I'M THE ONE THAT I WANT A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2000 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): **
Exuberant stand-up comedian Margaret Cho clearly enjoys her routines as much as her uproarious audience. A self-described "trash-talking fag hag," she is a chubby Korean-American bisexual with a lot on her mind from sex to diets. She's in favor of the former and against the latter since "the first thing you lose on a diet is brain mass."
Lionel Coleman's documentary, I'M THE ONE THAT I WANT, records Cho doing her routine in front of her hometown audience in San Francisco. As a documentary, it is the most basic, just point-the-camera-at-her variety. Unlike Spike Lee's wonderful THE ORIGINAL KINGS OF COMEDY, in which Lee incorporates audience reaction shots, Coleman slavishly confines his camera almost exclusively to either full-body or just head shots of Cho. We hear the audience laughing profusely but rarely see them.
Cho's material, which has some biting social commentary, is undermined by her fingers-scraped-across-the-blackboard style of delivery. Her comedic grammar requires every funny line to be screamed with such ear-piercing shrillness that your soda container would break were it made of glass rather than plastic. Repetition also plays a large part in her syntax. The more a piece of dialog is repeated, the funnier it is supposed to be. With her high-pitched scream, she repeated one unprintable line 16 times in a row. A printable one -- "Lesbians like whale watching!" -- is screamed over half a dozen times and isn't particularly funny even the first time.
Reviewing I'M THE ONE THAT I WANT is like covering most Adam Sandler movies. As I sat there unimpressed and never laughing, my audience was busting a collective gut. Sandler crowds are like that too. My job reviewing films is not to tell you what someone else's reaction is but to tell you mine. Still, it is hard to stare silently at a picture when everyone else is in stitches. Guilt sets in, and you subconsciously worry that your fellow moviegoers may vote you out of the theater for inappropriate behavior. (The converse, of course, is even truer.)
Cho does have boundless energy. She bounces onto the stage like a pudgy basketball player ready for the big game. She is proud of her girth, and many of her jokes involve television executives who have dared suggest that she slim down.
Cho spends long segments on her distaste for straight men, saying "I am heterophobic," and on her preference for gay men. (Still, she later describes numerous heterosexual episodes and only a single homosexual one that she has had.) Continuing on her gay vs. straight theme, she reveals the reason that the men in gay porn are so much better looking than those in straight porn. It is so that the men watching straight porn won't accidentally have "a homo moment." Her exaggerated delivery, as always, destroys what should have been a good joke.
Cho likes to ask herself questions. "Am I gay?" she screams shrilly and rhetorically. "Am I straight? And I just realized that I'm just slutty." Although she can do cute facial contortions and exaggerated accents and can write some good material, Cho is a comedian whose grating delivery made me want to cheer only once -- when the credits rolled and the theater doors opened.
I'M THE ONE THAT I WANT runs 1:36. It is not rated but would be an R for strong language and sexual humor and would be acceptable for high school seniors and older.
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
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