Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Seasons 1-6
by Jeff Garlin, Alec Berg, Andy Ackerman, Bryan Gordon, David Mandel
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DVD details
Actor: Cheryl Hines, Jeff Garlin, Larry David, Michael York, Ted DansonDirector: Alec Berg, Andy Ackerman, Bryan Gordon, David Mandel, Jeff Garlin
Brand: Warner
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Box set, Color, NTSC
Running Time: 1992 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-01-29
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Hbo Home Video
Product features:
- Condition: New
- Format: DVD
- Color; Box set; NTSC
DVD Reviews of Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Seasons 1-6
DVD Review: Old old man gets angry at himself for not being younger than David Duchovny's character from Californication!!!
Summary: 3 Stars
I loved this show and rank it with The Office and Chears as one of funniest shows to have come out of the states in a long time. My girlfriend however noticed a very funny thing about the casting that most people missed and it made me smile (for once). She reckons that Larry David has basically cast himself as David Duchovny's Hank Moody character from Californication, but older. They are both set in Hollywood and star a successful but alienated sort of cool bloke. My girlfriend and I are great fans of both shows and so I can see the likeness and if you watch both shows then there is something funny going on lol. The parts in Californication, were David Duchovny had a hard life mating with teenage girls; well in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David's character is constantly harassed and bothered by the things that bothered Woody Allen (in his early movies), but our hero writes in an even cleverer twist; Larry David's life is hilariously made difficult by Hollywood's lumpen-proletariat; how dare those unwashed zero's dare labour in front of Larry David's face; grrr!! Cue hilarious adventures. So when David Duchovny's coolness forced his ego to get off with beautiful teenagers, Larry David's character is forced to sneer in an aloof but funny manner. And it goes deeper that that (see below).
So we see our hero arguing with a waiter over why he should pay a tip, this would be funny if it wasn't for Larry David's own admission that he is indeed a millionaire, and so the joke didn't hurt my sides as advertised (Larry David must really fancy himself as a persecuted victim of those horrid murlocks from H.G. Wells: The Time Machine, as he actually wrote this scene). Funnier still, Larry David hilariously shouts down aggressive female nurses who display annoying behaviour, like attending sick cues (those annoying sick people!) and he gets the once in a lifetime opportunity to humiliate a ridiculous shoe salesman (you have to see it for yourself). So towards the end of the first season, I was developing an urge to abolish the hourly wage, ban health care for sick people and bring back plebicide! Larry David, you see, is an angst ridden old man playing a much younger man who hates both men and women, young and old, with equally intense sarcasm and vanity!
A big problem I found with Larry David's angst ridden dark star of fate persona, is when he does his looking away and sneering aloof at the absurdity of people and life situations etc, he just looks like a grumpy old man. This spoilt the effect for me as I do not think that Larry David had this in mind when he wrote the script. Now if David Duchovny played Larry's role, things would be different. If you haven't seen Californication, well trust me, Duchovny was brilliant in it, and Curb Your Enthusiasm is so similar, that Larry David should have cast the younger David in his shoes. With Duchovny in Larry's shoes, we can easily imagine a classic dark masterpiece. Duchovny's hero is a sneeringly handsome and very successful Hollywood writer, who sees himself as a crucified Heideggerian God; he disparagingly condemns the mind-set of the self regarding moneyed comrades he is forced to interact with and he especially wags his finger at the local untermenschen. This is not as dramatic a description as it appears, because Larry David obviously fancies himself as the `above-all-this' man. With Duchovny starring, Curb Your Enthusiasm would be even funnier that American Psycho!
