a perfect ending

Ken Hoffman celebrates Larry David and the Curb Your Enthusiasm finale

Larry left 'em laughing.

Curb Your Enthusiasm/Facebook

My favorite TV show ever ended forever Sunday night. HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm wrapped up 12 seasons over 24 years with a one-hour episode Sunday night that saw Larry David sentenced to jail for violating Georgia’s Election Integrity law by offering a bottle of water to a woman waiting in line to vote.

Just like Saturday Night Live once said, O.J. Simpson was sent to prison for robbery “but really murder,” a jury found David guilty of breaking the voting law, but really:

In flashback clips we watched David killing a rare black swan, burning down Mocha Joe’s coffee shop in spite, failing to yell “fore” after hitting a golf shot, bribing a city councilmember, refusing to jump off a stuck ski lift while sitting next to a single Orthodox Jewish woman after sundown, urinating on a holy Christian picture, stealing shoes from a Holocaust museum, digging up his dead mother’s body and moving it to a better part of a cemetery, giving Covid to Bruce Springsteen, eating ice cream meant for a dying dog’s last meal, teaching a child how to draw a swastika, hiring a prostitute to sit next to him so he could drive in the HOV lane, and prying a 5-wood golf club from a dead man’s coffin.

And those were just a few highlights from Larry David’s rap sheet over the years on Curb Your Enthusiasm. No wonder his agent on the show called him “a social assassin.”

Curb Your Enthusiasm’s finale was a revenge episode for the critically lambasted Seinfeld finale that David wrote in 1998. The premises were almost identical. In the Seinfeld finale the four main characters were found guilty of violating a Good Samaritan law and sentenced to one year in jail. The last scene had Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine settling in behind bars.

Except in the Curb finale, David is behind bars for only a few minutes before he is set free on a courtroom technicality. The last scene had Larry and Jerry Seinfeld walking out of the jail, commenting that’s how the Seinfeld finale should have ended. Duh!

Several years ago, I wrote a column asking a bunch of B-level Houston media types: who is the funniest person – who’s made you laugh the most and the hardest in your lifetime?

My answer was George Carlin. I loved his standup and his books. I saw him perform several times and he was always razor sharp and funny.

I’d like to change my vote. My funniest person, now looking back, is Larry David. My funniest show is Curb Your Enthusiasm. And my second funniest show is Seinfeld, which David co-created with Jerry Seinfeld and wrote most of the episodes. Between 190 episodes of Seinfeld and 120 episodes of Curb between 1989 and Sunday night, Larry David has filled my life with thousands of great laughs.

When Seinfeld left the air in 1998, I thought there’d never be a comedy cast that brilliant. Then Curb debuted in 2000 and David did it again — this time starring in front of the camera and surrounding himself with Cheryl Hines as his wife Cheryl, Jeff Garlin as his smarmy agent Jeff Greene, Susie Essman as Jeff’s foul-mouthed wife, and J.B. Smoove as his free-loading house guest Leon Black.

Along the way there were guest appearances by Richard Lewis, Tracey Ullman, Sienna Miller, Ted Danson, Wanda Sykes, Rob Reiner, Shaquille O’Neal, Joan Rivers, Alanis Morisette, Martin Scorsese, Mel Brooks, Ben Stiller, David Schwimmer, Hugh Hefner, Super Dave Osborne, John McEnroe, Dustin Hoffman, and this season’s unforgettably hilarious scenes with Bruce Springsteen. And dozens and dozens more. Actors lined up to work with Larry David.

Not since Seinfeld on Thursday nights did I make sure I was home to watch a TV show like I did for Curb Your Enthusiasm. Sunday night was Curb night. Taping it to watch later was out of the question. I have friends who watched each episode of Curb, then watched it again right away, then we started texting each other about our favorite lines. Can you believe when Susie told Larry to …

Nothing was off limits on Curb. The front of my face was laughing, but inside my brain couldn’t believe what I just saw. Curb wasn’t like a network sitcom that returns each year until it gets canceled. Curb would air on HBO only when David felt he had something to say. There was once a gap of seven years between Curb seasons. David produced only 10 episodes a season — 12 seasons, 120 episodes over 24 years. Every episode was worth waiting for.

The last few years felt like that could be the end. Then would come the good news, David would do another season. But Sunday night was the end for keeps. David is 76 years old. It’s time. He gave it everything he had.

But one thing’s for sure, Larry David is leaving ‘em laughing.

Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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