The Daily Grill

The Selling: Little Charmer in a Good Neighborhood

Spoofs are hard. Correction: Spoofs are easy; good spoofs are hard.

Savvy enough to realize this, perhaps, The Selling -- a new "supernatural comedy" by director Emily Lou and writer Gabriel Diani -- wisely avoids trying to be a straight-out spoof. Instead, the film treads a fine line between original and homage.

This is, at its essence, a haunted house movie. Starring screenwriter Diani as Richard Scarry, the nicest real estate agent to never sell a house, the film finds it's own quirky rhythm even as it's caroming wildly through a chain of sensibilities that run the gamut from The Ghost And Mr. Chicken and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein to Scary Movie and Shaun Of The Dead.

The haunted house itself is like The Money Pit meets Poltergeist.

Many of the lines of dialog feel as if they were yanked from one horror movie script or another, turned sideways, translated into banter and then dunked in funny. Even the action has a feeling of being familiar but never exactly copied from something else. As a result, even the discerning suspense or horror moviegoer might feel as if they're on familiar ground only to have it shift suddenly beneath them and dump them into equally familiar but different territory as the movie unspools.

Like any fine homage, the devil (or the demon) is in the details. Lou's direction and the cinematography by Matthias Schubert plays right along with the script -- shots and moods that hint at places we've been before, except seen now in a funhouse mirror where we're not sure if it's going to be a trick or a treat.

That's what it is! This movie is like Halloween. Not Halloween the movie franchise but Halloween the holiday put on film. Starting with a delightful animated title sequence by Ryan W. Kimball, some of the film is light and airy (verging on a little too deep a helping of cheese from time to time), only to snap back to deliver some genuine "jump" moments.

One thing that helps that is that the ghosts that appear (I did say this was a haunted house movie ...) are frightening visages of lost souls, done with a pretty cool "watery" effect which belies the shoestring that this little movie (shot on video in just 14 days) had to have had. And, with the exception of the major spirit entity that appears in the last fifth of the movie, never really plays for laughs but, instead, seeks to cause some real fright in bite-sized doses.

The laughs are kept for the living (for the most part), supplied in ample part by Diani. His gangly form is reminiscent of Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful, Pinocchio), while his angular face shifts ably from comic smirk to horrific visage, depending on the moment-to-moment demands of his own script. His character ends up, along with his doofus real estate broker partner, Dave Ross (Jonathan Klein), with the house on their hands through the shifty dealings of real estate nemesis Mary Best. (Best, played by the comedically-gifted Janet Varney, is kept in the mix to keep the real estate gimmick alive and is left in classic suspense movie mode as the keep of the flame, so to speak, with the whispered hint of a sequel in the funny closing credit sequences.)

There are affable performances by Etta Devine as "ghost blogger" Ginger Sparks and Nancy Lenehan as Richard's mother. Even plucky newcomer Cole Stratton as "Ed," a real estate office co-worker, does a fine job in the time he has on screen with his mindless prattling about America's Top Model even as he's skarfing down drugged brownies.

Although the movie is played pretty broadly, the only performance that felt a little over the top was the one delivered by Barry Bostwick in a brief appearance as Father Jimmy, an exorcist. Lines peppered with a little too much winkety-wink, it's almost a relief when the ghostly presence in the house proves to be too much and drives Father Jimmy away.

I know that The Selling is beginning to make the film festival rounds. If you happen to see that it's appearing near you, I'd make an appointment for a viewing, just in case this little gem gets taken off the market.

Kick It Over To Kickstarter!

I think Kickstarter.com is a great way for people to contribute and be part of fun projects. So far I've tossed my dough into half a dozen and have already gotten my TikTok iPod Nano wristband and soon I'll have a copy of Huck Finn with a robot sidekick.

But the first time I'm actually IN something that Kickstarter can fund, the coin pours in like molasses! Come on, guys! Help Sammy Wegent, my friend and co-director at the SFCC Improv program, pay for his web series pilot, Everybody's A Comedian! It's easy. It's fun. And if it goes, you'll get to see more of me than the 4 seconds I'm currently featured as the club manager in the teaser video Sammy shelled out to make:

 

Just click on that title under the video frame, head on over to the Kickstarter site and pick a donor level. Go!

Pass The Succotash, Please!

Ever do a project just because you wish someone else had done it? It's usually why I write a particular movie script — I want to see the movie and no one else has gotten around to writing it yet. Well, that's what was behind my starting up Succotash, my new "comedy podcast podcast".

I really love listening to comedy podcasts. To the point that I don't ever listen to the radio in my car any more, I just Bluetooth podcasts out of my iPhone whenever I drive. But there is never enough time in the day to listen to all the podcasts I enjoy, let alone get a chance to sample the ones I'm always reading or hearing about. So why — I thought to myself — isn't there a podcast where I can hear some other podcasts? Get it all in one sitting, so to speak.

And so Succotash was hatched. Just launched this week on iTunes, it's the comedy podcast podcast. And I've discovered why no one's put one together before — it takes a lot of time to sift through podcasts! What's cool, though, is what comes out at the other end: A roughly one hour show made up of snippets from 8 or so podcasts, interspersed with my yakking about my experience in the world of comedy over the past three decades, often with the people hosting and/or guesting on the podcasts I'm featuring.

Reminds me a bit about the old Comedy Hour I used to listen to on KSFO radio in San Francisco when I was in junior high school. Hosted first by Gene Nelson and then by John Gilliland, it was all about cuts from comedy records and was the formative thrust that shoved me first into radio and then into comedy as a career. So I guess I've come full circle and maybe there's some adolescent kid listening to Succotash in his bedroom late at night after the lights are out, smiling in the dark as he hears these shows.

