Release Year: 1999 Rating: R Duration: 103 minutes Director: Harold Ramis Producer: Jane Rosenthal, Paula Weinstein, Ken Lonergan Distributor: Warner Brothers
A comedy about a psychiatrist (Crystal) whose number one-patient is an insecure mob boss (De Niro.)
cast
Billy Crystal as Dr. Ben Sobel Chazz Palminteri as Primo Sidone Lisa Kudrow as Laura MacNamara Sobel Molly Shannon as Caroline Robert De Niro as Paul Vitti
quote
Dr. Ben Sobel: I am redefining weird on an hourly basis.
Robert DeNiro is not a comedian. He used this to his advantage, in what is arguably his best performance, as Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. In Scorsese's 1982 media-age satire, which becomes more relevant with each passing year, Pupkin is a struggling comic obsessed with talk show host Jerry Langford (a self-parodying Jerry Lewis) and the thought of appearing on his program. Pupkin's routines, however, are painfully unfunny-and he is blithely unaware of his own mediocrity. That his jokes don't sound like they were written to bomb (they're liked warmed over Henny Youngman one-liners that a Catskills veteran could elicit a chuckle or two from) is because of DeNiro's desperate delivery; the actor has awful timing in his bones.