film roundup

(Valérie Dréville) providing most of the (anti)drama. There is pleasure and profundity to be had reveling in the enigmas of such mundanely everyday interactions. Though Rama’s own parallel struggles — her motherly and womanly fears coming to the fore the longer the case goes on — too often feel like a contrived counterbalance to the more compelling spectacle of the court case itself. The very dryness of the proceedings allowing for a slow, simmering emotional devastation to bubble over by film’s end. Getting there is a bit more taxing than one would like, however.

[N/R] HHH

The Kingdom: Exodus (Dir. Lars von Trier).

Keith Uhlich is a NY-based writer published at Slant Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Time Out New York, and ICON. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. His personal website is (All (Parentheses)), accessible at keithuhlich.substack.com.

Starring: Mikael Persbrandt, Bodil Jørgensen, Udo Kier. It took 25 years, but writer-director Lars von Trier finally returns to the haunted Denmark hospital that was the setting for his two season television series The Kingdom, which ran for a total of eight episodes in 1994 and 1997. This five-part conclusion — something von Trier has hinted will be his last project given his recent Parkinson’s diagnosis — ties up almost all the loose ends. Though narrative is less the point than an overall puckish pessimism that should be familiar to anyone versed in von Trier’s provocationprone oeuvre. Since much of the main cast of the original series has passed away, a pair of new main characters, sleepwalking psychic Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) and beleaguered

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A MAN OF MANY talents with many outlets — Simpsons characters voice artist, a member of the rockumentary metal act Spinal Tap, an actor, a novelist-essayist, a film screenwriter, and director — Harry Shearer’s longest-running, continuous throughline has been that of Le Show. Here, as a small, intelligent mobile unit and autonomous, socio-cultural commentator and content creator, Shearer is front and center of the syndicated public radio comedy sketch and satirical news program. Dropping new, multi-layered, and elaborately recorded episodes every Sunday, Le Show has been ongoing and fresh since December of 1983, with Shearer acting as a one-man-band behind an arsenal of voices on both sides of the political fence as well as its press mediators.

When you created Le Show in 1983, the radio landscape was different than your morning show in Los Angeles in the 1960s, The Credibility Gap — and certainly different from where you are now.

It’s necessary to put that phrase in a larger context. Commercial radio changed radically — that’s an understatement — when Bill Clinton signed the deregulation policy where the number of stations that an individual corporation could own in the country was seven, to a situation like that of iHeart Radio owning 800 stations. Commercial radio was no great shakes, anyway. But, what that did, in the mid90s, was make radio stations into a bunch of repeaters. A radio guy would sit in Kansas City, and after his shift there, he’d turn around and say, “Good morning, San Diego.”

There was little localization after Clinton and only a few singularly hand-crafted radio programs

The idea of radio being anything but a mindless conveyor belt for more and more commercials became foolish. The Credibility Gap was on commercial radio when it started, so I had familiarity with that world. But that was in the 1960s — whatever else you can say about that decade, people who would ordinarily be safe and conservative, at least in that world, were willing to try something new if things weren’t looking perfect and profitable. That’s how The Credibility Gap got on the air in the first place — at the number two rock and roll radio station in town that could never figure out how to beat the number one station. At some point, management at the station, who happened to be connected to The Smothers Brothers Show on TV, were willing to try something new. Our time there was, as it turned out, a battle against people who thought that you get to be the number one station by imitating everything that the top station did. Imitation is the sincerest form of radio, to misstate an old Fred Allen line. They shortened our time slots but couldn’t fire us because they would have to pay us unemployment. So they just took our show off the air but told us that we would have to read the news straight. We did that but it was probably the

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 16 worst news broadcast in America for a week or two. Well, that ended them firing us, so we succeeded. Then we went to another commercial radio station at the dawn of underground FM. We went from an argument that said you can’t have a radio program longer than a hit record to taking our time — 23 minutes or three minutes, depending on how imaginative we were feeling that day.

What’s different about Le Shownow compared to its start?

There’s a very clear line of demarcation. I’d been doing stuff a satirist always does, make fun of the news. Aside from that, I played a lot more music and did a sketch or two. Then, after 911 with the internet, I was able to keep up with news in the U.K., Australia, and beyond. I knew that what President Bush was saying publicly — what they were calling intelligence — was bullshit.

