Louis C.K.

Though there is much to admire in ‘Trumbo,’ it never quite sparks to life

Maybe Lucky Louie has just been searching for the right material for its jokes. Over the past few weeks, I’ve derided the show for being racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and using subjects such as rape and alcoholism for comedic material. For too much of the season, Lucky Louie has come across as a way for a white man to crack jokes at the expense of those less fortunate than him.

Welcome to the latest in the series of weekly complaints about offensive jokes in Louis C.K.’s oeuvre, or as Sound on Sight calls them, reviews of the first and only season of Lucky Louie. In all seriousness, just when it seems like the show’s humor can’t get any more tasteless, it finds subjects now (ten years after Lucky Louie premiered, but still) universally considered to be taboo to mock.

While the attempts to tackle the other subjects have tended to reek of misplaced white male intentions, C.K. uses his experience as a parent to deliver a clever and touching take on parent-child power dynamics in the age of contemporary parenting techniques.

Throughout Lucky Louie’s prior episodes, the show has struggled to toe the line between using a dated style to express contemporary ideas and genuinely espousing a retrograde attitude. Although some moments, like Rich’s misogynistic jokes, have at least had the awareness not to directly align the viewer with the sentiments being conveyed, others, like the racist caricature in “A Mugging Story,” have seemed flat-out backwards.

From the beginning of Lucky Louie, the main impetus behind the project has always seemed to be to address issues which its stylistic progenitors couldn’t discuss.

Pootie Tang is a thing of the past and Louis C.K. is moving forward with a new feature film. The Wrap reported on Monday that C.K. is set to write, direct, and star in an new independent comedy, titled I’m A Cop. It will be his first feature film that he is directing since the …

The contemporary culture around TV viewership is one that favors binge-watching over moderate consumption. Whether you’re catching up on an older show or checking out the latest series from a streaming service, binge viewership has become thought of by many as the default mode (when possible) for enjoying TV. The verb form of the phrase (i.e. “to binge-watch”) was shortlisted for the 2013 Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year.

One of the most anticipated films of 2015 is Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Although that anticipation was under the presumption that Silence would actually come out this year, let alone be made. The film has been in pre-production for ages, by Marty’s account, nearly two decades, but the film is finally coming together with funding from Fábrica …

Louis C.K., who seems capable of doing just about anything these days, has just received a 10 episode order for a sitcom he is working on with Zach Galifiankis called Baskets. Deadline reports that Galifianakis will star in the show as a man wishing to pursue his dream of becoming a professional clown by finding …

Season four of Louie has been an unusual one, even compared to the other seasons of this unique show. After seasons of standalone shorts and only a couple multiple-episode arcs, Louis C.K. dove in head first with three large-scale stories, “Elevator” (parts one-six), “In The Woods”, and “Pamela” (parts one-three). While each is distinct, these three pieces all explore connection and communication, both verbal and nonverbal. “Elevator” sees Louie pursuing and enjoying a relationship with Amia, with whom he is unable to verbally communicate, but it also shows him becoming involved in the lives of his neighbors and confronting the lingering damage of his divorce, to himself as well as his ex-wife Janet and their daughters. Throughout “Elevator”, Louie assumes. He’s so wrapped up in his experience and his fears that he projects all of his onto the women in his life, reading his insecurities in their silence. He attempts to overcome communication barriers by speaking louder and more emphatically and in the process, doesn’t listen to what those around him are trying to say.

The end of one multi-part story and the beginning of another airing back-to-back unsurprisingly makes for a slightly jarring viewing experience in this week’s Louie episodes, one that pauses to reflect on a relationship ending, and another attempting to fill its place. And although its some of Louie’s messiest writing and film-making of the season, there’s a lot of fascinating material to contemplate in both episodes, from love and heartbreak, to Heaven and unwanted sexual advances.

“Elevator” continues its dreamlike examination of Louie’s psyche this week, with our increasingly insecure lead pushing his relationship with Amia to the next level and losing it in the process. Louie spends quite a bit of these two episodes validating his romance with Amia to other people in his life and as they voice their doubts, Louie grows more and more self-conscious. At the start of “Elevator Part 4”, Louie and Amia are out at a hockey game, having a great time; Louie practically glows when Janet asks about his new leading lady. It’s sweet and just like Janet, viewers will be happy to see our sad-sack protagonist in a positive place, emotionally.

Louie came back with a beautiful, impressionistic bang last week with two fantastic and very different episodes. This week that trend continues, with “So Did the Fat Lady” exploring body issues and shaming by building to a masterful soliloquy from guest star Sarah Baker and “Elevator Part 1” splitting nearly evenly into a stressful depiction of every parent’s worst nightmare and a sedate, comedic extrapolation of a well-intentioned misunderstanding.

Louie is utterly unique to the television landscape. There are very, very few shows of which this can be said. It’s part standup, part experimental film, part character study, part whatever else Louis C.K. wants it to be, and in its first three seasons, the series that started out well grew increasingly confident, playing with form and stretching C.K. as a filmmaker and storyteller. After C.K. decided to take 2013 off, some viewers may have been concerned he wouldn’t be able to recapture the magic of the first three seasons. Fortunately, with “Back” and “Model”, C.K. picks up right where he left off, as sure and relaxed as ever.

Ever since watching the series finale of IFC’s new series, Maron, I have struggled to find the right words and the right tone to describe my experience with the show. It is far from perfect and has its fair share of missteps, but excels in bringing to life Marc Maron’s sardonic world view that he …

The Tumblr round-up is a compilation of images, links, posters, stories, videos and so on, taken from the Sound On Sight Tumblr account. We simply do not have the man power nor time to write articles on every interesting movie related goody we find, so this is our way of still promoting some of the …