When Beavis and Butthead debuted on MTV’s Liquid Television in the very early 90s, it was not at all conceivable that its creator, animator and primary voice actor Mike Judge would, over the course of two decades, build a career that eventually conformed to the key points on the Troubled Maverick Timeline. First with those double entendre-happy half-brains to his long-running King of the Hill, Judge has done more to legitimize animation as a commercially viable vehicle for sly social critique than anyone in the post-Simpsons era save Matt Stone and Trey Parker. With Office Space, he cast Jennifer Aniston, then the biggest star on TV, in a sharp satire about 20 something stagnation far away from Central Perk, and audiences didn’t immediately get it. He followed that with Idiocracy, an apocalypse comedy that Fox dumped on the mere assumption that audiences wouldn’t immediately get it. Both films went on to find fervent cult audiences; Office Space looked a lot better on video and cable once its timeless comedy of little guy vengeance could be safely sifted away from the Aniston baggage; Idiocracy looked a lot better when it was actually available to be seen. After all this, it’s no wonder that Judge, who has written and directed each of his features, is treated like an auteur — quite the feat for a guy who makes visually indistinguished comedies mostly about working class guys and their frustrated ids. Who does he think he is — Kevin Smith?

Actually, Extract made me laugh more than any the last few Kevin Smith movies, but where Zach and Miri Make a Porno seemed to bring its maker’s career into sharper focus, Extract seems to derail Mike Judge’s previous progress as a filmmaker with Something to Say About The Way We Live In This United States. The story of Joel (Jason Bateman), a small business owner whose dreams of selling out to General Mills and finding a way to justify cheating on his wife are both thwarted when the insolence of one of his workers causes a chain reaction that results in another worker losing a testicle, Extract first takes too long to get going, and then seems to stumble into three or four conclusions. It’s riotously funny for about an hour in between (much of this thanks to the perfect cast, including Ben Affleck as Joel’s bartender buddy, Mila Kunis as the con bimbo who catches his eye, and Kristen Whig as his bored and boring wife), but those who have come to expect a Mike Judge movie to precisely skewer a contemporary social sphere may be disappointed. I didn’t previously give Office Space or Idiocracy much credit as anything other than very smart comedies, but Extract makes them both look like quasi-libertarian morality plays about the absolute necessity of personal responsibility. Those films were about men manning up to change the status quo; Extract is about a guy briefly taking his balls out of a drawer, juggling them for a bit and then putting them back after coming to the understanding that his status quo is actually great. Take away the ample discussion of testicles, and there’s something almost Capraesque going on here.

I spent the weekend at the Traverse City Film Festival, the fifth annual event presided over by Michael Moore in the waterfront town where the filmmaker lives and works in Northern Michigan. Though he and his staff were editing Capitalism: A Love Story across the street from the festival’s main venue around the clock all week, Moore himself introduced nearly every event I attended, including one where he unveiled both a trailer for the almost finished latest film and the entirety of the rarely seen film that gave Moore his first experience in front of a film camera (more on that later). At most of these events, he’d take the stage and talk at length to an entirely adoring crowd, casually making reference to his new film, his reputation and past career, and his future plans. A scoop from the later category: Moore said he’s planning to star in a one-man show on Broadway, presumably along the lines of his 2002 shows at the Roundabout Theater in London, “sometime in the next 24 months.”  He promised to give the show a tryout first at the film festival  — “because if you kill ‘em in Traverse City, you’ll kill ‘em anywhere.”

Outside of Moore’s shadow, Traverse City’s vibe as a festival is along the lines of Telluride and True/False — small town, secret screenings, celebrity/legendary filmmaker guests who blend in with the locals and lesser known attendees while giving each installment of the invent a specific character — but with a dedicated emphasis on comedy. In addition to the panel which I already reported on, in the three days I was in town TCFF hosted an afternoon course on the art of comedy, a preview of the long-anticipated upcoming season of Curb Your Enthusiasm hosted by festival board member Jeff Garlin, and Moore and the festival co-founders handed special prizes to the Funniest Fiction Film and Best Comedy Documentary (to In The Loop and Winnebago Man, respectively), and gave the “Stanley Kubrick Award for Bold and Innovative Filmmaking” to Bob Byington, who was the first director to have two films in the festival — both of them no-frills comedies. I’m not complaining, but one does wonder how Moore’s just-announced comedy festival will actually differ from the film festival in practice.

