WHEN STAND UP STOOD OUT: Denis Leary certainly did. |
A story I’d love to tell my grandchildren (if I had any grandchildren): in the early ’80s I often went to the Ding Ho, that ratty Inman Square excuse for a Chinese restaurant/comedy club, where I caught fabulous Boston comedians on the way up: Steve Sweeney, Barry Crimmins, Kevin Meaney, an out-of-control kid named Bobby Goldthwait, a deadpan genius named Steven Wright, and wild-ass Lenny Clarke, whose f-word scatological monologues were the closest thing ever to Richard Pryor. You weren’t there? Don’t worry, When Stand Up Stood Out, Fran Solomita’s winning documentary about Ding Ho nights of extreme laughter, is now available on DVD.My Hub faves are represented with their prime anarchic material, plus comics I somehow missed: Kenny Rogerson, Denis Leary, Janeane Garofalo, she then a recovering Boston bike messenger. Nice-guy Solomita is the ideal director, a veteran Beantown comedian himself, who now lives in LA.
Decades and decades ago, I was teen table-tennis champ of Columbia, South Carolina. (Let’s brag: singles and doubles.) So I looked forward to that great sport’s finally being represented on the silver screen. Ning Hao’s Mongolian Ping Pong opens this Friday at the Kendall Square. Can’t you see it, a kind of Asian Rocky, about a loser in life who becomes, cushioned paddle in hand, a winner, with the eye of a tiger and a backhand smash to die for? What you get is a totally different movie, pleasant but hardly enthralling. It’s a Nanook of the North–like story of a Mongolian family, non-actors playing versions of themselves, residing among sheep on a rural plain at the end of the earth. They’re under Chinese dominion but so out of it that they’ve barely heard of Beijing.
One day a ping-pong ball comes floating down a tiny tributary, something as inexplicable as a the landing of a flying saucer. The young boy of the family, Bilike, plucks it out of the water. What is it? His grandma deems it a magical pearl; the neighborhood rubes covet it. A policeman identifies it as a ‘ping-pong ball,’ but what is that? In a funny scene, the family try to watch a TV by hoisting a makeshift antenna, tin cans and scrap metal, high in the air to catch a signal. They hear but can’t see a discussion of how ping-pong is the national game. That gets the kids thinking they need to return that talisman ping-pong ball to Beijing. They set off, by horse and motorbike, across the Gobi desert in search of the Chinese capital.
That’s not a credible plotline, but there’s just so much the Chinese filmmakers can do when the centerpiece of their movie is a cryptic plastic ping-pong ball. What’s the audience to do? Savor the Mongolian vistas and enjoy the humor when, from time to time, an itinerant salesman arrives with his odd wares, such as ‘an American kind of tea called coffee.’
