Carl Kozlowski is a professional standup comic and newspaper reporter who won the title of “America’s Funniest Reporter” in a national competition at the world-famous Laugh Factory comedy club. He has performed with such comedy superstars as Dane Cook, Dave Chappelle, Lewis Black, Mitch Hedberg, Paul Rodriguez and Jake Johansen, and was featured in both the Chicago Comedy Festival and the Westside Stand Up Festival.
Kozlowski co-authored (with fellow comic Tim Joyce, who's his best friend but does NOT share his political views AT ALL! ) two nationally-published humor books: Life: the Final Frontier (2001) and Seize the Day Job: The Humor Book Al-Qaeda Kept You From Reading (2008). He has embarked on two national tours for these books, performing in clubs from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine with particular emphasis in Boston, Chicago and New York City.
Seize the Day Job, a spoof on self-help advice and etiquette books that was endorsed with cover quotes from superstar comic Carlos Mencia and Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs, is available through his website, americasfunniestreporter.com, where you can read more than 100 of his articles, watch his videos and listen to his podcasts.
Kozlowski recently made his debut with conservative icon Evan Sayet’s “RIGHT to Laugh” comedy show at the Laugh Factory and is the co-host and co-producer (with Jake Belcher and Brant Thoman) of the comedic and very libertarian talk show “Grand Theft Audio,” which can be heard anywhere worldwide at www.latalkradio.com LIVE each Thursday night at 7 to 8 p.m. PST and on podcast at latalkradio.com/grand. The show is like “’The View” for guys and takes a passionately anti-Obama tone to all things political while also addressing entertainment and everything under the sun with superstar guests like Carlos Mencia and Bob Saget. They will be expanding their show to two hours in September. They welcome any and all advertising and moral support.
Carl Kozlowski
Book Excerpt: ‘Seize the Day Job’ — Part 1
by Carl KozlowskiAs much as I love writing about film and politics, my first and biggest love lies in writing humor pieces of all types: jokes for my own and others’ stand-up acts, screenplays and TV scripts that admittedly haven’t sold yet, plus “SNL”-style sketches for Chicago’s legendary Second City theater. But my proudest accomplishment in humor writing came with the book “Seize the Day Job! The Humor Book Al-Qaeda Kept You from Reading,” which I co-wrote with Chicago comic Tim Joyce.
It was a spoof of self-help advice books and offers rants and essays about the crazy world we’re living in, mainly focusing on most of society’s utter lack of manners and common sense. And because Tim and I are on COMPLETELY opposite sides of the fence politically, that dynamic made the writing crisper, funnier, edgier and a whole lot of fun to read.
We first teamed up with a book called “Life: The Final Frontier”, which came out in Aug. 2001 and was doing well until 9/11 came along and we had 55 radio interviews canceled because the nation understandably went into mourning. But last year, we decided to try again in the true American can-do, bounce-back spirit and we got the rights to “Life” back, added 60 percent new material and re-released it through an indie publisher called Razor 7, with glowing cover endorsements from such comic and writing luminaries as Comedy Central superstar Carlos Mencia, Esquire editor and two-time national best selling humorist AJ Jacobs, and Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
| 
NBC’s ObamaVision Causes Facebook Brawl
by Carl Kozlowski
It all seemed to start so simply, as I watched this week’s “SNL” and saw an NBC in-house commercial bragging about how all this week’s Thursday night comedies will be packed with environmental propaganda, including an appearance from Al Gore on “30 Rock.” So I hopped on my Facebook account and wrote the following response before heading out for the next 10 hours:
“So NBC’s bragging that all their Thursday comedies will be pro-green propaganda this Thursday, so much that Al Gore’s gonna guest on ‘30 Rock”?! Ugh. OK I’ll do my part – by throwing out my television. (Not a fan of Al, in case you can’t tell. Find the story of why i hate him buried amid my blog topics at americasfunniestreporter.com.)”
