Everybody Loves

PHIL!!

Movie Night last night:
What a welcome change of tone and tirade from the typical Washington vitriol (of which I confess I have been so outraged in the past I myself have been guilty.)

EXPORTING RAYMOND
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1356763/ is the funniest movie I have seen in I don't know when. I was chuckling and chortling even. If I was drinking soda it would have come out my nose.
The 'Everybody Loves Raymond' TV show creative writer/producer Phil (see the bio blurb on the link) gets a call from Sony executives who want to export the show to develop a whole series of sitcoms in Russia (a medium heretofore unexplored in the Russian psyche except with the advent of the hugely successful exported "Nanny" show) -It chronicles his escapades trying to configure an American sit-com to suit a Russian audience as he maneuvers the cultural giddy- curtain through a Russian Costume Design lady chanelling Paris Hilton who makes Santa outfits for her Chiwawas, a Russian driver who served in the Russian Army for ten years and knows the guy who poisoned that Putinesque casualty we all read about, the Russian TV producers and executives and of course the string of Russian actors and actresses. Phil learns to love them all after ripping what's left of his hair out.
The American show, Everybody Loves Raymond depicts a fictional Italian family from New York (Phil is Jewish from Queens and said "Italians, Jews-what's the difference! Every problem is solved by food and your mother doesn't ever leave you alone.") He spent adolescence raised in a home in Rockland country New York and his real parents have signature
cameos in the film. He shows how the scene where the mother throws a kvetch-fit over having to receive all that fruit in the fruit-of-the-month club gets translated into a Russian mother getting annoyed at all the water bottles she has to handle in water of the month club because they don't have fruit-of-the-month clubs in Russia- some things don't translate- and his finding the funny even in the land of lost translation is priceless. You can actually imagine his real mother whining about having to get all that fruit- we don't have space in the refrigerator. We need a new bigger refrigerator. I need a freezer in the garage now.
The talent of Phil in this mode-like a Seinfeld only for families not yuppies, who are trying to live as committed families is that he takes sheer delight in the whimsically amusing of the every day. Every day has treasures of chuckle material hidden in it if you look close enough. God has a sense of humor- and Phil reads his mind.


He has invented a new medium here-you have heard of documentaries and docudramas? This is a documomedy. Hilarious. It hits theatres next Spring in select locations (DeMoines may not get the humor)-Two thumbs up. See it.


Big thank you to John Hanshaw, that heaving hunk of he-man movie promoter who is the Washington, DC icon (lawyer, creative entrepreneur, actor, media man and general renaissance genius) who started the Guerilla independent film festival (short-fest) and the Washington Film Institute for the advanced screening.