Review: "Too Funny to Fail"

Imagine you're a television executive and someone pitches you a show: it will be headlined by one of the biggest "Saturday Night Live" stars, Dana Carvey. At the time, he is fresh off co-starring in the "Wayne's World" movies, and everybody wants a piece of him -- he actually turns down David Letterman's gig after he decamped to CBS. Carvey can literally do anything he wants, and he chooses to have his own sketch comedy show.

ABC is giving you their full backing and a fat budget. The showrunner will be Robert Smigel, another legendary SNL alum. The head writer will be Louis C.K. Charlie Kaufman is another. The two big acting recruits will be a pair of young sketch geniuses, Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert. A bunch of other super-talented performers and writers are in the mix, including Jon Glaser and Robert Carloc.

Oh, and the thing will go on right after the single top-rated show on all of TV. A sure-fire can't-miss, right?

Or so everyone thought. "The Dana Carvey Show" lasted all of seven episodes in 1996 -- a crashing failure so bad it's barely even remembered by audiences today. Also plagued by health problems, including open-heart surgery the following year, Carvey's career as a film and TV star was effectively over.

And yet the short-lived debacle touched a lot of lives. It helped groom the next generation of comedy giants.

One of its popular bits, a cheeky animated superhero parody, "The Ambiguously Gay Duo," would move to SNL and become a staple for years. Colbert would be recruited by the rejuvenated "The Daily Show" based on his work on the Carvey show, and he would insist they hire Carell as well. We know how they turned out.

Now, Hulu is presenting "Too Funny to Fail," a feature documentary about the Roy Hobbs of TV comedy, the show everyone thought would break the mold but would instead become its own punchline. It debuts Saturday, Oct. 21.

Directed by Josh Greenbaum, it's an insightful, wry and thought-provoking look at what goes on behind the screen of network television. ABC thought it was buying Dana Carvey's suitcase full of popular impressions and characters, from the Church Lady to President Clinton. What they got instead was a truly subversive show with off-the-wall scenarios and a puckish attitude.

The young renegades wanted to do their own thing, by their admission "draw a line in the sand" for audiences who weren't cool enough to understand their brand of funny. For their very first sketch, they chose to have the POTUS demonstrating his empathy by taking drugs to grow realistic-looking teats, and have him suckle live puppies and kittens on-air.

Quite literally, millions of people turned off their TVs after the first five minutes -- and they never came back. Critics were even less kind.

Another one of their ideas was to have the name of the show change every week with a rotation of sponsors. So the debut was "The Taco Bell Dana Carvey Show." The first show was such a train wreck, with national headlines talking about how offensive and unfunny it was, Taco Bell loudly announced they were cutting ties -- even though sponsors were only supposed to last one show.

But it started a virtual evacuation of advertisers. By the end, the sponsor was literally the local Chinese diner where the crew bought their lunch.

Festooned with in-depth interviews with nearly all of the principles -- Louis C.K. being the notable exception -- "Too Funny to Fail" comes at the perfect time, as the people involved in making the show have seen their careers recover sufficiently to laugh about how young and deluded they were.

Probably the least injured is Carvey himself, who had such high hopes and knew right away his enterprise was doomed. But it allowed him to be close to his family, raise his two young boys and return to standup on his own terms.

It's a cliche to say something was ahead of its time, but with "The Dana Carvey Show" I think that's literally true. Panned as racy and kooky, it was probably a better fit for late night than prime time. Certainly, it did not mesh well with its pedantic lead-in, "Home Improvement" starring Tim Allen.

One bit, a real promo for a maudlin "very special episode" of HI, followed by the "The Mug Root Beer Dana Carvey Show," had me laughing as hard as anything I've seen in awhile. Greenbaum knows how good the moment is, too, milking it with a collage of the interviewees guffawing over the clanging contrast.

Comedy is by definition highly subjective. In its (very short) day, not many people appreciated Carvey's show for what it was, rather than what they wanted it to be.

Review: "The Secret Life of Pets"

Colorful, boingy, copious critters, a robust emphasis on gastrointestinal humor -- if that’s not the perfect recipe for a little kids’ movie, then I don’t know what is.

Note I said “little kids’ movie,” not “family film,” because while “The Secret Life of Pets” is a strong entry in the former, it is not much in the way of the latter. What it mostly is is a sorta-sequel to “Minions,” made by the same people, with cartoony dogs and cats (a few birds and reptiles, too) swapped out for the lil’ yellow dudes.

Well, except these guys are understandable. It’s a “Toy Story” -ish conceit, about the adventures our pets go on when we’re not around. To humans their speech just sounds like barks and yelps and what have you, but they can all understand each other -- no inter-species language barrier here.

The story focuses on two dogs, Max and Duke, voiced by Louis C.K. and Eric Stonestreet. Max is a fun-loving little dude who has a cozy life in New York City with his owner, Katie (Ellie Kemper). But then one day she brings home Duke, an enormous brown ball of fluff from the shelter, and all bets are off as they vie for title of apartment alpha dog.