Three friends commented quickly afterwards in support of me. But then, two others – a former boss from a Chicago magazine named Jane, and an acquaintance who’s a public school teacher living in Whittier – chimed in to express their disagreement. Caught in the middle was one of my best friends and co-host of my weekly Internet talk show “Grand Theft Audio,” Jake Belcher. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
‘2012′: Silly Bombastic Fun
by Carl KozlowskiThere are some filmmakers whom movie fans turn to for serious, introspective fare, like Oliver Stone or Lasse Hallstrom. Others are counted on as masters of the fantastic, like Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson. And for comedy these days, you can’t beat Judd Apatow.
But if you just wanna see stuff blow up on an epic scale and watch the world fall apart in a good old-fashioned disaster movie, then check out nearly any Roland Emmerich film: “Independence Day,” “Godzilla,” “The Day After Tomorrow” and “10,000 B.C.” provide hours of jaw-dropping action to go with hilariously poor logic in plotting and laughably bad dialogue. Yet they are often undeniably entertaining despite their faults, and with his new film “2012,” Emmerich has fashioned his biggest, craziest cinematic opus yet. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
‘Precious’: Unforgettable Story of Hope, Self-Reliance
by Carl KozlowskiSome lives slip through the cracks, people who you might pass everyday without giving a second thought. Precious is one of those people.
Vastly overweight and carrying her second child at the far-too-young age of 16, Precious is an African-American girl living in the Bronx who’s stuck four years behind her age group in the 7th grade, with a single mother who is verbally, emotionally and physically abusive towards her. Her father is only in the picture enough to come over and rape her, which led to her first child being born with Down Syndrome, and Precious utterly unaware of proper prenatal care or even a delivery date for her second.
The only thing that brings her any sense of joy is her imagination, which Precious uses to block out horrific moments of the past and present with visions of herself on red carpets and other glamorous situations. But when a school official steps in and orders her to go to an alternative school for troubled young women, a concerned teacher, social worker and eventually a male post-natal nurse discover the extent of Precious’ problems and help her take the drastic actions needed to save her life. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
Review: Clooney’s ‘Men Who Stare at Goats’ Biased but Amusing
by Carl KozlowskiGive the military-industrial complex an unlimited budget, and it’ll find unlimited ways to kill people. From megaton nuclear missiles to Donald Rumsfeld’s allegedly humane, small-scale nuclear “bunker busters,” and from robot soldiers to Barack Obama’s beloved predator drone planes, our nation’s finest scientific minds will find ever-newer ways to obliterate anything that gets in the path of the American Way.
Of course, our enemies do the best they can on the killing front as well, and at one point it was widely believed that the Soviets were engaged in training soldiers in psychic warfare. British journalist Jon Ronson stumbled across America’s response to those mental-murder programs and wrote about them extensively in his humorous nonfiction book “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”
Now, with the help of screenwriter Peter Straughan, who has invented a streamlined story in which to connect the book’s hilarious and almost impossibly wild anecdotes, “Goats” has hit the nation’s movie screens. Fast-moving, funny, and supremely subversive entertainment of a kind that Hollywood rarely takes chances with anymore, it also arrives at a rich historical moment, as President Obama’s own decision on whether to surge or pull troops out of Afghanistan hangs in the imminent balance. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
‘This Is It’: A Genuine Thriller
by Carl KozlowskiMichael Jackson was the epitome of a human Rorschach test. To his fans, he was a Messiah of entertainment, seemingly able to transcend the mere mortal abilities of nearly anyone in the history of show business. To his detractors, he was an eccentric who was also repeatedly accused of molesting children. To yet others, he was both.
When he died of an apparent drug overdose just shy of his 50th birthday on June 25, while rehearsing for an intense 50-show engagement in London, it seemed that this conundrum would never be solved and that his life and legacy would be forever shadowed. Then word emerged that concert promoter AEG had decided to sell extensive footage it shot of the show’s rehearsals and put it up for bidding war, which Sony Pictures won for $60 million. Debate raged throughout Hollywood and the business world about whether this was an appropriate outcome, or if it reeked of exploitation. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
Review: ‘Amelia’ Fails to Take Flight
by Carl KozlowskiThere are certain mysteries that place a stronghold on the world’s imagination. The existence (or lack thereof) of the Bermuda Triangle, Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and UFOs are primary among these questions, inducing shivers in those who would like to speculate about the possibility of strange life forms on our fair planet.
