We signed up for a free month of Hulu to catch up on our queue. Here are three documentaries about unique characters.
DEREK DELGAUDIO: IN & OF ITSELF (2021) (B) - Your patience may vary, but this is one long feature-length sleight-of-hand without much of a payoff besides an obvious trick by a magician who emotionally manipulates his audience for 90 minutes. It starts out promising but just suffocates in gimmickry.
DelGaudio is a magician's magician, a former con man and card cheat who developed an intricate stage show that ran in New York for many months and eventually was filmed by Frank Oz for this documentary. DelGaudio has a baby face and an obsequious demeanor, and he mines his alleged youthful traumas to craft a meandering narrative about a mythic character who defied odds by winning many games of Russian roulette.
The previews for this are misleading. The trailer shows audience member expressing awe and bafflement at DelGaudio's great predictive powers. But all that emotional cholesterol is packed into the final third. Before that, DelGaudio shows off some neat tricks -- his handling of a deck of cards is mesmerizing; he makes a brick disappear. Cool.
But this gets maudlin pretty quick. He yanks our chains with a sob story about his hometown's homophobia over his mother coming out as gay. He takes long pauses for distant stares, meant to convey inner tormoil. (He cries at one point.) The camera casually lands fleetingly on random celebrities -- Bill Gates, Marina Abramovic, David Blaine -- purporting to grant credibility and gravitas on the proceedings.
And then there are two tricks at the end, and if you think about them for more than five minutes, you can probably figure out how the schemes were carried out. In the end, it all feels ironically soulless, hoodwinking the willing participants in the audience.
FOR MADMEN ONLY: THE STORIES OF DEL CLOSE (2021) (B) - This sloppy, shambling look back at the life of the zen-master of improvisation, Del Close, gets by on pluck and charm, with a dash of rebellion. Close is the legendary inventor of the Harold, a radical reimagining of the art of improvisation, a method that launched a generation of comics who predominate today.
Director Heather Ross takes her cue from the irreverent guru and tosses in a variety of ideas and schemes to get her narrative across. One tack is to imagine some of Close's bizarre brainstorming sessions (he also created a graphic novel) with droll re-creations staring James Urbaniak as Close, supported by comics like Matt Walsh and Lauren Lapkus.
We also hear from Close in clips and voice archives. There's a fun reveal from Bob Odenkirk, who interviewed Close back in the '80s for a college newspaper. Other talking heads and acolytes include Adam McKay, Ike Barinholtz, David Pasquesi ("Veep"), Dave Thomas ("SCTV"), Jason Sudeikis ("SNL") and, with perhaps the fondest connection to Close, Tim Meadows, another "SNL" alum. Michaela Watkins narrates.
There is an air of you-had-to-be-there about the whole production. I enjoyed seeing the familiar faces from the stages of Chicago's Second City theater back in the '80s. Who knows if this is a particularly accurate biography of a pivotal figure in the history of improv. The man, addled at times by drugs, was never the most reliable narrator. This slap-dash tribute seems to do him justice.
THE AMAZING JOHNATHAN DOCUMENTARY (2019) (C) - This more-meta-than-meta commentary on the life of a con man is only modestly entertaining and frustratingly repetitive. It tells the uninteresting story of Jonathan Szeles, who had a moment back in the '80s and '90s as the comic magician/provocateur known as the Amazing Johnathan. He was known for gruesome gags like piercing his tongue, spooning out his eyeball or sawing through his forearm. Yuk-yuk.
Well, now Johnathan is an unrepentant meth addict and claims to be dying of heart disease, although he's several years into a one-year death sentence when director Ben Berman shows up to start filming. That's not the only illusion Johnathan has up his sleeve. Over the course of the film, at least one other film crew is revealed to be competing with Berman.
By the one-third mark, the filmmaker starts to lose interest in Johnathan and gets wrapped into his own existential crisis, wondering if he's been hoodwinked and how he should proceed. The rest of the film is mostly Berman kvetching about his dilemma. And boy, is it not interesting. (He drags his parents into this for counseling.) So now we're stuck with a zero as the intended subject and a dud of a filmmaker. You'll probably stick around to find out how it turns out, but you won't be bowled over. You're better off not getting suckered into it in the first place.
(Extra credit for the most inappropriately tone-deaf use of Erik Satie's "Gymnopedies" ever; no, I don't think it was used ironically.)
BONUS TRACK
From the closing credits of the Del Close documentary, Mika Miko with "Jogging Song":
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