The genesis of Succotash happened pretty quickly after I got the idea. I started out by doing a couple of "test" shows, hunched over my MacBook Pro with a crappy USB microphone and a collection of roughly trimmed snippets from some comedy podcasts. (The Internet being the perfect place to share, you can find both of those "dress rehearsals" on iTunes as well as the premiere episode.)

KSFO, the radio station I just mentioned, comes into play again as I had gotten reacquainted recently with Joe Paulino, a great and friendly guy who was an engineer at the station the same time I ended up working there in the late 70's-early 80's. He runs Studio P in Sausalito, California, and he took an interest in the Succotash project. Enough to jump onboard as our Producer-Engineer.

And the Succotash theme was created by Scott Carvey, who is a fan of the Bel-Airs, a group who had done "Succotash", the aptly-named tune I had been using in my test shows as a musical placeholders. He said, "I can create a theme that's got that sound!" And he has. Hoping to feature more music by Mr. C in future episodes.

In fact, I'm going to feature a song by Scott Carvey right here, right now! Called, "I Want You Dead", it's all about the kinds of people that drive most of us crazy. And the various ways to do away with them...

I Want You Dead

That's about it. Love to have you sample Succotash. You can listen to it on the show blog, which is at http://SuccotashShow.com, or download the podcast from iTunes.

Let me know what you think.

The Truth Just Might Be In Here

Full disclosure: I'm a huge conspiracy buff.

Not in the sense that I believe in UFOs, hybrid alien-human star babies, FEMA death camps or many of the other theories that fuel the hearts and minds of the delightfully paranoid. I'm just a fan of the idea of conspiracies. That one can construct an intricate and detailed web of connections and associations that, with very little effort or even imagination, can explain any number of events as being the intended result of planning by some nefarious cabal of secret power mongers.

Knowing that, it's small wonder that I enjoyed watching The Truth Is Out There unfold as it does. The new documentary by Phil Leirness examines the world of conspiracy theories in a refreshing and novel way: Through the eyes of a conspiracy buff. Or, at least, alongside the eyes of one. Namely Dean Haglund, an actor and comedian probably best known from his role as Langley, a recurring role on TV's The X Files. (Appropriately, his character was one of "The Lone Gunmen," a trio of conspiracy enthusiasts that were consulted from time to time by FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder on the show. The three had such a wide following that Fox produced a short-lived spin-off series -- the pilot show of which was so eerily close to the events of 9-11, which was still 8 months away when the episode aired, that it's become a part of conspiracy folklore itself.)

During the course of the film (a long watch, by the way, with a running time of nearly two and a half hours), Leirness follows Haglund around the United States, Canada and parts of Europe as he drops into various New Age expos, UFO conventions and one-on-one interviews with proponents of assorted conspiracy-flavored viewpoints on one subject or another. One challenge of a project of this undertaking is how do you decide what to focus on? There are, after all, conspiracies around so many things -- politics, the economy, medicine, UFOs, etc. -- so how to pick where to point the camera must have been a head scratcher, right?

No such decision necessary, as it turns out. Leirness and Haglund have created a film that is like a Whitman Sampler of conspiracy theories. But rather than being a mishmash of earnestly crazy kooks, spouting outrageous claims about the groups and bogeymen in the shadows, what emerges is a thoughtful journey of Haglund interacting with people who lay out their takes in measured, reasonable tones. Never mind that one woman claims to be the hybrid product of humans and aliens. Or the strident radio announcer decrying the impending jack boots of the New World Order. Everyone is allowed to speak about their subject without interruption or objection by Haglund, who alternately nods with understanding or expresses surprise at some revelation of information.

Leirness has then assembled the material in a very cool way. It almost feels like a music score the way the narrative travels back and forth between the conspiracies and the subjects speaking about them. The documentary is broken down almost in terms of categories -- the UFO and aliens in one section, the government elements in another, medical subjects all together as well. What emerges is a picture of how the threads of these various stories begin to weave (or sometimes tangle) together.

As Haglund finds each subject and urges them to expound on their complot du jour, the UFO conspiracies begin to blend neatly into the medical conspiracies which then find connections in the government conspiracies. There's no one subject -- Haglund included -- that explains or assumes that. There's no need -- the film does that itself but never obviously -- you're left to discover that "conspiracy of conspiracies" yourself, if you can separate the forest from the trees.

There's a subplot of sorts as Haglund interacts with a motivational psychotherapist, Dr. Nicki J. Monti, attempting to delve into the truth of the Self. It seems the most circuitous route in the movie, as Haglund deflects a number of Dr. Monti's attempts at peeling back elements that Dean himself proclaims may have been getting in the way of his life and career over the years.

Back on the trail of the ever-growing host of conspiracies, the longer that each subject talks about their subject, with Haglund alternately wide-eyed or perhaps aghast at the information being revealed, the more often the conspiracies begin to teeter under their own convoluted logic. None of them actually gets to the point of falling completely to pieces. In fact, in a few cases, the information is downright compelling with few seams showing.

By the film's end you're left with the idea that the truth must, surely, be "out there" -- whether at a distance from the reality you know or just around the corner, one can't be sure -- and there is sure to be at least one or two threads viewers might be enticed to pick up and follow for themselves, if only to prove, once and for all, that truth can't possibly be stranger than fiction.

— Marc Hershon