December 3 movie: Definite Article. This was a stand-up routine by Eddie Izzard. Does it count as a movie? I think it does. It's 90 minutes long and it's on a DVD. In which case I should also mention Unrepeatable and Circle, two other Izzard DVDs we've watched recently.
In case you couldn't guess, we really like Eddie Izzard. He's done some acting but we most like his standup. He's very funny and his jokes tend towards topics like history and old movies, not so much the typical standup routines of flying on airplanes or going to bars or current politics, etc. My favorite of his performances was Dress to Kill, which we saw last year on HBO. I don't know if it's truly the funniest or if it's just the one that I saw first, but either way it seems the funniest to me. One of the reasons Georg delayed getting a website was that he couldn't get cakeordeath.com, which refers to an Izzard joke from Dress to Kill about how the Anglicans would have run the Inquisition, offering heretics the choice between cake or death.
Unrepeatable was his first performance to be filmed. It's funny, it has potential, but there are more typical standup jokes than in the others. He does have a very funny bit about The Great Escape, in which the cats are digging a tunnel called Charlie behind the couch, and also mysteriously wearing cat trousers so they can carry the excess dirt from the tunnel into the garden. (There's an extended bit about The Great Escape in Dress to Kill so it was interesting to see that he was working on the idea already.)
Definite Article is the one we watched on Friday. Actually I fell asleep (no reflection on the movie, it was the face-full of exhaust I had gotten from David's truck that knocked me out early) and finished watching it last night. It seems like he had found his voice by then, it's very funny and the topics are more like Dress to Kill. My favorite part was the letter the Corinthians write back to St. Paul, in which they tell him "Fuck off! Why do you keep writing us letters? You arrogant bastard!"
We watched Circle a while ago, I think maybe in October when I watched a bunch of movies but forgot to write any of them up. I don't remember Circle that well, but I did think it was funny. My only criticism is that I guess by the time he filmed Circle he had gotten more famous because of the success of Dress to Kill, and the audience was a bit obsequious. Applauding madly every time he said something remotely clever, you know what I mean? That's a minor complaint though, it was still funny.
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