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Curb Your Enthusiasm: Opening Night (2004)
Brilliant
At its best, the brilliance of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" is revealed by the exquisite construction of the plots - every little thing that happens along the way comes together in the finale. In "Opening Night," this brilliance is shown both on the scale of the episode itself and on the long scale of the season-long plot arc.
The running plot lines of season 4 have been "Larry David stars in 'The Producers'" and "Will Larry be able to take advantage of Cheryl's offer to let him commit adultery once and once only as a 10th anniversary present." In "Opening Night," we finally get the answer to the question that's been hanging over our heads all season, "What was Mel Brooks thinking when he cast Larry David, who appears to be unable to sing, dance, act, or learn his lines?" We also see his last two attempts to make good on Cheryl's offer and the complications that as usual get in the way of any hope of success.
The entire plot works like clockwork: Larry travels to New York for the Broadway opening, finds himself not having small bills to tip the staff at his hotel, offends the Sikh air conditioner repairman by not tipping him, makes it up to the hotel staff by giving them opening-night tickets, meets a tourist played by Stephen Colbert and as usual gets in an altercation that ends with the tourist placing a whammy ("You. Will. FAIL") on Larry. . . leading to an absolutely perfect finale involving Larry's loudmouthed cousin, the Sikh's turban, Larry completely forgetting his lines and getting no help at all from costar David Schwimmer (who may have forgiven Larry for the watch incident, but apparently not for the stewardess incident), and a cameo appearance by Anne Bancroft playing herself.
One has to admire Larry David's audacity in revealing that the entire season was basically a shaggy-dog joke that only people who have seen the movie "The Producers" will fully appreciate. I don't want to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn't seen the episode, so I won't say any more than that. I suspect that even if you haven't seen "The Producers," you'll find a lot to laugh at and admire in this episode. If you have, you'll almost certainly be like me -- on the floor laughing throughout the brilliant finale.
Thursday's Children (1954)
An interesting historical document
Nowadays, Lindsay Anderson's short documentary about children at a school for the deaf is probably of more interest for what it reveals about attitudes during the 1950's than for its own sake. The film shows how these children are taught to lip-read and to vocalize, and it is interesting to see how it was done. The two teachers shown in the film clearly love their work and the children, and do their jobs with an almost saintly patience. The children are shown as bright, happy, and enthusiastic -- although we see the occasional failure, we never see how the children react to the inevitable frustration that they must have experienced.
For those of us who watch the film nowadays, from a perspective of more than half a century, it is hard not to start wondering about the social attitudes toward the deaf that were current at the time the film was made. For example, no effort is made to teach the children sign language (or at least if there is, we never see any evidence of such an effort), even though they openly admit that the school's teaching methods only succeed with one child in three. And one would hope that nowadays, the teacher would find something other than _Little Black Sambo_ to read to the children.