I’m not sure what it means that the most exciting news I’ve heard about this year’s Tribeca Film Festival is the programming of a brilliant film that’s been around for three decades. Perhaps it says something about the Tribeca slate revealed so far, but mainly, it speaks to the incredible power of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, which will close this year’s festival with a Saturday screening on April 27. (Click here for tickets if you think you’ll be in Manhattan and want to attend.)
Scorsese’s magnificent commentary on our society’s crippling need to be “famous” (and the pitch-black cynicism that infects most who’ve become famous) will be restored through a partnership with The Film Foundation, Regency Enterprises and 20th Century Fox. The 1983 comedy stars Robert De Niro as Rupert Pupkin, a mild-mannered nobody who dreams of hosting a talk show modeled after the “great” Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis, playing a slightly distorted version of himself). The movie was ahead of the curve when it comes to today’s everyone-is-a-celebrity culture. But The King of Comedy is simply worth seeing because De Niro is blisteringly sympathetic and Paul D. Zimmerman’s screenplay is nothing short of genius.
Scorsese’s magnificent commentary on our society’s crippling need to be “famous” (and the pitch-black cynicism that infects most who’ve become famous) will be restored through a partnership with The Film Foundation, Regency Enterprises and 20th Century Fox. The 1983 comedy stars Robert De Niro as Rupert Pupkin, a mild-mannered nobody who dreams of hosting a talk show modeled after the “great” Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis, playing a slightly distorted version of himself). The movie was ahead of the curve when it comes to today’s everyone-is-a-celebrity culture. But The King of Comedy is simply worth seeing because De Niro is blisteringly sympathetic and Paul D. Zimmerman’s screenplay is nothing short of genius.