This Is Not A Movie II

This is not a movie.  This is not some piece of shit documentary showing at the selected art-house theaters in college towns and few hip major cities.  This isn’t some pretentious Academy of Art graduate hipster with a super8 camcorder he found in his grandfather’s attic who is obsessively in love with the shitty band his girlfriend plays keyboards in, not knowing while he films the story of their vain rise in the music world that she’s fucking the lead singer when he’s not around.  This isn’t some egomaniacal pseudo-auteur with a Jarmusch fascination and an Adderall prescription shooting hours and hours of celluloid of public transit buskers to present what he believes to be “the only real musicians in this culture of capitalist consumption and uneducated conservatism.” 

This is not a movie.  This is not some meta-documentary about the process of making a failed documentary about the Salton Sea artist scene being destroyed my meth amphetamines inspired by Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of Adaptation after dropping out of college because there was nothing there for him to learn and he “just needed to get out in the shit, in the real world, and immerse [himself] in the lives of real people in order to truly capture how they live.”  This is not some pathetic fluff piece about some schizophrenic performance artist who sculpts giraffe heads from his own feces on stage and has subsequently been arrested and banned from multiple cities in what the director sees as an “outrageous suppression of both the arts and our basic right to freedom of speech and expression” regardless of the risks to public health and simple decency.

This is a performance.  This is an actual band comprised of professional musicians led by a man with actual singing talent and an undeniable stage presence.  This is a theater and musicianship merged together at its best with a brilliant self-awareness and highly effective take on both inspirations.  This is comedy and entertainment in its purest form, with great laughs being drawn from the audience who are, at times, made willing participants.  This a jazz group playing Top 40 hits of the last three decades in a complete tongue-in-cheek lounge style punctuated by the tightness of the musicianship and brilliant showmanship of the lead singer who can only be described as a cross between Dean Martin and Jon Lovitz (without even completely nailing down his uniqueness).  This is hours of preparation and development blessed with a natural sense of comedic timing that leaves the crowd laughing, even when they should be confused, offended, appalled, or even disturbed.  These are artists who have found a way to entertain through a combination of the obsolete and the mundane, bringing brilliance into otherwise drab and overwrought art forms, and through persistence of personality and thousands of hours of practice have succeeded in breathing new life into a fading form of public presentation.

This is a performance.  This is Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine.