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A certain underground crudeness or surrealism, Robert Downey calls it by its name, "advertisement." Reviews don't come cheap even if it's just pointing out the "pee-pee dickey" of beer, the regime change unfolds at the board meeting over the boss' fresh corpse for the benefit of the token black member (Arnold Johnson). Castro-bearded and croak-throated, he lays out the plan: "Rocking the boat is a drag. What you do is sink the boat," hence Truth and Soul, Inc. Militant faces fill the white corridors, obscenity becomes the norm for commercials, the suits line up with bags of money. A pie in the face for Miss Redneck (favorite hobby: "emasculation"), Face-Off pimple cream comes with a slushy ballad about soul kisses and dry-humping. Salaam mixed media, the commodity of revolution, "innuendos and subtleties" and sundry firecrackers. "I feel like an Oreo cookie." "You look like a pile of shit!" A long piss on Madison Avenue and its subsidiaries, the skit format as a string of blistering squibs. (Of contemporaneous freak-outs, only Klein's Mr. Freedom and Winner's I'll Never Forget What's'isname match its satirical bile.) Ethereal Cereal in Watts, Lucky Airlines with topless stewardesses, sell-out after sell-out lambasted by the radical jivester in A-rab headdress (Antonio Fargas). The huckster's small world, presided over by Mimeo out of Barnum & Bailey (Pepi Hermine) plus his oily Kissinger (Larry Wolf). "Every single account pulled out." "I wish I had pulled out—too many dependents, baby!" The agitator's rage and closet rue for Downey, who knows how easily an insurrection can be made into another product. Establishment or "unestablished establishment," the corporate gets a Molotov cocktail all the same. Louis C.K. (Pootie Tang) and Anderson (Inherent Vice) inherit its princely spirit. With Stan Gottlieb, Allen Garfield, Laura Greene, Eric Krupnik, and Allan Arbus,. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |