The French were right about Jerry Lewis
While I certainly struggled to connect with the more isolated moments with Lewis performing bits in an empty room (or with a partner) and in front of a static camera—he’s tonally like a mild Tom Green which is both historically impressive and experientially grating/frustrating—Lewis as a filmmaker sure has a spellbinding sense of space, movement, and framing… it’s a bone-thin plot, but that almost makes its unabashed vibrancy feel “borderline experimental” as Jay Bauman would say
It’s about coming into adulthood with the now-banal scars of childhood… it kinda inverts the basic taboos and struggles of childhood (smoking, the opposite gender/gender identity, routine, treating others like subjects and not objects) to investigate why they exist, what purpose they serve, how they can be transcended, and how they can end up being replicated/reproduced but it notably doesn’t really transcend these social elements to investigate the material reasons why Herbert Heebert would have to make this inversion with age, but somebody’s gotta feed Baby or else…
The French were right about Jerry Lewis
While I certainly struggled to connect with the more isolated moments with Lewis performing bits in an empty room (or with a partner) and in front of a static camera—he’s tonally like a mild Tom Green which is both historically impressive and experientially grating/frustrating—Lewis as a filmmaker sure has a spellbinding sense of space, movement, and framing… it’s a bone-thin plot, but that almost makes its unabashed vibrancy feel “borderline experimental” as Jay Bauman would say
It’s about coming into adulthood with the now-banal scars of childhood… it kinda inverts the basic taboos and struggles of childhood (smoking, the opposite gender/gender identity, routine, treating others like subjects and not objects) to investigate why they exist, what purpose they serve, how they can be transcended, and how they can end up being replicated/reproduced but it notably doesn’t really transcend these social elements to investigate the material reasons why Herbert Heebert would have to make this inversion with age, but somebody’s gotta feed Baby or else…