And then there is a different sort of mystery, one in which we know someone really existed and then suddenly, simply disappeared without a trace. The famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart was one of those people, the first woman to fly across an ocean who went on to attempt being the first woman to fly around the earth when her plane encountered a series of problems and likely – but not definitively – crashed, with her never to be found again. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
‘Paranormal Activity’ All too Normal
by Carl KozlowskiHumans like to think they know the difference between truth and fiction. But in the modern media age, even as we feel technology has made us more savvy than ever, there’s always a disquieting edge that makes us wonder what’s really the truth and where are we being manipulated. Is Fox News really “fair and balanced” just ‘cause they say so, for instance? Or is Obama really bringing “Hope” back to America just because his colorful posters say so?
Back in 1999, a movie called “The Blair Witch Project” burst into the American pop culture consciousness from seemingly nowhere. It appeared to be (and was marketed to viewers as) a raw documentary film about three student filmmakers and their tragic last days experiencing supernatural forces while lost in the wilderness, but in reality it was a fictional film made for under $30,000 by a team of indie filmmakers and actors and had caused a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival months before. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
‘Where the Wild Things Are’: Beautifully Realized By a Visionary Director
by Carl KozlowskiThere are some books that are so beloved and iconic, they’ll probably never be made into films. “Catcher in the Rye,” for one. Or “A Confederacy of Dunces,” for another. And for decades, the children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” seemed to be among those topping that list as well.
Of course, there were a couple of factors that added to the burden of anyone willing to take a swing at “Things.” The book is only 10 sentences long and takes about eight minutes to fully absorb even when one drinks in the stunningly detailed and otherworldly drawings of its creator, Maurice Sendak. So to stretch it into the 90 minutes or more needed for a feature film, filmmakers would have to invent massive amounts of material, creating the risk that their newly added sequences would upset rather than delight the fans who made the book a mega-seller in the first place. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
‘Couples Retreat’ Satisfying if Unspectacular
by Carl KozlowskiYou’ve met couples like this before: longtime marrieds approaching 40 and facing stress from fertility problems, work-aholism, lack of communication or just flat-out losing the spark and giving up hope. In fact, you might have lived through these problems yourself.
But in the new movie “Couples Retreat,” which not only co-stars but is co-written by real-life best friends Vince Vaughn (“Wedding Crashers”) and Jon Favreau (a popular character actor who has also directed “Iron Man”), these average middle-class American problems are given hilarious voice through vivid performances and rapid-fire dialogue. Or, more accurately, the movie shines when it focuses on those aspects of life in the first half of the film, while disappointingly falling off a cliff for much of the unfocused second half. Yet, just like a real-life marriage that lasts, the ups outnumber the downs enough to make this a satisfying if not spectacular night at the movies.
“Couples Retreat” kicks off with uptight couple Jason (Jason Bateman) and Cynthia (Kristin Bell of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”) begging their other friends – workaholic Dave (Vaughn) and his neglected wife Ronnie (Malin Akerman of the underrated remake of “The Heartbreak Kid”), and high school sweethearts-turned-bored middle-agers Joey (Favreau) and Lucy (Kristin Davis of “Sex and the City”), and just-separated Shane (Faizon Love) and his ridiculously young new girlfriend Trudy (scene-stealing Kali Hawk) – to join them on a retreat to the Club Med-style resort of Eden. If they can get a group of four couples together, they can all go half-price – which sounds great to the three seemingly healthy couples, as long as they’re assured they won’t have to go through couples counseling. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
‘Capitalism: A Love Story’ Targets Both Right and Left
by Carl KozlowskiFiring a red-hot cannon blast at both parties and the excesses of America’s capitalist system, filmmaker Michael Moore’s latest documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story” is also his most stylistically and emotionally mature work to date. Launching with a string of film clips that parallel the fall of the Roman Empire to our present societal hot mess, the film serves up big laughs with its harrowing vision of just how far off the rails our present economic crisis has taken the nation.