Through a whole lot of implausible contretemps, they’re lost in the city trying to find their way home. Meanwhile they are pursued by two groups. The first is a rescue mission led by Gidget (the adorably squeaky Jenny Slate), the white Pomeranian from across the way who secretly adores Max.

She throws together a ragtag group that includes Max’s other dog friends, a fat and lazy cat (Lake Bell), a parakeet, guinea pig and even a hawk (Albert Brooks), who tamps down his predatory instinct to help creatures he would usually snack on.

And that’s actually the normal team. The other, more antagonistic one is the Flushed Pets, a gang of discarded creatures who’ve sworn revenge on the human world that shunned them. They have a tattooed pig, a hairless and holey cat (Steve Coogan), several alligators, assorted lizards and fish and a large one-fanged viper. Their leader is Snowball (Kevin Hart), an excitable former magician’s rabbit with the heart of William Wallace and the combat skills of… a poofy little hare.

“Liberation forever, domestication never!” is his clarion call.

Director Chris Renaud, co-director Yarrow Cheney and screenwriters Ken Daurio, Brian Lynch and Cinco Paul pitch the material straight at the 3- to 8-year-old audience. For instance, there’s a dog party where they walk in a circle sniffing each other’s butts while exchanging pleasantries. (“Enchanté!”) A high point is a sequence where the dogs break into a sausage factory and gorge themselves, leading to pork-induced hallucinations and a musical number.

“The Secret Life of Dogs” is well-made, unambitious entertainment. It’s the sort of thing you appreciate being able to let your kids enjoy, while at the same time wishing it were permissible to go off and do something else.

(Drop-off theaters with supervised double-features of this and “The Angry Birds Movie”? Now that’s an upcharge parents would happily shell out for ahead of 3-D.)

Review: "American Hustle"

In one of his final reviews, the incomparable Roger Ebert declared a film “fabulously well-acted and crafted, but when I reach for it, my hand closes on air.” I felt much the same way about “American Hustle,” which boasts an entire crowd of Academy Award-winning and -nominated thespians, one of Hollywood’s most lauded writer/directors, a buzzy historical subject, and a crushing identity crisis.

What the heck is this movie about? Ostensibly, it’s a fictionalized version of the Abscam scandal of 30-odd years ago that led to the conviction of a bunch of Congressmen and other government officials on corruption charges. But in the sprawling, unwieldy adaptation, it seems like merely an excuse for a bunch of actors to dress up in horrid ‘70s fashions and exchange frenetic volleys of dialogue that often make not a lick of sense.

Eric Singer’s screenplay exploring some little-known peculiarities of the imbroglio had languished around Hollywood for years, turning up on lists of the best non-produced scripts. Director David O. Russell did his own rewrite to intentionally turn the real-life characters into caricatures, and make the shenanigans even crazier than they actually were.

(Fittingly, Singer’s original title was “American Bullpucky,” though he used a different word.)

The cast is led by Christian Bale as Irving Rosenfeld, a brilliant but complex con man. Outwardly the role is showy, with Bale putting on weight to gain a big belly, and wearing an elaborate comb-over hairdo, tinted glasses and cheesy facial hair. But Irving lives mostly inside his own head, and sometimes has difficulty putting his schemes into action.

Bale never quite breaks through the wall between an actor’s creation and the audience, and Irving largely remains a sphinx to us.

Irving’s muse and partner in crime is Sydney Prosser, played by Amy Adams, who adopted the persona and lilt of a refined British woman so long ago, it’s taken over her identity. She cares deeply for Irving, for reasons that are unclear to her, and us. Adams gets her own makeover with a poodle perm and necklines that perpetually plunge down to her navel.

The third, and unsteadiest leg of the triad of leading characters is Richie DiMaso, played by Bradley Cooper, who is the FBI agent who busts Sydney and Irving and forces them to become his operatives.

They entrap politicians (including a sharp Jeremy Renner as a New Jersey mayor) with promises of a massive casino financed by a mysterious Arab sheikh. Richie lets the power go to his head, and convinces himself he and Sydney are soul mates.

If you thought this was yet another story about a love triangle, then you’d be wrong, because it’s actually a quadrangle.

Jennifer Lawrence turns up as Irving’s wife, Rosalyn, a walking electric ball of neuroses. Feeling abandoned by her husband’s criminal antics and his attentions for Sydney, Rosalyn inserts herself into the mix by sheer force of will, which proves troublesome when their business dealings wander into the purview of the mafia.

Narratively, Rosalyn doesn’t really serve much purpose in the story, other than to gum up the works and generate chaos. Lawrence is so crackling good, though, that the film goes into a torpor whenever she walks off-screen.

Rounding out the cast is Louis C.K. as Richie’s put-upon boss and Michael Peña as a Mexican-American fed who gets tapped to portray the sheikh. Robert De Niro also makes an uncredited appearance in a familiar role.

The experience of seeing “American Hustle” is like being at a wild party where you don’t know anybody, and find yourself shoved into a corner watching the mayhem happening all around. You never really understand the whats and the whys of it all, and you stroll out the door unchanged from how you were when you walked in, mostly trying to remember who sent the invitation and why you accepted it.