The full list of TCFF 2009 winners is after the jump.

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On the “Comedy, American Style” at his Traverse City Film Festival this morning, Michael Moore announced plans to launch a comedy festival in the waterfront town, beginning in 2010. Likely taking place the first week of March — “the deepest, darkest part of winter” in Michigan, Moore noted — The Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival will be a collaboration between Moore and comedian/actor Jeff Garlin, who participated in this morning’s panel with Moore, Larry Charles, TCFF 2009 Lifetime Achievement honoree Paul Mazursky, Wavy Gravy, and Austin-based filmmakers Bob Byington and Ben Steinbauer, whose three features (Byington’s Harmony & Me and Registered Sex Offender and Steinbauer’s Winnebago Man) are being screened here as the sole exemplars of “the new hotbed of American independent cinema.” As described by Garlin and Moore this morning, the comedy festival seems to be an attempt to spin-off  the experience of the comedy panel, which has become an annual tradition at the film festival, anchored by frequent guests Garlin and Charles, into its own thing. With that in mind, here are five things I learned from the assembled geniuses during today’s 90 minute session:

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Judd Apatow’s Funny People feels like an attempt to graft the writer/director/producer’s patented brand of semi-raunchy character comedy of latent male adolescence on to the template of a certain kind of studio film rarely made today — think 1980s Oscar bait, like Terms of Endearment, The Accidental Tourist or even Beaches: the gently melancholic dramedy in which someone in early middle age is suddenly forced to reconcile their lives. This unlikely hybrid serves as the vehicle for a meta-epic work of autobiography that pays tribute to one of the writer/director’s oldest friends/collaborators, diverges into a love letter to his wife, contrives to get the wife and the friend in bed together, and then drags in Eric Bana to get them out. All the while, Seth Rogen is milling about, mostly as a surrogate for the filmmaker, until he suddenly switches over and starts speaking for the audience — during the film’s draggiest stretch, he is very vocal about not wanting to be there.

If this sounds bizarre, it is. What’s more bizarre is that this mix of personal project-as-product actually succeeds — at least intermittently. Though not formally bifurcated, Funny People practically plays out in two sections (another 80s flashback: it feels like the kind of film that used to come packaged on two VHS tapes). It peaks emotionally at about three-quarters of the way into the first section, makes good on track laid in that scene about a third of the way into the second section, and then rapidly devolves from there into a domestic sitcom that can only resolve itself in a “girls may come and go, but bromance is forever” fade out. The film is so self-referential, so quick to pounce on and twist what the audience thinks it knows about Apatow and his players (from multiple references to Seth Rogen having recently lost a lot of weight to Adam Sandler repeatedly begging Rogen to show him his dick) that to reaffirm the bond between two men this way almost seems like an act of defiance. “Yes,” Apatow seems to be saying. “This is a movie about me, and yes, my primary concern as an artist is platonic male love. So … suck it.”

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Now as much as ever, Hollywood comedy is heavily preoccupied with pandering to the median. Something like Bruno is clearly designed to make the viewer feel good about their own brain power and education — each laugh is equivalent to an “I’m smart enough to behave better than that” statement, whether it’s “I’m smart enough to not hate gay people” or “I’m smart enough to not get suckered by Sacha Baron Cohen in the first place.” And nobody in the audience of a Judd Apatow film has to work very hard to get the jokes in it, although inevitably it’s suggested that most or all of the protagonists on screen weren’t gifted with the same innate intelligence. So the first thing that marks In The Loop as a break from the norm is its refusal to flatter the viewer’s intelligence; the second, is the way the film forces them to use it.