Moore has made plenty of claims that “Capitalism” is the summation of two full decades of work, harking back to the 1989 release of his seminal “Roger & Me,” and that this film is lobbing bombs at the figures involved. Yet much of the time, the film has a mournful, yearning approach in showing Moore’s desire that America return to the capitalism of the pre-Jimmy Carter years: he shows that the system’s promises worked out splendidly throughout most of the nation’s history, and in particular from the boom years after WWII all the way through Ford before the nation hit Carter’s infamous assessment of “malaise” in the late ‘70s. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
BIG HOLLYWOOD INTERVIEW: Quentin Tarantino, a Glorious ‘Basterd’
by Carl KozlowskiEditor’s Note: After the publication of this piece we made an internal discovery that this interview was not a one-on-one interview between our writer and Quentin Tarantino, and that some of the questions attributed to “Big Hollywood” were asked by other journalists in what was a roundtable interview.
Upon discovering this, we temporarily removed the piece from the site until all the facts were known and a proper correction could be added.
Quentin Tarantino exploded on the world film scene in 1992 with “Reservoir Dogs,” a brutally profane yet ingeniously plotted and often funny deconstruction of the heist-film genre. He took things to a whole other level in 1994 with “Pulp Fiction,” reviving the foundering careers of superstars John Travolta and Bruce Willis while launching the star careers of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman while winning a Best Screenplay Oscar himself.
Yet in the 15 years since that classic, Tarantino hasn’t been able to score quite as big an impact. 1997’s “Jackie Brown” made just $39 million, while the two “Kill Bill” films scored $70 million each yet were considered hyper-violent trifles compared to what he was really capable of. And he really bottomed out with 2007’s “Death Proof,” which made up half of “Grindhouse,” a three-hour homage to the trashy drive-in films of America’s past. Its 21st-century audience didn’t get the joke and largely ignored it, earning just $27 million at the US box office. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
‘Informant!’ Refreshingly Apolitical, Highly Entertaining
by Carl KozlowskiMark Whitacre had a boring job as a scientist and executive at Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s largest food-processing companies. Trapped in small-town Illinois hell with his wife and kids after previously living with them in the capitals of Europe, he still loved to drive fast cars and pursue as much luxury as his rural life could afford, all the while reading Michael Crichton and John Grisham novels that he believed were all too realistic in their depictions of corporate and governmental intrigue and malfeasance.
Stir all those factors together with his insider knowledge that ADM was colluding with overseas food companies in one of the planet’s biggest price-fixing schemes ever, and the fact that Whitacre became both one of the FBI’s best informants ever may not have seemed all that surprising. But the fact that he also hid a highly unstable tendency to lie or leak information as well also made him one of the Feds’ most nerve-wracking and unreliable head cases ever – and it’s this dichotomy that forms the center of director Steven Soderbergh’s head-spinning and comically offbeat take on the ADM scandal, “The Informant!” (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
Review: ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ Summer’s Greatest Movie?
by Carl KozlowskiSome guys never seem to catch a break in life. Lance Clayton is one of them.
In “World’s Greatest Dad,” the recently-released, extremely dark and sometimes perverse new comedy from writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait (we know, we’re just as surprised as you), Clayton (Robin Williams) is the epitome of the put-upon, browbeaten modern middle-class American man. He’s a high-school poetry teacher with hardly any students, a girlfriend who’s afraid to be seen in public with him, and a son named Kyle (played with an amazing level of scorn by Daryl Sabara) who surely must rank as the foulest, most awful teenager in the history of movies.
