I have to agree with you here (at least somewhat). There used to be a radio program in KC, played Friday and Saturday nights, very late, that I'd set my alarm for... It was called "When Radio Was," and it was replays of the old radio serials, as well as Fibber Mgee and Molly, Burns and Allen, and best of all, The Jack Benny Show!
I've got to say, I don't think that there's anything else on TV or radio that's anywhere near as engrossing or entertaining.
And, no, I wasn't around to hear them when they were on the first time! I'm only 40! lol
Mark
August 1, 2002| New York Observer
The New Ship of Fools
by Rex Reed
Hollywood is the new Ship of Fools, and with a boring, amateurish, incomprehensible and stupefyingly pretentious pile of swill called Full Frontal, the prosecution rests its case. This is the most deluded piece of crap since Mulholland Drive, only it seems twice as long and half as interesting. Before it crashed and burned, David Lynch’s dementedly overrated Mulholland Drive at least held a morbid grip on the imagination. Steven Soderbergh’s dementedly overrated Full Frontal doesn’t even offer a grace period; it falls apart in the first five minutes. Everything after that is a week’s vacation in Kabul.
In the dense array of animated zombies that populate this gimmicked-up Soderbergh drivel, a vast number of performers who should’ve known better prove Hitchcock’s theory that actors are nothing more than cows you lead through a fence. While several Hollywood imbeciles prepare for the 40th birthday of a producer named Gus (David Duchovny), scenes unravel from a fictional film called Rendezvous, which has a black star named Calvin (Blair Underwood) and a white star named Francesca (Julia Roberts in a blond wig). As shots from the fake film progress on perfectly clear 35-millimeter film stock with professional lighting and sound, the continuity is interrupted by the digitally recorded "reality" footage of the people behind the scenes while Mr. Soderbergh breaks through the "fourth wall" of cinema. The fake movie looks like a real movie that doesn’t give you headaches; the "reality" stuff is so grainy and dark you feel like you need to shine a flashlight on the screen to see what’s going on. Sometimes the movie just goes out of focus completely and stays that way for minutes on end, the way photographer Bert Stern used to shoot whiskey bottles to look like a blur of pinwheels. (It made a lot of people sick but didn’t sell much Four Roses.) The same kind of pretentious retro assault on the optical nerves makes Full Frontal look like the world immediately following Lasik surgery.
But back to the brain-dead characters. Mopey, monotoned Catherine Keener plays Lee Bright, a 41-year-old "icy bitch" who works as a V.P. of human resources at a large corporation and takes out her sick fantasies on fired employees; on her younger, unmarried sister Linda (Mary McCormack), who works as a hotel masseuse; and on her emasculated husband Carl (David Hyde Pierce), a writer for Los Angeles Magazine and author of the Rendezvous screenplay. In the execrable movie-within-the-movie, Mr. Underwood is also playing a black actor named Nicholas who is being profiled by (and falling in love with) an arrogant magazine interviewer named Catherine (Julia Roberts in a brunette wig). Carl bakes the hashish brownies for Gus’ birthday, gets fired from his magazine job (presumably for publishing too many nude Brad Pitt covers), and comes home, already so depressed he’s ready for a whole bottle of Seconal, to find the dog has eaten the brownies and is now semi-conscious. While he’s on the phone with the vet, he finds a letter his wife Lee has written asking for a divorce. Meanwhile, Lee is having sex with the actor Calvin, and Lee’s sister Linda gets an extra $500 for a 30-second hand job on a client who turns out to be the mysterious Gus. For extra confusion, Mr. Soderbergh keeps cutting to a play called The Sound and the Führer, in which Adolf Hitler returns to Hollywood as a psychotic and much-revered studio executive. Everyone shags off to Gus’ party (except Hitler, who has to teach a Pilates class), where the guest of honor never shows up because he’s upstairs naked with a plastic bag around his head. Director Soderbergh appears from time to time doing what he laughably calls "directing" this garbage with a black box covering his face. Apparently everyone involved is considered such an expert on the subject of self-obsessed Hollywood hypocrites they require no identity. You’re not supposed to ask why Julia Roberts can’t tell the difference between Francesca and Catherine, or why she plays them both the same way. If you don’t already know that Julia Roberts can’t act, then the joke is on you. Everyone else is dreadful, too. David Duchovny gets a massage. Brad Pitt shows up to improvise a few inanities (a homage to Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven). Terence Stamp is seen entering and leaving a hotel lobby (a homage to Soderbergh’s The Limey). Mouthing superficial baloney, none of them has any talent for improvisation, and the incoherent jumble they babble is so annoying it makes you think of pain-management clinics. Editor: "I want this magazine to drink from the bottle!" Petulant movie star Julia Roberts, throwing her lunch on the floor of her trailer: "This arugula is so bitter it’s like my algebra teacher on bread!" Black actor: "From Sambo to Sidney to Denzel to me, us brothers ain’t gettin’ or givin’ no love!" Insane actor playing Hitler, whose leading lady walks out when she catches him drinking blood: "People who are offended by drinking blood are obviously not drinking any blood, O.K.?" This is the catastrophic result of turning over the contents of the safe to second-rate directors after they win their first Oscar, and moaning when they shovel back their masturbatory fantasies in your face. The most disgusting impersonation in the film is a swinish pig who calls himself Harvey. Since Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein gave these amateurs the money to waste, then allowed them to make fun of him on screen, the in-joke seems like insulting double jeopardy. Maybe he’s such a sport that he thinks it’s funny. I don’t. I mean, how many ways can you spell F-O-O-L?
Mr. Soderbergh’s aim is to convince amateur filmmakers that they can buy any basic camera at any convenience store and make a movie just like Full Frontal. He’s right: With no talent, experience, intelligence or perception, you can make a movie just like this one, as long as you’ve got pals like Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, David Duchovny, Catherine Keener and David Hyde Pierce to trash themselves in front of your video camcorder, and Miramax to write checks. The result is career suicide, of course, and any guarantee that the audience will pay money to watch it happen is as big a gamble as WorldCom stock. Ask Mr. Soderbergh to explain this gibberish, and he would probably tell you it’s supposed to be bad satire. But who wants to spend good money watching neurotic non-people cruise the Internet for sex, eat food sweetened with fruit juice by Wolfgang Puck, and talk in pointless non sequiturs? If this is what Hollywood people are like, no wonder their movies are so lousy