You see, I'm all for rugged anti hero's, because the genre allows the bad ass hero a few decades in their self perpetuating mischief of angriness to grow and redeem (so Duchovny's Hank Moody is allowed to sleep and drug schoolgirls); this is why the anti hero genre works (it taps into our unconscious expectation of allowing the anti-hero time to become a better person). However, when the hero is pushing 70, well it doesn't work on a human level because we except inner growth to have hit the spot by then and thus wisdom to have flowered in old age; we do not expect the successful man, approaching the great beyond, to act like an existential teenager. I really find it creepy too that a man like Larry David should write himself shouting at young girls. Now then, all this intellectual flagellation is unconscious remember, so I still laughed along with everybody else. Just my personal bias talking here and Curb Your Enthusiasm is still a masterpiece and Larry David is a great writer. Though you could argue that he only writes for millionaires and for those who believe that millionairehood is a mere few generations away. If you find shouting at the plebs and condemning their taste in shoes hilarious and if you yearn for Victorian values, but in a funny way, then you will love this. I loved it too, but I did feel guilty for doing so, so I'll let myself off! This is just me moaning though and my whining really does not do the show justice. Curb Your Enthusiasm will go down in the annals of rib ticklers that reached the very heights of absurdist masterpieces. It really is brilliant, with superb production values and labyrinthine plot devises that always fall into very funny places. Larry David should be commended in this writing skill. I'm only commenting on the miscasting. If Larry shaved his bushy sides, like Sean Connery does, and if he wore sharp clothes, he would have gotten away with the angry old man routine, but he doesn't do this. He grows his sideburns to Charles Darwin bushiness and wears old people's clothes (well the cloths he wore in the 70's, but he was young back then so it looked cool) and he makes no reference to his age in his script, which is weird. This leads the viewer to believe that Larry David is trying to be younger! I'm sorry but that is the only explanation I can think of.
(I'm aware that I'm coming across as somewhat patronising to old people, like I'm expecting them to morph into the Dalai Lama on their 64th birthday! I'm well aware of our desperation for angrily holding onto youth with gusto and we are indeed genius at denial of death shenaniganisms!).)
Now this age issue is the weirdest part of Curb; nobody in this sitcom even notices that Larry David is pushing 70! So his wife looks like his much younger sister (I won't say daughter because of the disturbing imagery, though there is a very funny incest episode, so now I don't know what to think!) and Larry's two best friends speak to our hero as equals, they being an entire generation younger and all, and Larry's attitude to young girls is confusing! So when Larry is forced to apologise to his buds Jewish parents, well, it just didn't work because Larry David is in the same generation as the Jewish parents. Also the bit were Larry hilariously gets stuck in a box with Ted Danson's old mother in-law, that didn't work either, because, you guessed it; our hero is the same age as the mother in-law. Larry David needed to hire a younger guy to play this part. I really do not mean to be ageist; I am not. I just think that Larry David must have a huge ego to feed if he thinks he can pull off the smooth but misunderstood cheeky chappy, cookie and off balance, but cute and adorable, existential hero. Ok he may be a comic writer of the first order, but why not just stay behind the camera? Why take on the reins of your masterpiece and insist on being the main hunky guy? It's analogous to Steven Spielberg elbowing Harrison Ford aside because he's the director and he's going to be Indiana Jones! God, the guy must be a walking beacon of insecurity. Apart from me moaning, this is still one of the funniest and smartest shows out there.... But old folks, many feign as they were dead; Unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale as lead. O God! Romeo and Juliet - Act 2, Scene 5.
Description of Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Seasons 1-6
THIS HAS EVERY EPISODE EVER MADE......(ALL 70)Like its fellow HBO series Sex and the City, this half-hour comedy broke some TV rules and went from critics' darling to an award-winning series in three years. Curb Your Enthusiasm is the brainchild of star-creator Larry David who co-created Seinfeld and was the basis for the easily rattled George Costanza (who was played by Jason Alexander). Like George, David has a tendency to speak too much, blow things out of proportion, and, most often, fail in the end (and often liking it that way). David's new show is also like its predecessor: it's about "nothing" except following the day-to-day ramblings of a sometime writer and comic (this time in L.A.). Eternal questions stemming from universal daily dilemmas are honed to perfect comedic absurdity. A notable exception is the show is only scripted by plot; much of the action is improvised. David plays "himself" (as does his friend, Richard Lewis) although his manager and wife are played by comedians Jeff Garlin and Cheryl Hines. Although the show is a comedic gem, one can't take more than an episode or two at a time--it's acidic, biting comedy. The episodes are often built like a house of cards, which the irritable David will surely collapse by the end. Like another caustic TV character, Dabney Colman's Buffalo Bill (1983-84), Larry David is not for everybody. --Doug Thomas
Stills from Curb Your Enthusiasm- The Complete Sixth Season (Click for larger image)
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