KILLING AUDIENCES, KILLING BIG GAME

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All Joking Aside--Adorable young Charlene tries out her standup comedy skills at a New York club one night; she gets heckled off the stage by a middle-aged jerk. Later she learns her heckler, Bob, was once a promising, rising comedian who flamed out for various personal reasons. She enlists him, for money, to help her build a set.

"I've seen this movie before" says Bob (Brian Markinson) when Charlene (Raylene Harewood) makes her proposal. But he takes the gig, Charlene gradually begins to feel her way to getting laughs, and, since Charlene gained her standup ambitions from her late dad, and Bob is estranged from his daughter, the two of them just naturally bond.

You've seen this movie before, too. But there's a reason why: This general story template of "old veteran mentors novice" works. It works in this Canadian production because the veteran Markinson and the relative novice Harewood are both charming, and director Shannon Kohli, working from a script by James Pickering, captures an unforced chemistry between them.

I've never seen a dramatization of standup that has quite the hilarious edge and energy of real standup; not Punchline, not The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The closest I've seen, I think, is Cliff Gorman's brief turn as a faux Lenny Bruce in Bob Fosse's 1979 All That Jazz, but truly funny as it was, even that somehow felt like an actor excellently pretending to do standup, not a standup doing standup.

That's what Harewood seems like here, too. But the story is structured so that after a while we accept this as a convention, like when they don't show you the hands of the actor playing a surgeon actually removing somebody's appendix.

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Wild Daze--Phyllis Stuart's documentary makes the case, in passionate, overtly editorial terms, that the killing of big fauna in Africa is a big problem, not just for Africans, not just for animal lovers. The importance of large animals to ecosystems, and thus to the environment worldwide, is insufficiently understood, as is the complex problem of why humans wantonly kill large animals.

So Stuart breaks it down for us, in "Acts." Act One covers the corruption and greed behind the trade in things like ivory and rhino horn; Act Two then explains the conflict between animals and, say, farmers or ranchers; Act Three discusses hunting, legal and not.

There are numerous talking heads, ranging from Jane Goodall to a professional hunter named Pete Swanepoel, Jr. whose cognitive dissonance about what he does seems almost deranged. There's also some rivetingly beautiful animal footage. My favorite moment occurs when Swanepoel repeats the tired line that "Hunting is the best form of conservation" and Stuart times it to a shot of an ostrich taking a crap.

And, as with Saul Schwartz's harrowing 2017 Trophy, there is also plenty of footage of animal death and mutilation and suffering that is all but unwatchable. The use of such horrific material is, of course, perfectly legitimate in terms of these films' purposes, but therein lies the problem: People like Trump's sons or the Jimmy Johns guy--or, say, an art collector who fancies carved ivory--are unlikely to watch Wild Daze, and people sympathetic to animals and to environmentalism already agree with its position. It's a strong movie, but who, exactly, is it aimed at?