Doc Watch: Underdogs

CALL ME LUCKY (B) - Barry Crimmins was the godfather of the prolific Boston comedy scene in the 1980s. He was also an angry man, railing in particular against U.S. foreign policy and the Catholic church.

Don't Google him. You'll enjoy this much more if you don't know his history. In the sure hands of Bobcat Goldthwait ("Shakes the Clown," "World's Greatest Dad"), a portrait forms of one man speaking truth to power on behalf of the powerless.

When we meet Crimmins, he's a grumpy man in his 60s holed up at a quiet farm in upstate New York. Clips from the '80s show him ranting onstage against the world in general, and against hecklers in particular. He comes off as a cross between Avery Schreiber and Fidel Castro. He managed to channel that energy into launching a comedy club at a Chinese restaurant and mentoring the likes of Steven Wright, Tom Kenny, Goldthwait, and Kevin Meaney.

You can just tell that some dark secret is eating away at Crimmins. Around the 45-minute mark, Goldthwait begins to remove the layers and expose the childhood trauma that haunts Crimmins and drives his longtime crusade against the source of that trauma.

Goldthwait knows how to spin a story. He's assisted by a strong crop of talking heads, joining them to fill in key parts of the story. Among the entertaining contributors, in addition to the comics mentioned above, are David Cross, Marc Maron, Lenny Clarke, Margaret Cho and Patton Oswalt. They all provide puzzle pieces to create an image of a complicated man. One gem of a clip shows Crimmins in the early '90s performing onstage with a fellow lefty, folk-punk singer Billy Bragg, inserting one-liners in music breaks as the crowd goes wild. (One observer compares him to Goldie Hawn on "Laugh-In.")

The second half of the film revolves around Crimmins' struggles -- both psychologically and on behalf of his cause. The problem is, Goldthwait is too close to the story and he loses control of the film. He belabors his points and drags the movie out to 106 minutes, about a quarter hour too long. The climax involves a trip to Skaneateles, New York (an Indian word meaning "beautiful lake surrounded by fascists," Crimmins quips), to Crimmins' boyhood home, where the filmmaker forces him to confront that childhood trauma. This, too, gets dragged out, wringing the emotion until it saturates the screen.

If not for that unfortunate tipping point, "Call me Lucky" could have been a great cinematic profile.

ONE BRIGHT SHINING MOMENT: THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER OF GEORGE McGOVERN (2005) (D+) - A depressingly amateurish production wastes an opportunity to do biographical justice to an important political figure of the second half of the 20th century.

If this has been knocking around your queue for the past 10 years, feel free to delete it with no qualms. Director Stephen Vittoria (who went on to helm two documentaries about Mumia Abu-Jamal) assembles a random rag-tag group of talking heads and mixes in some non-chronological and out-of-context video clips, stretching this out, improbably, beyond two hours. And the title is false advertising: we don't get to the substance of the 1972 campaign between the South Dakota senator and the incumbent, Richard Nixon during the depths of the Vietnam era.

The cast of commentators includes Dick Gregory, Warren Beatty and Howard Zinn. "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman narrates in her most professional voice. Biographer Thomas Knock (whose first book about McGovern still hasn't been publshed) is on hand to repeatedly state the obvious and offer Wikipedia-level insight.

Vittoria is clumsy with his cinematography and editing. Some of the interview settings are starkly different than the rest, as if they were shot in a different format, like videotape. Video clips get repeated, for no reason, and some add nothing to the story.

McGovern himself, interviewed late in life, proves that he has almost zero charisma. Awkwardly, he reads from his old speeches, as if to announce the limitations of the video archive. It's a reminder that while he was a good man who was on the right side of the issues, it's no surprise that voters flocked to Nixon instead of the dove from Dakota.