What's Up Doc

What's Up Docⁱ is transparently Bogdanovich trying to be Neil Simon. It doesn't even work out terribly ; I mean the result's shockingly superficial and very slow to start, like a nine act comedic play by a retired policeman. Nevertheless, if you've got an hour to wait for the extremely circumvolutedly tedious warmup of the spuriously overcomplex machinery, it does eventually get funny. It never gets insightful or more deeply satisfying than the mere Haha! Hahaha!, there isn't that Simon trademark Aha! at all in there, it's as much about human nature as it is about the humour intrinsic to piles of crates (something cats often see just as well as people do, and occasionally even better). Nevertheless, if you're sixty and had an overlarge steak right before, by the time you drowsily rouse it'll just be getting hysterical.

Barbara Streisand (the only person ever to receive all of the following: Oscar, Tony, Emmy, Grammy, Golden Globe, Cable Ace, National Endowment for the Arts, and Peabody awards, as well as the Kennedy Center Honor, American [...], not to mention the 1971 Gala de l'Unicef (TV Series) as well as the celebrated 1974 production of "Fred Astaire Salutes the Fox Musicals") is perhaps the most obnoxious uninvited guest in showbiz history. A sort of Lorena Lupu of the Borscht Belt, an iconic practical verification of the intrinsic immorality and ethical perniciousness of the postmodern religion : if there's no drawback to "trying", the only virtue left's persistence, in turn meaning that this pile of deplorable fail's just as likely to have a career as actually talented women.

As far as I'm concerned, I'd much rather live in a world without Barbara Streisand (and for that matter without her off-color exact equivalentⁱⁱ), which is why I do. I'd augur you the exact same, but then again we can't all be me.

1. 1972, by Peter Bogdanovich and introducing the jewnose wonder (if you don't count Texaco Presents: A Quarter Century of Bob Hope and other such highlights). [↩]
2. Apparently I've not bothered to review that 1987 Burglar atrocity, but seriously, Streisand, Goldberg, same shit different hats (somewhat). Except of course the junior did a bunch of Letterman couchwork, for lack of any half-century Bob Hope specials. [↩]