{"id":5815,"date":"2010-09-14T17:14:48","date_gmt":"2010-09-14T21:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5815"},"modified":"2010-09-15T02:13:51","modified_gmt":"2010-09-15T06:13:51","slug":"im-still-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5815","title":{"rendered":"I’m Still Here"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Andy Kaufman was* hilarious. But only in retrospect. If you went to a comedy club and had to sit through one of his on-stage readings of The Great Gatsby<\/em>, it\u2019s a very reasonable response to heckle him and eventually leave. Such meta-commentary on the notion of entertainment and the expectation of a comedian performing for an audience, as opposed to simply amusing himself, would be funny from outside of the bubble of the experiment, but torture if you were the butt of the joke. Kaufman took a comedian\u2019s greatest fantasy; that they could control the crowd so much as to repeatedly annoy and delight them at will, as if they were simply marionette puppets. Milos Forman\u2019s biopic of Kaufman, Man on the Moon<\/em>, was little more than a greatest hits package of Kaufman\u2019s more infamous antics, and only brushed against his profound sincerity about his insincerity and how much he cared about receiving the most vitriol he could from the crowd.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Oddly enough, Casey Affleck\u2019s I\u2019m Still Here<\/em> is a better exploration of Kaufman than the movie\u2019s actual subject, \u201ctroubled\u201d actor Joaquin Phoenix. That\u2019s an advantage because the question of whether or not I\u2019m Still Here <\/em>is a hoax and Phoenix\u2019s retirement from acting to become a rapper is legit, will be relevant for about, at most, the next three weeks.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Phoenix\u2019s stunts on The Late Show With David Letterman<\/em>, appearing medicated, humorless, and disoriented were interesting at the time, if only as a reminder of Joaquin\u2019s brother River overdosing at the age of 23, and how the emotional swings and addiction might be hereditary. Of course, by the time I\u2019m Still Here <\/em>was finally released a few days ago, it had been eighteen months since Phoenix\u2019s appearance on Letterman\u2019s show, quite a long time ago in terms of pop culture relevance (and why would anyone see the movie if they weren\u2019t eminently familiar with the incident? The movie is like inside-inside baseball). It\u2019s both unfortunate and fortunate that most of I\u2019m Still Here <\/em>is a build-up to the Letterman debacle, because it\u2019s not much of an event to focus on and it also gives us a chance to get to the genesis of how and when Phoenix and Affleck decided to document his career transition. There have been far more entertaining and memorable stunts pulled on Letterman\u2019s show, a lot of them involving Andy Kaufman (no doubt part of Joaquin and Casey\u2019s conception) where Letterman was in on the joke, and one where he didn\u2019t, with Crispin Glover, in character for his then-upcoming film Rubin & Ed<\/em>, with Glover, after nearly kicking Letterman in the face, being escorted off the stage.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Being familiar with these details helps carry a viewer past the more self-indulgent portions of I\u2019m Still Here<\/em> (way too long at nearly 2 hours, and concluding with a wordless Terrence Malick-style sequence), which is almost a necessity if you\u2019re going to explore the tediousness of fleeting fame and the difference between being an artist and a joke. The deadpan humor, not normally one of Phoenix\u2019s strengths, is what really comes through, especially in his disinterest in personal hygiene coupled with his shyness, tempered with coke-fueled desperation, unkempt hair and beard, and quickly bloating body, gives him the look of Zach Galifianakis, but the demeanor of an early, stage-averse-period Jim Morrison.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that Phoenix has any of the musical talent of Morrison, his rapping is comically low-energy (he\u2019s lucky that Joaquin rhymes with spleen), it\u2019s appropriate that the white whale to his Captain Ahab is Sean P. Diddy Combs, surely the most successfully ineffectual rapper of the last 30 years. It\u2019s not particularly believable that Phoenix, a veteran of show business, wouldn\u2019t take the hint that Combs wasn\u2019t interested in producing his music after being repeatedly avoided. This lack of control and utter panic around his handlers and management is briefly amusing as a way to humanize Phoenix, but his stage struggles (there\u2019s a very obvious reference to This is Spinal Tap<\/em> as Phoenix is unable to find the proper exit door) lean more towards the movie being a joke than a legit documentary.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>There are plenty of other hints too, there\u2019s a fight about breaking confidentiality agreements (why would you need such a contract if you weren\u2019t hiding something?), the closing credits has certain people credited as actual characters with totally different names, and Joaquin\u2019s final film was Two Lovers<\/em>, suggesting that I\u2019m Still Here<\/em> might have been part of a two-picture deal with Magnolia. But it doesn\u2019t really matter whether or not what we are seeing is real or staged; Phoenix was a mannered actor on screen, and he\u2019s stiff and mannered here too, even during his Phil Hoffman-esque breakdown<\/span><\/a>, as he tearfully repeats, \u201cI\u2019m such an idiot.\u201d That\u2019s where a lot of what makes I\u2019m Still Here <\/em>so funny comes from, Phoenix wants to appear as an everyman, but we see a pampered, spoiled, arrogant fool who teaches us that the primary responsibility of a handler is to hold your tie while you puke in a toilet. No matter where he is, he acts like he\u2019s still on a set, jittery, impatient, and bursting at the seams with hostile insecurity. \u00a0Where do the layers of self-awareness and mockery end and where does a truthful portrayal begin in I\u2019m Still Here<\/em>? I neither know nor care, but I\u2019m pretty sure that whether or not Phoenix comes out of retirement or fatally ODs, I\u2019m Still Here <\/em>will always be moderately intriguing. In retrospect.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>* There\u2019s a very low-budget and terminally dull, padded, and wasteful documentary called The Death of Andy Kaufman<\/span><\/a><\/em> that briefly argues that his death from lung cancer was a hoax and he would make his return in the near future. But without anything apart from conjecture behind it, the movie gives up on the notion and turns into a low rent and poorly edited recap of his notorious gambits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andy Kaufman was* hilarious. But only in retrospect. If you went to a comedy club and had to sit through one of his on-stage readings of The Great Gatsby, it\u2019s a very reasonable response to heckle him and eventually leave. Such meta-commentary on the notion of entertainment and the expectation of a comedian performing for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[4802,327,7074,7099,1267,7067,1695,98,6226,786,7064,437,6505,7079,7075,7103,7070,2285,7100,261,3412,5847,7081,3733,7098,7080,7066,7073,226,3181,7078,2167,7076,7065,7095,490,2058,7102,2144,7094,1381,7096,7097,7072,2589,7077,7101,7069,7068,4190,7071,3076],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5815"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5815\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}