Last week I shared my undying love and admiration for JLawASchu, aka the best celebrity friendship ever. Although I noted that I had already divulged my affinity for Jennifer Lawrence, my most recent post is the first time I’d mentioned how much I truly enjoy Amy Schumer.
Generally speaking, her show is pretty brilliant. It’s inventive and funny, fresh and intelligent, but also childishly gross in a smart-girls-like-poop-jokes-too kind of way. While I very frequently laugh my ass off watching “Inside Amy Schumer,” it’s often a painful kind of laughter. The humor in Schumer’s show increasingly revolves around the dual and inescapably linked themes of feminism and internalized sexism.
One of the show’s boldest episodes was an at times shot-for-shot remake of Sidney Lumet's “12 Angry Men” (1957) (as evidence of the show’s delightful penchant for raunch, the full episode title is “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer”).
The crime under dispute in the show’s version is Schumer deigning to believe she’s “hot enough for cable.” It’s honestly a pretty brutal episode, because even as it skewers male entitlement to female objectification, the arguments about Schumer’s insufficient hotness so embody that no-but-dudes-ACTUALLY-talk-this-way-without-hearing-how-unforgiveably-douchey-they-sound dynamic that very actively pervades our consumerist and appearance-overvaluing society.
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| Okay maybe guys don't literally say *this,* but it's implied. |
Feminism ever so briefly and temporarily aside, as a film lover it’s just a fucking great episode and it enhances Schumer ever more in my esteem.
If you’re in the mood for EVEN MORE ANGRY MEN, I strongly recommend Nikita Mikhalkov's “12” (2007), a Russian remake of the original film.
Not altogether unlike the Schumer remake, there are moments of delight and aching heartbreak in “12” (although maybe the painful moments hurt a bit more than in the one that aired on Comedy Central). Perhaps obviously unlike Schumer’s iteration, the movie updates and Russianizes the narrative in a manner that breathes vibrant life into the '50s narrative.
In “12,” the accused is a Chechen youth whose family was brutally killed in the conflict between Russia and Chechnya and who was subsequently adopted by a Russian military officer. The youth stands accused when the officer is also murdered.
Unlike Lumet's film, in which the action is fully contained in the court house, “12” is based in a school’s dilapidated, freezing gymnasium because the court house’s facilities are being renovated and travels in flashes to key moments in the Chechen boy’s life and to his confinement in an austere jail cell. The narrative is interwoven with themes of cultural bias in Russian society, ethical indifference born of political corruption, and lack of hope for, or even interest in, justice.
What makes “12 Angry Men” so special, beyond the conceit of its self-imposed limitations (12 strangers stuck in a room together until they unanimously agree on their answer to a life-or-death question), is that it actively brings to light the frailty of human reasoning. Each man is called out for his biases, faulty assumptions, intellectual laziness, passivity, and lack of empathy as he idly and indifferently frets about making a train or getting back to his job even as he holds another man’s life in his hands. Each iteration of this narrative starkly lays bare these universal human shortcomings and nevertheless upholds the power of just one person willing to stand in the way of the steamroller of intellectual, emotional, and ethical weakness in the name of justice. For anyone deeply invested in social justice, these stories are incredibly powerful calls to arms.
While Schumer’s version is bite-sized (under 30 minutes), “12” is quite the epic at 2 hours and 40 minutes. The former is streamable on Hulu and Comedy Central's website (if you have access through your cable provider), and the latter is streamable on Netflix. I very adamantly recommend both.
I hope you enjoy!
{Heart}
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