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It’s certainly no accident that The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman found out about and reported on Bruno initially receiving an NC-17 rating from the MPAA. After all, what raunchy docu-comedy wouldn’t want additional buzz focused on how “objectionable” some scenes were? Universal and Sacha Baron Cohen obviously pushed the envelope in order to both see how much they could get away with and to draw attention to themselves with a desired NC-17. Hasn’t anyone been following Hollywood the past 10 years? Here are a few benefits to both garnering the unacceptable rating and having news of that “unfortunate” rating leaked to all the fanboy bloggers:

• Typical outrage over the MPAA’s dealings guarantee postings (including this one), which continue to give attention to the film.
• Excitement over how hard the ultimate R-rating will likely be continues the interest from moviegoers interested in raunchy content. And if they’re upset that it won’t be as dirty as the original NC-17 version they can always…
• …look forward to the Unrated DVD release, which will most definitely include the censored “objectionable” scenes either in the movie or as supplement material.

Of course, news of the ratings controversy does draw potentially unfair complaints regarding the MPAA’s reputation for typically having problems with homosexual themes. For once, though, the gay community can leave the ratings board alone on this one, since the studio and filmmakers most certainly wanted all of this. Of course, if you do decide to protest, make sure you mention the film title often. That will help the marketing, too.

And now some of the unnecessary complaints from my fellow internerds helping with the film’s buzz:
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It usually takes a comedic franchise a few outings to warm to up a “going to jail” installment. Sure, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay got the irrepressible stoners to America’s most infamous detention center on their second journey to the multiplexes, but for the most part, especially when the films are buoyed by a comedic performer whose brand is based around a single outrageous, larger than life comedic persona, you have to work up to the jailhouse installment.

Tyler Perry’s sixth outing as a feature film director, Madea Goes to Jail, which opens today (not screened for critics), takes him into this territory as he sends his signature character to the slammer, but the most treasured entry in this oh so small subgenre certainly belongs to John Cherry III. Who the hell is John Cherry III? He directed 1990’s Ernest Goes to Jail, the fourth proper theatrical film to feature the late Kentucky-born comedian Jim Varney’s Ernest P. Worrell, the insatiably stupid blue hat and vest-wearing bank janitor who would go on to be the subject of Trauth dairy milk commercials and an increasingly inept series of movies that bottomed out with 1997’s straight-to-video Ernest Goes to Africa.

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FilmDrunk learns us that Michel Gondry directed an episode of HBO hipster musical sitcom Flight of the Conchords last night. Behold a dance number from the episode.

Variety’s Todd McCarthy received mixed reviews for his Sundance 2009 wrap-up piece, in which he lumped together the festival’s two biggest narrative hits, Push and An Education, as part of a trend of films espousing values “emblematic” of “the start of the Obama age.” I’m not sure our recently elected president has much to do with the themes of films that no doubt were conceived years before he clinched the nomination (especially these two films, both of which were based on long pre-existing texts), but I did notice that this year’s crop of Sundance titles seemed more interested in reflecting the times than some of their solipsistic Amerindie ancestors. I saw more films at this festival that tried, earnestly or satirically, to grapple with the state of the union’s troubled-but-hopeful psyche, than I’ve seen in any single ten day stretch in my professional life.

Even better, I saw this concern with The State of Things seep into films as disparate as the tacky, raunchy Rachel Dratch/Amy Poehler comedy Spring Breakdown, and Deborah Stratman’s extremely classy, short feature-length experimental documentary feature O’er the Land –– two films which, on paper, couldn’t be more different, and yet are both heavily invested in notions of fin de siècle Americana and the peculiar ways in which Americans take advantage of our bottomless freedom. Dense, sometimes silent, always visually complex, and presented with neither binding narration nor immediately evident narrative, Land is probably the purest cinema experience I had at Sundance this year. I’d like to give Stratman’s film another look before writing about it in more depth, but as I expect it to show up in at least one upcoming festival, I’ll have a shot. Bizarrely, it’s the studio-produced comedy that I may not soon have another chance to consider, or even see.

