July 21, 2006 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

eveningsout

I stole the movie

Strangers with Candy' film is good, but misses the dizziness of the best shows

by Kaizaad Kotwal

How can something so inimitably wrong, in so many countless ways, be so amazingly, incomparably right at the same time? Ask the many rabid and faithful fans of the Comedy Central cult hit Strangers With Candy.

The show, which had only three seasons on the cable network, managed to cement its reputation as being a bad-ass comedy with plenty of social satire and political chutzpah to boot. That series now has a film version playing in theaters across America and its fans-many of them gay-have been waiting for the cinematic incarnation of Jerri Blank for ages.

The movie has been completed for over two years and was supposed to receive its theatrical release last fall. For reasons the studios refuse to explain, the opening was delayed to this summer.

Although it's a great film, it never reaches the dizzy heights of many of the superlative episodes of the television version.

The franchise tells the story of Jerri Blankan acquired taste if ever there was one. She is an ex-con, ex-drug addict, exprostitute and ex-basic flunky in all aspects of respectable living.

The film a pseudo-prequel to the telly series begins with her release from prison, where she was sentenced for prostitution, and stealing a TV.

Blank comes home to find her father remarried to a prim and proper on the surface-woman. Jerri has a stepbrother, a jock wanna-be. Her stepmother is having relations with the meat-man and, saddest of all, her father is in a coma.

To help him come out of his coma, Jerri decides to go back to high school at age

46 and start exactly where she left off.

Her hope is that by becoming the good daughter, her comatose dad will find reason to go on living.

Jerri's return to the halls of Flatpoint High are the source of the comedy. The creators set out to make an anti-after-school special-those sappy, often moronic shows that were supposed to teach young kids responsibility, respect, and don't do drugs.

Not only does the series and the film very brilliantly deconstruct those programs, but it also leaves Jerri learning the wrong lessons most of the time.

With her large hips, her crooked smile, her rotting teeth, her twitchy eye and her knack of putting her foot in her mouth, Jerri is hardly the stuff of American legend. Yet in the inimitable hands of Amy Sedaris, she has become a cultural icon, a figure in our pop culture consciousness who embodies what we most hate (fat, ugly, uncouth, overly honest) and what we are most like (lonely, unloved, and outcast).

The sister of out liter-

ary icon David Sedaris, Amy Sedaris shares his sense of the outrageous and the brutally honest. They are both comedic geniusesa rich overabundance of comedy in one family that would have made Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz blush with envy.

The film starts out with tremendous

A whole box of candy

by Anthony Glassman

In the world of mass media, successful companies seldom miss an opportunity to cross-market products.

Releasing a new razor? Come out with

a shaving cream to go along with it. A new wine? Special wine glasses. Strangers with Candy: The Movie? A boxed set of Strangers with Candy: The Complete Series, available now to treasure forever.

"Boxed set" might be a little deceptive, since the six-DVD offering is shaped like a Trapper Keeper, and all three seasons have been available individually for years. But for the completist, this set is the shiznit, filled with extras to drive fans of Jerri Blank crazy.

Strangers with Candy is, of course, the tale of Miss Blank, who dropped out of high school at the age of 14, spending the next 32 years as a teenage runaway.

She was a boozer, a user and a loser. She

stole the TV!

And now she's back in school, again

with candy

the complete series

doing the wrong things, but this time for the right reasons.

strangers (with candy

If the movie (see review) lacked some of the spark of the series, what better way to see that lost spark?

For instance, Jerri's father, who seems to be in rigor mortis following a terrifying sight, is never explained. Apparently, he does move and react, just not on-camera. Noblet and Jellineck's relationship bloom, blossoms and grows in the original series, a stunted affair treated as a fait accompli in the film.

And Jerri's interactions with her step-brother are far funnier in the series. The Blank siblings have about a thousand names to call each other, although Jerri usually ends up on top in the verbal sparring.

All of Jerri's rampaging bisexuality is in the original episodes as she wanders from situation to situation, never really seeming to have experienced anything before, despite the fact that in 32 years as a prostitute, drug addict and convict she must have been through everything.

The DVDs feature so many extras, one's head could explode. On-set interviews with the four stars, in characters; deleted scenes, director's cuts of two episodes, their Museum of Television and Radio interview, a filmstrip presentation of Chuck and Geoffrey's vacation, an outtake reel the length of an actual episode and a montage of all the episode-ending dance scenes are secondary to the true gem: the original, unaired pilot, with so many differences yet so much of the brilliance that marked the show.

So, in summary, what have we learned today, class? Anyone? Bueller? Oops-wrong comedy.

COMEDY CENTRAL FILMS (2)

Mr. Noblet turns his back on Mr. Jellineck. Left, Amy Sedaris as Jerri Blank. provocative crux would have done wonders for the franchise's edginess and true grit.

promise—an

edgy montage

scenes of the kind of life Jerri is leaving behind in prison: shower brawls with burly Amazons, cafeteria food-fights with brusque inmates, becoming someone's prison bitch and vice versa.

Back at school with her loopy principal, teachers and fellow students, Jerri tries to gain legitimacy by entering a science fair with fellow outcasts and geeks-Tammi Littlenut, a redhead, and Megawatti Sacarnaput, an Indonesian-American lad. Theirs is also a crazy love triangle with Jerri in lust with Tammi and Megawatti yearning for Jerri.

The human zoo at school includes her science teacher Chuck Noblet, a born-again Jesus lover who teaches science from a Bible and in whose classroom the chemistry periodic table is shaped like a cross.

Noblet, married and with kids, is secretly in love with art teacher Geoffrey Jellineck, but his new-found Christianity makes him run from their love affair. African-American principal Blackman is hungry for power and desperate to keep his job and the money flowing to his school.

Mr.

The film's premise of a science fair as the springboard for comedy is a weak one and drags the movie down. It is not at all an inspired spine for the film like the TV episode when the school decides to mount an all-white version of Lorraine Hansberry's classic drama A Raisin in the Sun. A more

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Nevertheless there are some truly inspired moments in the film, like the opening prison montage or the faculty steam-room, which is open to view and a room off the main corridor just like any other classroom.

Noblet's classroom, filled with many small religious details, is a delight.

Allison Janney (West Wing) and Philip Seymor Hoffman (Capote) provide some nice gags as school board members serving as the judges of the science fair. Sarah Jessica Parker is fun as a jaded counselor and hubby Matthew Broderick is mostly wasted as a high-school science geek who can't let his past go.

vide

Brit superstar Ian Holm has a delightful cameo as Jerri's father's doctor and watching him slide down the banister of the home stairs is probably the funniest bit in the film.

Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's delirious The Colbert Report is good here as always as Noblet. Yet the gay relationship between him and Jellineck (Paul Dinello) seems neutered and without edge.

Dinello, who directs the film, manages fine. It is the script that lacks the real humor and complete irreverence of the television show, despite recycling many of its jokes. But, like the series, the film belongs to Sedaris, who may be the most underrated and underappreciated comedic genius of our times. Her delivery, her pratfalls, her facial expressions and her overall characterization are flawless.

Like another irreverent original TV show, Absolutely Fabulous, Jerri Blank is just that-Ab Fab.

SO.

One only wishes the film had been more

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