Analyze This (1999)

Director: Harold Ramis

Cast: Robert de Niro, Billy Crystal, Lisa Kudrow, Chazz Palmentieri

Have I Seen It Before: Oh sure. It was one of those R-rated movies that my parents let me see in those scant few years before I could just bypass their authority altogether.

Did I Like It: Back in those days when watching the movie was a special treat, I thought it was tremendous, causing me to put the movie in the same class as Ramis' work on Ghostbusters (1984) and especially Groundhog Day (1993). I kinda wanted to be Harold Ramis, if I'm being honest. A purveyor of funny comedies whose scripts actually work plot-wise. This was before his eventual petering out with duds like Bedazzled (2000) and Year One (2009), and certainly before subsequent Ghostbusters movies became occasions to memorialized him.

As a critic, one doesn't want to let the variables of one's own mood or environment, but I'm going to say that it was probably a bad idea to watch this film immediately after watching The Godfather (1972). But it’s also not a great idea that the film wants to invite all of those comparisons. Sobol’s (Crystal) dream sequence where he is Marlon Brando and Vitti (De Niro) is John Cazale during the assassination attempt in the earlier film not only smacks of self-reference via identification only and forgetting to bring some sort of commentary to the proceedings. It also highlights that Coppola and his cinematography Gordon Willis can be frequently mimicked, but rarely captured*.

The rest of the film leans to heavily on the personalities of its two stars to really ever succeed on its own terms. De Niro leans into the monosyllabic and Crystal spills forth with schtick that I want to remind them both that they’re not suffering through a talk show appearance or hosting the Oscars.

For all the good it might do them.

*Boy, that one scene in Barbie (2023) really had my number, didn’t it?

The King of Comedy (1983)

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Sandra Bernhard, Diahnne Abbott

Have I Seen It Before?: Yes, but so much of it had disappeared from my memory, like some kind of dream that didn’t mean all that much. If you had asked me what I remembered from the film when Joker (2019) quite aptly put it back in our collective consciousness, I would have only been able to reach for long sequences of Robert De Niro waiting in Jerry Lewis’ reception area.

Did I like it?: I’m thrilled to report that my failure to remember much of the movie owes more to my fleshy, insignificant brain than to any problem with the film itself.

It’s hard to deny this film’s influence on Joker. I mean, look at that poster. The structure is almost totally aped from it. The thing that the new film changes is how it ends. In films today (and TV shows, now that I’m thinking about shows like Breaking Bad, and to a much lesser extent Dexter), people who do bad things need to suffer some kind of comeuppance, even if their descent into depravity is the closest these characters come to self actualization.

Here, Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) is just as ruthless as Walter White, just as mentally unmoored as Arthur Fleck, and just as oblivious to the world as Dexter Morgan. And yet, as this film ends, Pupkin is on top. He goes to prison for a flash, but the world loves him. It turns out he’s far funnier than we were led to believe. The world was actually keeping him down, as it turns out.

How the hell am I supposed to feel at the end of the film?

After John Hinckley cited Taxi Driver (1976) as the muse for his violence, it’s sort of a marvel that Scorsese would continue to tell stories about disaffected madmen in the few years immediately after the Reagan assassination attempt. It wasn’t like Salinger started writing the ongoing adventures of Holden Caulfield (or anything) after Catcher in the Rye.