Lance does have dreams of greatness, however. In fact, he’s in the middle of sending off his fifth novel for agent consideration, even though he’s never been published before. But ** SPOILER ALERT ** one night, after finding his son dead from a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation that occurred while watching porn on this computer, Lance suddenly feels a unique burst of inspiration: in order to cover up the shame of his son’s actual cause of death, he moves Kyle’s body, re-hangs him in his closet and writes the perfect suicide note so that the policeman who finds him will think that it was just another, normal teenage suicide. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
Text of Obama Address to the Nation’s Schoolchildren
by Carl Kozlowski
On Sept. 8, President Barack Obama will attempt to address all the nation’s schoolchildren with an address delivered live over CSPAN and on the White House website. No doubt, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNBC and CNN will all carry it as well. The speech has drawn controversy because concerned parents have noted that no one has explained what the president intends to say to the children.
Yet here, in an exclusive advance coup of epic proportions, is the internal, top-secret copy of that speech. It reads as follows: (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
Review: ‘Extract’-ing Laughs is Easy
by Carl KozlowskiJoel is just an average guy, a quiet yet well-to-do American living in a small town who happens to own a flavor-extract company. He’d like to sell the plant, retire early and get back to a healthier sex life with his bored, put-upon wife.
But just as he seems prepared to make a deal with food giant General Mills to sell the plant for good, a freak accident occurs inside his plant that lops off one of a long-time employee’s testicles. The other is hanging by a thread, a metaphor that is apt for Joel’s life as it suddenly spirals out of control via a surreal round-robin of relationships that come unhinged and turn his life upside-down in the new comedy film “Extract.”
Written and directed by Mike Judge, who has chronicled the modern everyman’s life in the long-running and brilliant Fox cartoon “King of the Hill” as well as in the short-running yet brilliant 1999 film “Office Space,” “Extract” takes a sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued look at middle-class values in Middle America. But once again, Judge proves that he possesses a true love for the common, working-class Joe that translates into comedy that uplifts rather than demeans the lives of its characters. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
Cult Classic ‘The Room’: So Bad, It’s Brilliant
by Carl KozlowskiIt happens all the time in Hollywood: A friend has a dream of making a movie and wants to hire his friends as cast and crew. But most of the time, those dreams stay dreams, as the money to fund those projects rarely materializes.
For South Pasadena-based actor Greg Sestero, however, the dream became reality when his friend Tommy Wiseau managed to raise $6 million to write, direct and star in a movie called “The Room.” Keeping a promise he made years before when the two thespians met in a San Francisco acting class, Wiseau hired Sestero to be his co-star.
That should have been a happy ending, with the film either fading into oblivion or rising out of Sundance-style film festivals to become an indie sensation. Instead, “The Room” became wildly popular for an entirely different reason: it’s regarded as one of the great camp classics of all time, a movie considered so bad it’s brilliant.
Its monthly midnight showings at the Laemmle Sunset 5 theater in West Hollywood routinely sell out all five of the theater’s screens simultaneously, with crowds that have turned the viewing experience into the craziest interactive movie party since “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
‘Inglourious Basterds’ Review
by Carl KozlowskiTake a ruthless Nazi leader who can order the deaths of a Jewish family with the same dispassion with which he requests a glass of milk. Mix his story with that of a Jewish woman who flees the slaughter of her family only to grow up and discover an opportunity to kill Hitler himself. Add in a cocky American Lieutenant named Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) who leads a secret mission in which each of his men are ordered to scalp 100 Nazi, and you’ve got the combustible mix of lead characters who cross paths with explosive results in Oscar-winning writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, “Inglourious Basterds.”
Bringing together his usual strengths as a director of intense performances from sterling casts, an amazing score pasted together from classic scores of past films, incredibly sharp and catchy dialogue and a warped time frame that that will throw viewers through a satisfying series of loops, Tarantino has easily made his best film since “Pulp Fiction.” Coming off a humiliating misfire with 2007’s “Death Proof,” which was half of the box-office disaster known as “Grindhouse,” Tarantino has admitted that he felt the need to double down on his strengths and prove that he was just as relevant and inventive as ever. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
Review: ‘District 9’–An Alien Internment Camp?
by Carl KozlowskiIs it possible for a film to be both a brilliant, exciting piece of entertainment, and also a completely illogical piece of heavy-handed political propaganda? It is, if the new science-fiction oddity “District 9” is any indication.
