8-19-10 Movie Review: Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

The only two noncommercial movie showings I know of between now and next Wednesday night are both tonight at 7 p.m. The one I don’t have to tell you about is the classic Ghostbusters, with Bill Murray, Dan Ayckroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis, and Annie Potts in a story about paranormal investigators that Roger Ebert said was one of the few comedies to survive superproduction; it’s 7 tonight in the Orpheum. The noncommercial you probably don’t know about is Left Field, the Tallgrass Third Thursday movie, a documentary, a true story about a kickball team that tries to escape growing up but eventually finds that life is not a playground and they have to join the adult world after all. The catalyst character is former Wichitan K.C. Haywood who still has family here.  Left Field shows tonight at 7 in the former Hillside Baptist Church at 147 South Hillside.

Or you might prefer to see Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.

Some people could find in Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work something more worthwhile than I could; both the Eagle brief note and Denise Neil’s column found it somehow inspirational, despite its honest picture of a woman you may not like in terms of either herself or her work.

All I could see was an extremely insecure woman whose humor relied entirely too much on shock and raunch and whose interests didn’t seem to extend beyond herself; when she shared Donald Trump’s show Celebrity Apprentice with her daughter, she says she didn’t want to outshine her daughter, but her daughter expresses doubts that Rivers could have been that generous. Rivers does allow her staff to censor some of her most tasteless material, but other than that, she’s pretty much all Number One, and unlike George Carlin — whom she expresses admiration for — I couldn’t see that she had any subject in her work beyond herself, no matter how much she claimed to be representing womankind in general. We have to give her credit for things like that. She did promote plastic surgery, which did a better job on her than the still pictures I have seen suggest; but it was just a matter of preserving hr youth, or at least such beauty as she had, which was no more than she admitted was always short of dazzling. Maybe I should admire her for sticking to her career after some pretty hard knocks; but I get tired of admiring show people for obsessing about their egos.

Structurally, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is too repetitious; we keep going in and out theatre doors and up and down theatre stairs, and there are too many short clips and repetitious tributes to her refusal to give up. Rivers goes on about her desire to be accepted as a dramatic actress, but there isn’t even a review to suggest her acting. There other missions: did Johnny Carson really quit speaking to her just because she got a show of her own? One suspects some kind of back story there, and I would have liked to know at least whether anybody tried to find it.

Let me confess that I had never liked Joan Rivers before I saw Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. After seeing it, I felt no reason to change my mind.