JUST FOR LAUGHS: Canadians, as you may have gathered from the large number of them who populate our television and movie screens, take their comedy pretty seriously. North of the border, one of the biggest national showcases for talent has been Montreal’s Just for Laughs Comedy Festival and its incumbent tour. This year, for the first time, that tour is dipping a toe into our fair country; its appearance at the Berklee Performance Center next Tuesday, October 29, is one of only two US dates. To help ease the transition into American culture, the JFL folks have brought along home-town funnyman Greg Fitzsimmons, whose big break came at the 1995 festival. And what a bill: the great Emo Phillips, worshipped by melodic pop punks the world over; a guy from Saskatchewan named Brent Butt (that’s, like, pretty funny right there); an Australian female musical-parody duo called Supergirly. Show time is 7:30; the Berklee Performance Center is at 136 Mass Ave in Boston, and tickets are $35. Call (617) 931-2000.
STOCKING STUFF: Eventually, everyone gets sick of Christmas — except, of course, for that part about opening presents. But when the Johnny Mathis CD begins to lose its luster, there’s no better battery recharger for the Christmas spirit than the annual Christmas Revels, a travelogue of Yuletide traditions the world over. Now in their 32nd season, the Revels folks are cooking up a feast of folk music, dance, and fable from Armenia and modern-day Georgia, with an 80-member cast featuring the Arev Ensemble, who’ll guide visitors through the musical world of an 18th-century spiked-fiddle player in the court of Tbilisi. Don’t worry, we don’t know who the hell he was either, but we’re certain it’ll be good. Performances begin December 13 and run through December 29 at Sanders Theatre, 45 Quincy Street in Harvard Square. Tickets, at $18 through $40, go on sale this Sunday, October 20, at noon. Call (617) 496-2222.
NEXT WEEKEND:
Auto Focus
Assiduous students of ’60s pop culture know that Bob Crane, star of the long-running Nazi prison-camp TV comedy Hogan’s Heroes, was a sex addict who obsessively videotaped his encounters with hundreds of women. Auto Focus, which opens next week, is a fictionalized account of Crane’s rise and fall; it was written and directed by Paul Schrader and stars Greg Kinnear as Crane.
"Paul is very big on research," says Kinnear. "He’d send me boxes of old tapes, interviews that he was conducting, anything that he could get his hands on. There’s not very much documentation on Bob Crane where the man wasn’t performing, where he wasn’t aware that the camera was on and doing shtick for it. So finding out who he truly was was a difficult task. His son, Robert Crane Jr., was enormously helpful in filling in the blanks.
"Bob had a Teflon-like quality, where nothing would stick. Nothing seemed to penetrate his happy-go-luckiness. It became very interesting, how to play that and how to make it a characteristic that the audience would maybe identify with. Or not identify with. That was the fight: ‘This is the way Bob is. He’s a one-woman man, he’s a family man, and he’s screwing everything in sight. Those are the parameters of his life, and he feels good about it, and whether you do or not is up to you.’
"In the first part of the movie, you learn nothing about Bob. And there’s a great deal to learn about somebody when you’re learning nothing. But I think in the second half, you can start to learn some things about him. One of the fascinating elements of the story is this relationship between Bob and John Carpenter [Crane’s partner in womanizing, no relation to the Halloween director], how they had this odd sort of husband-and-wife relationship. It was that kind of symbiotic relationship with somebody who you think is going to enrich your life but who is in fact wrecking your life. Bob Crane Jr. said John Carpenter was Bob’s only friend, which I still think is quite amazing and insightful.
"I don’t know exactly how I feel about Bob. I think that he’s a lot of different things. He was certainly one of the most ambiguous characters I’ve ever played."
Says Schrader, "To be honest, I came to think less of Bob Crane the more I found out about him. I think I was more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when I didn’t know quite as much about him. But that doesn’t bother me at all, making films about characters that I find not entirely likable. I don’t think that’s an issue. If they’re really interesting characters, and they’re entertaining, and they make you think and they make your world a little larger by thinking about them, that’s all you can want from a movie. Just ’cause you like a character doesn’t mean it’s a good moviegoing experience.
"He’s not very much a tragic figure, because he’s just too clueless to be tragic. A tragic figure, the assumption is that he’s a great person with a great flaw. I think he had a great flaw, but I don’t think he was a great person. In this film, you step back a little bit and watch him swim through this moral morass, and you learn by watching him rather than by becoming him. There is an identification with Crane, but at some point the identification starts to go away, and you just watch him: ‘Wow! Jesus Christ!’
"You get an audience to follow or identify to some degree with a character that they’re not comfortable identifying with — well, you have cracked open a door to their hearts and minds. And God knows, once that door is cracked open, anything can come in or out."
Auto Focus opens next Friday at theaters to be announced.
BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