Led by a stunning performance by Sharlto Copley, who is not only unknown to audiences outside South Africa, but who had never acted in anything but short films before, “District 9” blasts through its running time with a furious mix of action and satire. Yet its central plotline, focusing on what might happen if space aliens approached Johannesburg and were then held in a segregated district for nearly three decades, is riddled with holes and bangs viewers over the head with its allegories of racial discrimination harkening back to the evil days of that nation’s apartheid policies.
The film kicks off with a fast-paced blend of fake newscasts and faux-documentary footage shot by a camera crew that’s been assigned to cover a mass evacuation of aliens from their home in the city’s District 9. The aliens had come in a giant mother ship back in 1982, but no one has ever figured out why they arrived and left the ship to hover eternally over Johannesburg. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
Between D*ck Jokes, Judd Apatow Upholds Traditional Values
by Carl KozlowskiQuick! Think fast – who’s making the most morally conservative films in Hollywood?
The answer may surprise you, but it’s none other than Judd Apatow. Yes, the writer-director of “The 40 Year Old Virgin,” “Knocked Up” and the new film “Funny People” might have a reputation for creating profanity-filled R-rated raunch, but in reality they’re actually films that uphold traditional values. And the fact that Apatow sneaks messages that are pro-life in “Knocked Up,” anti-promiscuity in “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and (SPOILER ALERT) upholds marriage against the temptation and forgiveness of infidelity in “Funny People” under the surface of all the dirty talk, means that he’s found a way to preach to far more than the usual choir and spread positive moral messages to those who might otherwise never choose to hear them.
I remember the night I first walked in to see “Virgin” back in 2005. I thought that it would just be one big sex comedy poking fun at the titular character. But as written by Apatow and the film’s star, Steve Carell, the film actually turned every convention one might have expected upside down.
Carell’s Andy had the “problem” of being a 40 year-old virgin, but after initally laughing at him and trying to get him laid, Andy’s co-worker friends slowly start to respect him. One who brags about cheating on his girlfriends winds up turning monogamous when he sees his impending baby on an ultrasound, while another may find his perfect match with a kinky gal but by the end it’s true love nonetheless. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
Review: ‘Julie & Julia’–Traditional Filmmaking With Traditional Values
by Carl KozlowskiIt’s rare enough these days to see a movie in which one story is well-told, much less two stories. It’s even more rare when a filmmaker is able to balance two completely different plotlines and make both equally enjoyable and compelling. Yet with her new film “Julie & Julia,” writer-director Nora Ephron (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail”) pulls off such feats so impressively that the movie could possibly wind up with an Oscar nomination at the end of the year now that the Academy has expanded the awards to ten nominations and will likely finally include a couple of comedies each year.
“Julie & Julia” follows the amusingly parallel lives of chef Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep), who achieved worldwide fame while revolutionizing the art of cooking starting in the ‘50s, and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a young New York City woman searching for identity in 2002. Powell longs to be a successful writer like her friends and yet is trapped processing insurance claims from victims of the World Trade Center attacks. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
John Hughes: Don’t You Forget About Him
by Carl KozlowskiIt’s odd to consider which celebrity death will hit you the hardest. Michael Jackson’s bizarre and untimely passing certainly floored people around the planet. But for me, it’s this morning’s passing of John Hughes while he was walking in New York City at the also-far-too-young age of 59 that has hit me like a ton of bricks.
Just last night, I went through my DVD collection and stacked up all the movies I own of his, and was planning to spend the next week watching them whenever I had a spare moment. Just thinking of the titles brought back 25 years’ worth of memories, from “Sixteen Candles” to “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” and from the three Chevy Chase “Vacation” movies to the immortal holiday classic “Planes, Trains & Automobiles.”
