jerry lewis

Does Canada make the most consistently interesting but largely unseen television programmes? Possibly: any country which can give the world The Beachcombers (filmed in quaint Gibsons and sold to 50 countries in the Seventies) and also the very droll Corner Gas (sold to considerably fewer) gets my vote as a nation which has found its points...
> film/3455/corner-gas-season-three-madman-dvd/

It seems curious that Madonna, who has had the unerring instinct to reinvent herself in the image and iconography of others (yesterday Marlene, today Marilyn) has never – at least not yet – alighted on Cleopatra for inspiration and a new dress code. Here, at least in myth, is a wannabe seductress and style-setter for...
> writingelsewhere/3337/cleopatra-histories-dreams-and-distortions-by-lucy-hallett-hughes/

Within minutes, literally fewer than five, Marcel Marceau is back in the unadorned dressing room at Sydney's Capitol Theatre and, still in full pancake makeup, enthusiastically giving an interview after another thunderously received performance.The speed at which this private audience has been expedited and the sheer rush of words from a man...
> culturalelsewhere/1682/marcel-marceau-interviewed-2001-its-all-talk-talk-talk/

There's the widely held if rather snooty view that fart noises and belching are only amusing to adolescent boys. This rather ignores the obvious: that there will always be adolescent boys, and even more people who have been adolescent boys. Which perhaps explains the enduring if low appeal of this outing by Mad magazine's Alfred E Neuman....
> fromthevaults/3235/alfred-e-neuman-its-a-gas-1963/

Who said the gay power movement lacked humour? Quite the opposite in fact, and humour is a powerful weapon. This one-off appeared on the Harvey Kubernick-curated double album English as a Second Language in 1983 on Freeway Records, another in his series of recordings of poets and spoken word artists from LA which included people like...
> fromthevaults/3107/age-of-consent-fight-back-rap-1983/

When a history of animated film is written, it is possible that the largest chapter about how this genre emerged will go not to Walt Disney or Otto (Felix the Cat) Mesmer but to a modest quietly spoken Scots-born Canadian, Norman McLaren. McLaren’s whimsical films charmed and delighted audiences for nearly 50 years. He entered the...
> film/2010/norman-mclaren-animator-making-the-screen-come-alive/

Before they got into movies like Animal House and the Vacation series (with Chevy Chase), National Lampoon was a satirical magazine which also delivered a very funny sideline in records such as Lemmings (which skewered Woodstock). One of their funniest album, but hard to find unfortunately as it doesn't appear to be on CD reissue anywhere,...
> fromthevaults/3067/national-lampoon-im-a-woman-1975/

You might have thought the Hayseed Dixie joke -- a band from the fanciful Deer Lick Holler playing bluegrass treatments of (mostly) rock songs, interviewed here -- would have run its course by now. But eight albums in they are still going. And of course it is still kinda fun: here they knock off Queen (Bohemian Rhapsody), Black Sabbath,...
> music/2973/hayseed-dixie-killer-grass-cooking-vinyl/

While British commentators congratulate their culture on its history of comedy and satire (Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, David Frost, Peter Cook, Monty Python et al) they conspiciously fail to note that America had a similar, but often darker and more biting, tradition. Stan Freberg was -- although at the time of this writing he is still...
> fromthevaults/2964/stan-freberg-the-old-payola-roll-blues-1960/

There has been a long tradition of mocking the pretentions of rock and pop singers, which isn't that hard. Many of them take themselves very seriously. When National Lampoon for example got stuck into a Pink Floyd-like musician who wanted to create a massive rock opera (on their '75 album Goodbye Pop, helmed by Christopher Guest of Spinal...
> fromthevaults/2814/peter-sellers-the-trumpet-volunteer-1958/

Well, if you can have an Olympic event on the parallel bars, why not on a vertical bar -- especially when many thousands of people across the world are dedicated to it. So why not pole dancing as demonstation sport at the next Olympics leading to official recognition as sport thereafter? Well, here is why not. Pole dancing is, like, just...
> film/2947/immodesty-blaize-presents-burlesque-undressed-emi-dvd/

As Nick Tosche revealed in his remarkable biography Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, Dean Martin didn't have to try hard at anything: he was good looking, could sing whatever was put in front of him, was a natural straight man and comedian, and he'd just turn up on a movie set and do his lines with charm, ease and utter...
> fromthevaults/2817/dean-martin-my-rifle-my-pony-and-me-1959/

With Will Birch's biography and the film of his life Sex and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll (Andy Serkis as Ian), there is something of a revival and re-appreciation of Ian Dury going on, a decade after his death at age 57. Dury came to the punk era as someone more than a decade older than most performers, and he had considerable stage experience:...
> fromthevaults/2853/ian-dury-razzle-in-my-pocket-1977/

