The Perfect Election Week Movie (+ One More)

Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Mollie Ivins (2019) – The brilliant life and slicing wit of one of America’s greatest political commentators.

This is the movie we all need to see just before Election Day.  A movie about six feet of Texas womanhood who kicked the ass of the establishment, the good old boys, and every self satisfied political figure of her time. 

Before this documentary, I knew Ivins by her massive and well deserved reputation, and a couple pieces she had written.  She was a legend, but a distant one.  A towering figure visible at the horizon through the shimmering haze of the media.

Little did I know that that was a pale representation of an American genius.  With the down home charm of Twain and the biting wit of Dorothy Parker, Ivins knew her way around the halls of power.

Born in California, raised in Texas, educated at Smith, and Columbia she pushed the boundaries of expectation everywhere she went.  The first female on the police beat in Minneapolis, she would eventually work for the NY Times before returning to Texas.  A syndicated column made the nation her beat and beat it she did.  Smart and funny, she was deadly when someone ended up in her journalistic crosshairs.

There is nothing about this movie I didn’t like.  There’s nothing about Ivins blunt, smart, funny style I don’t like.  We need more voices like hers.

The Amazing Jonathan Documentary (2019) – A Las Vegas star in the first part of the 21st century, The Amazing Jonathan was part comedy act and part magician.  Following a diagnosis with a potentially fatal disorder, the comic worked with director Ben Berman to create a documentary.  As always with Jonathan, things don’t go the way you expect.

The real question of the movie is this: at what  point do you have to cut a dying man some slack for being a jerk?  Followed by – how big a jerk does he have to be to stop cutting him said slack?

Berman enters into an agreement with Jonathan to do the film, but almost immediately is confronted with a second film unit working with the performer, then a third and even a fourth.  Does the director want to continue?  The answer is the central story of the movie.

The Amazing Jonathan specializes in a form of over the top comedy with a little magic thrown in along the way.  The humor is loud, and juvenile for the most part.  It is also very funny for a while.  Like a lot of this kind of humor, it wore out its welcome with me after a year or two.  But Jonathan made a career out of it, working Vegas from a dozen or more years.

With the illness plus his drug use, the performer we see here ranges (and sometimes rages) from funny to morose, from cooperative to belligerent.  The movie becomes about both Jonathan and Berman.  The director is sucked into a bizarre world around the comedian/magician and must find a way through.  The ending of the movie is not what anyone expects.