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Director Greg Mottola has had a Sundance-in-reverse journey since his 1996 film The Daytrippers premiered at Slamdance that year, and he then moved into the world of television directing, worked on Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks followup series Undeclared, directed Superbad, one of the biggest comedies in recent years, and now is finally at Sundance with his movie Adventureland.

Adventureland was inspired by Mottola’s own experience working at a theme park in the 1980s after college, and it’s a bittersweet look at young romance. Check out our interview with Mottola after the break.

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In the director’s statement slipped into the press notes for his Robin Williams-starring Sundance entry World’s Greatest Dad, Bobcat Goldthwait says it took him 25 years in show business to figure out that what he really wants to do is direct movies, and doing so makes him feel like he’s “getting away with murdr.” That’s a fair description of what he pulls off in Dad, in which a frustrated novelist/high school teacher (Williams) exploits the death of a loved one to plump up his own popularity. Though far more polished than Goldthwait’s 2006 Sundance competition film Sleeping Dogs Lie (also known as Stay), Dad rides the same line between obscene satire and almost mushy sincerity. I talked to Goldthwait about self-Googling, why he has no desire for his stand-up fans to see his movies, and why he’s not going on Celebrity Fit Club any time soon.

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MoMA sent over a press release this morning about an event called Silent but Deadly: An Evening of Comedy Shorts, which looks very cool. Curator Ron Magliozzi and silent film accompanists Steve Massa and Ben Model have put together a program of silent slapstick comedy shorts that “explore social, cultural, and political subjects”; they’ll be screening these, followed by shorts comissioned from contemporary comedians including Nick Kroll and ThunderAnt, AKA Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein.

The press release doesn’t reveal exactly what they’ll be showing in terms of silent films (when I think slapstick silent comedy I think Fatty Arbuckle, but unless the comedy of being fat is a cultural issue, I’m not sure his work qualifies), but I hope the contemporary response pieces fall somewhere along the lines of ThunderAnt’s Boink!, embedded below. It’s a mock, New York Noise-like public access indie rock show, featuring special guest Sadaam Hussein, who strums an acoustic guitar in his “home recording studio in Manhattan” while talking about the life of a dictator in the language of a jaded old punk rocker.

The MoMA program takes place January 6; there’s more information at their website.
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I missed it when it aired over the weekend, but apparently there was a short film on Saturday Night Live this past Saturday starring guest host Paul Rudd, Bill Hader and an out-of-Obama-costume Fred Armisen, directed by none other than Noah Baumbach. Via Whatevs, I’ve embedded it above. It’s a cute bit of bromance–they’re all sleeping with the same girl, because they all really love each other! It’s no Mr. Jealousy (ah, Chris Eigeman and Peter Bogdanovich, together at last), but at the very least, it’s considerably more subtle than anything I’ve seen on SNL in awhile.

As I’ve noted before, it’s easy to assume that Kevin Smith cast Seth Rogen in Zach and Miri Make A Porno in an effort to capture some of the magic dust that makes Judd Apatow’s films so financially successful, while remining the audience that Kevin Smith movies have offered a blend of raunchy comedy and surprisingly traditional romantic resolutions for a decade and a half now. In a post today at Burbanked, Alan Lopuszynski questions whether Adam Sandler is currently starring in Judd Apatow’s Funny People for the inverse reason.

“At first, I figured that Sandler’s interest in working under Apatow as a director was because Sandler was on a downslope of box office returns at this point in his career,” writes Alan Lopuszynski at Burbanked. But then he got out the virtual graph paper, and realised that although Judd Apatow’s films are vastly more appreciated by critics than Sandlers, “the pair’s financial track records are extremely similar” — and when there has been a discrepancy, Sandler’s films have almost always grossed more than Apatow’s.

And so Alan coins a term to explain the collaboration:

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