‘Verity’ Review: Erotic, Violent, Yet Darkly Hilarious - We Live Entertainment

Stand-up comedians have always had a reverence for what they like to call a “comic’s comic” — a fellow comedian who works with such distilled purity and edge, diving head-first into the gnarly metaphysics of comedy, that the comics end up worshipping him more than the public does. (He’s the stand-up-comedy equivalent of an ultimate cool indie-rock cult band.) Gilbert Gottfried was a comic’s comic. So are Larry David and Doug Stanhope and Maria Bamford. And Norm Macdonald was one too, except that as you watch Judd Apatow’s juicy and haunting documentary “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald,” you realize that there was a special thing about him. He was a comic’s comic…who everyone else loved too. As the movie demonstrates, Macdonald’s credentials as a comic’s comic were unassailable. We see his very first network television appearance on May 9, 1990, on “Late Night with David Letterman,” where he did a bit about the devil commanding someone to kill his family and chop them into bits and stuff the pieces into a duffel bag. (Then the killer learns that the devil is a friend who was kidding.)

The last time Tom Cruise, Hollywood’s Last Movie Star, collaborated with a bona fide auteur was in 2004: the director was Michael Mann, and the film was a love letter to nighttime Los Angeles, Collateral. Coincidentally, it’s also the last time Cruise starred as a villain. Twenty-two years later, with more makeup applied than when Tropic Thunder’s Les Grossman danced into future memes, Digger has finally arrived. The latest film from four-time Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu (The Revenant) is a masterpiece. Writing this after the film has already screened for critics and opened to most audiences, it’s clear Digger won’t be Cruise’s next blockbuster triumph, having earned mixed reviews and the star’s lowest opening weekend total since 1985’s Legend. And yet… from where this critic sits, the world may have gone as mad as the one in the film’s dystopian, depressed future. Time will tell, but to cut to the chase: with a ten-cent shovel in hand, this pairing of star and director has struck creative gold. Digger is the rare film which wisely uses the artifice of art to unearth truth about humanity in the most maximalist way ever committed to IMAX screens.