The offspring of Hollywood were just as swept up in Beatlemania as anyone. The two sons of comedian Soupy Sales -- Hunt and Tony, drums and bass respectively -- were in Tony and the Tigers who appeared on Hullabaloo and had a couple of records out . . . although went on to more interesting things later when they joined Todd Rundgren, Iggy...
> fromthevaults/2847/gary-lewis-and-the-playboys-this-diamond-ring-1965/

On New Zealand's national Poetry Day in 2004 a television news team buttonholed people on the street and asked them to recite a piece of poetry. One guy did an impromptu local variant of Spike Milligan's Silly Old Baboon. By coincidence, that very day a letter writer to the New Zealand Herald expressed outrage about the artist et.al...
> writingelsewhere/2734/the-essential-spike-milligan-complied-by-alexander-games/

Everyone is allowed their guilty secrets when it comes to bad movies: I have an unnatural affection for Zardoz (Sean Connery in the future somewhere) and The Long Ships (in which Sidney Poitier seems to swim from somewhere Moorish to the land of the Vikings). These are stupid but fun and allow you plenty of couchtime to add up the...
> film/2749/the-wild-women-of-wongo-a-film-by-james-l-walcott-1958-triton-dvd/

This irreverent outfit who sing songs ostensibly for children but with major adult appeal, have appeared at Elsewhere previously with their very silly The Bestest and Most Horriblest Songs for Children. They are more Spike Milligan and Monty Python than Teletubbies and Play School. This one is aimed rather further up the kiddie demographic...
> music/2726/fatcat-and-fishface-birdbrain-jayrem/

In retrospect, one of the funniest incidents in the Flight of the Conchords' second television series was when the nice but naive New Zealand prime minister Brian turned up and seemed out of his depth, and desperate to be liked. Who knew that the actual PM John Key would later turn up on Letterman looking alarmingly like Brian? But the...
> music/2634/flight-of-the-conchords-i-told-you-i-was-freaky-subpop-rhythmethod/

The relationship between some movie directors and composers is so close that it is hard to imagine certain films without their soundtracks: Hitchcock had Bernard Herrmann's gripping scores for Psycho and North by Northwest and others; Werner Herzog with the German avant-rock band Popul Vuh providing the eerie music to Aguirre, Wrath of God and...
> essentialelsewhere/830/ennio-morricone-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-1966/

It is a peculiar thing that Corner Gas -- a wry, understated and very droll Canadian comedy series -- isn't screened on New Zealand television. It has many similarities in its humour to that of Flight of the Conchords, not the least in its gentle wit, the slightly confused and often naive characters, and the similarity between what Canadians...
> film/2610/corner-gas-madman-dvd-a-whole-lot-of-nothing/

Jerry Lewis is in his early 80s so it’s hardly surprising people don’t talk about him much anymore. His last decent movie appearance was in The King of Comedy in 83 as the arrogant television talkshow host Jerry Langford stalked by Robert DeNiro’s deluded Rupert Pupkin. Lewis was terrific, oozing oily indifference. The...
> film/1921/the-genius-of-jerry-lewis-all-fall-down/

Those who knew Hong Kong actor Lam Ching-ying describe him as disciplined and often severe, generous to his colleagues, but so private that when diagnosed with liver cancer in mid-1997 he didn't even tell his closest friends.  He died that November, aged 45, and his pallbearers included actor/director Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan. At his...
> culturalelsewhere/2377/lam-ching-ying-1952-97-the-fearless-vampire-killer/

It seems only yesterday that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ was being debated for its uncompromising brutality. I wonder if those who bought it on DVD watch it often? And will they watch it 30 years time? Gibson has a sense of humour -- he made Braveheart after all -- so maybe he would get a laugh out of the irreverently...
> film/2335/monty-pythons-life-of-brian-30-years-on-2009-still-a-bit-of-a-naughty-boy/

The debate about the amount of violence on television isn’t going to end soon. There are too many people doing well-funded research for it to die quietly. By the time kids get to school they have seen, oh just heaps, of violent acts on television. They’ve also seen lots of programmes about sharks, but has anyone conducted a...
> film/1948/the-three-stooges-violence-spoken-here/

There was a scene in Michael Palin’s much acclaimed travel-doco Himalaya which, even if you didn't see it, you'll recognise. It was of a towering mountain with clouds scuttling over at about 10 times the speed. Such an image is over-familiar these days -- you see it often in ads which indicates how cliched it has become -- but the...
> film/2097/quentin-tarantino-the-director-defining-the-landscape/