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The current student at Berklee College of Music has a rock 'n' roll pedigree, but delivers a pleasing and diverse collection of soft pop on his debut record. Enter our contest for your chance to win!
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Rating: Country: USA Release Date: November 14, 2006 Distributor: 20th Century Fox Cast: · Alex Borstein · Teddy Towne Related Sites: ·IMDb: Alex Borstein
Grade: B
Family Guy and Mad TV alum Alex Borstein delivers her comedy with earnest sincerity in this stand-up stint that spends most of its time poking fun at the lack of female role models in films and television.
Teddy Towne opens the act, asking folks if they still have faith in President Bush, and wouldn't they rather have confidence. Fortunately, that's the only nod toward politics, and Towne demonstrates he can be funny about other things -- like those troubling doctor appointments men have to endure when they're older, and the things that television gets away with today -- before breaking into his rendition of "Rainy Days and Mondays", in which he is joined by our headliner, Alex Borstein.
Heeere's Alex: Teddy Towne brings out Alex Borstein in the
midst of singing "Rainy Days and Mondays".
Borstein wastes no time in letting the audience know that she is a woman comfortable with all womanly things that women are normally uncomfortable talking about. She opens with a seriously delivered PSA about shaped and scented bath soaps that generally come in baskets from boutiques: "Keep these soaps as far away from your vagina as possible!"
But vagina is too sanitized for Ms. Berstein, since a certain Broadway play made the word mainstream. She claims her favorite word is the C-word -- that women should embrace it and own it the same way that African-Americans have done for the N-word. This sets up what the industry calls "the running gag" for the bulk of the show.
After detailing the events of living with her husband in her parents' studio basement while moving to their new house, Borstein hits her stride on the subject of female role models in television. Beginning with the first time she noticed this -- watching Sesame Street as a child -- and through her formative years, Borstein names a trio of female characters with whom she could identify: Janet Wood (Three's Company), Sabrina Duncan (Charlie's Angels), and Velma (Scooby-Doo), and demonstrably proves that all three were actually the same person.
The mystery of the role of women in entertainment is unshrouded, however, when Borstein gets to reading "breakdowns" -- descriptions of characters sought in casting call advertisements, which contain such descriptions as "drop dead gorgeous, in a down-to-earth bombshell kind of way." In between well-done sarcastic takes on "Showgirls" and "Thelma & Louise", false bravery lauded on actresses Charlize Theron and Renee Zellweger for taking on the roles of ugly fat women in films, and trying to figure out Rosie O'Donnell ("What bugged me was this weird phony erotic obsession with Tom Cruise.") and her impersonation of Natalie Merchant losing her mind, Borstein continues to go back to these breakdowns in much the same fashion as Jay Leno rips through his Headlines schtick on The Tonight Show. (P.S. Borstein isn't afraid to lampoon her own roles in film, reading from some of the reviews of "Catwoman".)
Extras on this set include a twelve-minute tour of the cubicles and conference rooms used for the production of Family Guy, as well as the full-length version of the closing credits song, "Crazy Summer Days" by River Gypsy.
In English mono only, with subtitles in English, French and Spanish.