But nobody in this country, not The New York Times or NPR, had that on their pages or airwaves. So I decided that knowing as much of the truth as I did and that such truth was authoritative — and that I had a microphone — that maybe I should put the two together. So, the news content of Le Show grew after that and increased dramatically. I couldn’t be contemptuous of The New York Times and NPR and not do something about it.

Considering what happened to you previously — what was the driving force in Le Show’s creation? What interested you about the radio format?

I had been doing my own Sunday afternoon show, not with sketches about the news, as that was The Credibility Gap’s field. But I had the occasional sketch and played a lot of records because music was so vibrant then. A friend from that station got a job at KCRW in Santa Monica and had intimated that I do a show there.

You could move around radio more easily then.

Radio, compared to other mass media, was something you could do with ease. It was easy to do on your own. Doing your own show on television required a crew of a hundred people or so. Film, too. Having done my own show for decades now with radio, I only need one other person to make sure it gets on air and me to do the show, write it, and produce it. Given the fact that people weren’t handing me television shows, radio was an attractive alternative.

You got your start on early television with Jack Benny. Did you perform on serial radio as a kid?

Yes, I broke in on Jack Benny’s radio show. I did radio soaps for ABC, one for a few months called When a Girl Marries. I did the Phil Harris radio show. On Sundays — and this is something that I loved about the old Los Angeles — NBC Radio had this big building at Sunset and Vine, and CBS Radio was on Sunset and Gower. I did The Jack Benny Show at 4:00 p.m. and walked down Sunset Boulevard to do The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Radio Show at 6:00. That was pretty cool.

You’ve worked for BBC. Were they more cooperative than your U.S. counterparts?

That’s fraught for me. I can say this: I’m not yet persona non grata at BBC the way I am at NPR. I did a documentary for Radio 4 in 2015 on the tenth anniversary of the flooding of New Orleans — all public knowledge here, despite the major networks and NPR having split within a week after the flood and patting themselves for having spoken truth to power. I made it, and they aired it, but they pretty much quashed all promotional mentions of it on the network in advance. I was really displeased by that. There are people at BBC who do a great job, and I also think that BBC is under so much more constant political attack than NPR has ever dreamed of that you have to cut the BBC a certain amount of slack.

You said that on radio you could report the news through satire more fully. You joked on the December 11 episode of Le Show as Chris Wallace, casually stating how at his new place of employ, CNN, there is no staff and no more fact-checkers or runners as their finances and ratings have fallen. I know your research is painstaking, but how do you handle the news beyond you?

I read a lot of newspapers —– The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Age in Australia. Haaretz in Israel. Trade publications such as Advertising Age. The San Diego news desk contributes a good amount of material, along with other volunteers. Huge kudos to them, an amazing volunteer.

Le Show is also a podcast. To what do you attribute the rise and scattered success of many podcast-only platforms?

Their success proves that you can kill radio, but the audio medium is still great and powerful. The radio industry has done its darndest to make it all unlistenable, and the idea that within a decade of the deregulation we talked about, podcasting came along to show this is what it should sound like. That’s no surprise. My problem with podcasting is that the advertisers who buy time on podcasts are reverting to the 1930s format of commercial radio, and demand that the talent read the commercials. I picked up a recording of NPR’s Ira Glass speaking to a convention of podcasters in 2018, and he said, “Public radio is open for business.” Great. Great. Adam Carolla is the only podcaster who has an announcer in the booth so that he doesn’t have to read ads. You can’t logically go from a hard news, serious political interview to, “I want to ask you more about the Ukrainian army, but, you know, my wife and I have been sleeping on the best mattress for the last three months.” I’m gone after that. Absolutely out of there. They think they’re opening for business. I think they’re shredding their credibility.

The late great Paul Harvey and the late great Joe Franklin were two of the best at segueing from hard news to conversation. They were two very different people with two very different approaches. If I were involved in a conversation with them, I’d feel like a third wheel. They don’t need me because they’re amusing each other. I love that on radio — what I am on Le Show is one person talking to an audience. That’s why I do it. n

If you miss a live Le Show, you can catch it at Shearer’s radio/podcast archives: harryshearer.com/le-show.