Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic (2005)

To me, this movie is perfection.

Just perfect...

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

"Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic" features very funny comedian stuck in a very bad movie. At her stand-up Silverman can be the master of her instrument. Yet, here she is stuck in a movie that is distracting and disorganized. It is part concert film, part variety show. The former works, but the latter is like throwing a rock through the rest of the movie. You're left with the intense urge to hit the fast-forward button.Silverman has, like all stand-up comedians, a specialty. Yet her act is somewhat different than the usual comedians who stick to time-weathered material about the everyday battles with the universe like sex, politics, coffee shops and microwave ovens. Instead she talks about edgy subjects such like AIDS, race, pornography, even 9/11, and then punctuates her comments with shocking commentary. She pushes herself into unhealthy waters and her fearlessness is brought home by the fact that she doesn't seem to be bulldozing the material by being crass or mean. There's poise and intelligence to her delivery. She is pretty and well-mannered but her words take an unexpected U-Turn into commentary that is shocking. "I believe that the best time to have a baby is . . . when you're a black teenager" she tells us. That's offense, and it's funny.Part of the problem with her first movie "Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic" is that there's not enough of that. Her act has a conversational flow to it, a pattern of beginning as something mundane but then ending it with something shockingly un-PC. Yet, the movie breaks this pattern every few minutes by bad skits and musical numbers of no consequence. We came to see her stage act, I think the image she wants to project (at least on stage) is the image of a person who is insecure but unaware of the racist and sexist language that she uses. That's fine, but it requires an artist who can orchestrate it like music. She's done it before, but somehow it all falls flat here. There needed to be some measure of consistency. Throw out the lame sketches and the music and get down to the business of doing what she does best. Sadly, it's not here.*1/2 (of four)

Not funny ha-ha but funny no-one-heard-me-snicker-at-that-right? With Don Rickles now eight-five years old, Sam Kinison ironically dead at the hands of 16 year old drunk driver and Andrew "Dice" Clay's shallow talent reservoir completely exhausted, a gap exists in the market for highly offensive race-based comedy. This movie presents Sarah Silverman's staking out of that ground. Silverman produces none of the show-stopping belly laughs that Kinison could in the years before cocaine and alcohol convinced him that singing along to early 70's rock songs constituted entertainment. Viewers will find little in Silverman's act worth sharing with coworkers at the water cooler next day (Kinison's fans still remember certain of his material). This is not to suggest that the movie lacks entertainment value or that some lines don't elicit a minor titter. Rather, Silverman's talent is in getting the audience on her side with smart, politically incorrect observations and then leading them to a place so improper that they their fear overwhelms their smug hipness. She also does an excellent job of using her innocent good looks to amp up the shock value. Her attempt to provide value for money by including some videotaped vignettes along with footage of a Los Angeles show is largely misguided as the skits, like her ill-fated MTV show, feel forced. Some of them may have worked had she inflicted them on real audiences - Borat-like (for example, an extraordinarily offensive song sung to supposed nursing home residents may have actually been funny if Silverman actually went in and assaulted the elderly in a real nursing home). In short, far better stand-up comedy videos exist out there (most of George Carlin's stuff) but Silverman brings an original voice to shock-comedy audiences.

Sarah Silverman--with her gummy smile, coltish stance, and clear voice which bubbles up from deep within her chest--wants to come on like a huggable shock comedienne, yet she's more performance artist than stand-up personality. Cleverly and carefully (one may say 'precisely') dropping taboo words into her stories, Silverman gets laughs by pretending to lead the audience in one direction and then undercutting those expectations with a surprising low-keyed zinger. Silverman doesn't overwork a punchline--which are often nestled in the context of her stories anyhow--although she returns to older topics too often. Also, she relies far too much on pseudo-cute facial expressions and aw-shucks body language to soften the blows of her words, though the topics (9/11, the Holocaust, AIDS, vaginal sex versus anal sex) are tiptoed through in a facetious yet frisky manner. The fantasy edits, imagining Sarah in different manners of celebrity, work well, better than the purposefully-wooden prologue and epilogue with friends. Still, one expects to laugh more with such touchy material. Silverman is so laid-back and blasé, it's clear to viewers she is giving them a made-up creation. Other shock comics manage to make audiences feel as if they are hearing something true, but this personality that Silverman is displaying (playful, naughty, grounded, unaffected) is unabashedly artificial. This is entirely deliberate on Silverman's part, yet is tends to render her act phony: smoke and mirrors prodding at the national funny bone. *1/2 from ****

Basically a stand-up session enriched by skits. Silverman is exceedingly funny, capitalizing on her beauty, the sweet blankness of some of her expressions, especially mild puzzlement as the audience reacts to some of her over-the-top lines. She has a filthy mouth and a filthy mind and says the most outrageous things as if respect and decorum were annoying nuisances to be swept away with a comment or a laugh. Somehow her riffs on racism and other tricky subjects pass through offensiveness and come out the other side as brilliant satire of society's often hypocritical observance of "tolerant" values. Some of the skits are a little tedious—the framing device with her sister about putting on a show is strained and overlong, and the folksinger at the old-folks' home and the grandmother's funeral bit is overlong, sapping its potency like so many Saturday Night Live sketches did by staying past its welcome. A couple of the songs are really very funny—Silverman can sing, and her band (the Silvermen) is pretty good. It's a nice touch having them wear their hair in two ponytails, like hers in some parts of the movie. And the stand-up is often brilliant and always entertaining. Much laughter ensued, as well as a few OMGs.