“Pretty in Pink”
These weren’t just movies to me, and to many others in my generation and the ones since. They were touchstones of our lives, that freeze-framed moments and memories both of the times we watched them and the amazing way in which they seemed to shine a light on our existence. And in particular, one character and one movie of John’s shaped my entire showbiz career ambitions.
“Pretty in Pink” is the movie that made me want to write movies and led me to idolize John Hughes as a movie god ever since. Why? Well, I used to have a crush on Molly Ringwald but I got over that – especially when I met her for about two seconds last fall and she blatantly tried to keep it at two seconds. (Rude!) (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
I’ll Hump You, Man: How Far Will the ‘Bromance’ Go?
by Carl KozlowskiWe’ve come a long way since tough-guy Humphrey Bogart let Ingrid Bergman away in “Casablanca,” only to tell another dude, “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.” Or have we?
Today, we’re living in the age of the “bromance,” where guys are no longer squinty-eyed, deep-voiced bastions of macho attitude like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne or Bogart were. Now, we’ve got dudes who wear pastels and have feelings, sharing how much they care for each other, even waking up together instead of with the girl they were lusting after in “Superbad.”
Don’t get me wrong, these are mostly hilarious movies in which men are encouraged to be just a bit more sensitive. But one’s gotta wonder how far things are gonna go with the release of the new movie “Humpday,” which is now playing in “selected theaters” and is likely to stay that way no matter how “open minded” our society gets.
The premise of “Humpday” isn’t focused on a workplace slogging through the midweek boredom of a Wednesday in Cubicle Land. No, it’s about two straight guys – one married, one single – who are really great, old friends – so great, in fact, that one of them dares the other to make a porno together for an amateur porn contest where the goal is to break creative boundaries. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
‘Funny People’ Review: Mostly Funny
by Carl KozlowskiAs one of America’s most popular comedians, George Simmons seemingly has the world on a string. But then one thing happens that can ruin everything: he’s diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia and told that even with aggressive experimental treatments, he only has an eight percent chance of survival.
That happy-sad dichotomy is at the heart of the new film “Funny People,” in which Adam Sandler plays Simmons in a terrific performance that no doubt draws on his own experiences as a wildly successful comedy star. As written and directed by Judd Apatow in his third film, following “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up,” the movie has an intimate awareness of the pain that often lies behind the laughter generated by our modern court jesters. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
Coming Out of the Comedy Closet
by Carl Kozlowski[Ed. Note: Carl's 'Grand Theft Audio' airs tonight and every Thursday night on LATalkRadio.com at 7pm PST]
It’s not easy being a conservative in comedy these days. Folks like Evan Sayet, and no doubt Drew Carey or Kelsey Grammer, can tell you that.
Add in the fact that I’m just trying to get to where they are, and not already fully entrenched in success, and a lot of people would wonder if admitting I’m a conservative (actually, libertarian but pro-life to boot) isn’t tantamount to career suicide. The fact I’m also a reporter in the ultra-liberal world of alternative-weekly newspapers, and some would say that I might as well pick out my casket.
I’ll admit that I was a virtually a card-carrying liberal for about a decade until I reached my moment of conversion last summer. Before that, I was hoping for Hillary to win it all, having grown up in Arkansas with Bill ‘n’ Hill keeping things colorful, and then watching Bill keep us out of wars and leaving us with a budget surplus while in the White House.
I bought the Kool-Aid that Bush could do nothing right and was a fervent follower of Michael Moore (I even have a photo with him where we sadly almost look like twins). But when I saw my brethren in the news media suddenly fawning blindly over the Chicago mystery man Barack Obama, giving him the easiest free pass to the White House I’d ever seen despite the fact he had less relevant job experience than it takes to manage a department store, I started to wonder if maybe my profession and its liberal slant had veered dangerously off-course. (more…)
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
|
Follow Us on Twitter
Subscribe via RSS
Tips & Feedback