depicting friendships between women in a way that doesn't feel like him patting himself on the back for passing the bechdel test. i like schumer and there were some dark places this was willing to go that i credit to the combination of her and apatow but this was still tedious and just ridiculously overlong. apatow's got this weird 'i have daughters so i understand women, i get this feminism thing now', he's not quite as far up his ass here as he was w/ this is 40 but still, dude is cooked. i was a fan of the dude for a long time, loved ben stiller show, love larry sanders, loved freaks and geeks obv, even loved undeclared, and was very happy when he finally actually had some success but man it has been a while since i've come away from one of his movies or even his interviews w/o thinking 'what a tedious schmuck'.

The Heat and Spy are fucking great. Spy had a couple of clearly improvised scenes that dragged, but overall it was hilarious, especially the interaction between McCarthy and Jason Statham. I even liked a lot of Tammy; that one was way darker than I expected it to be, McCarthy was willing to take that character into a really stupid and hostile space where if you met someone like that in real life you'd just be waiting for the racial slurs to start falling out of her mouth. But at the same time it felt class-authentic in a way movies almost always get wrong.