NEW REVIEW!! SARAH SILVERMAN, JESUS IS MAGIC: A very clever stand-up comedy film but never as ground-breaking or as colorfully offensive as it wants to be. I have no idea why but one of my biggest pet peevs in the world is the opening sequences to stand-up comedy films. They always come up with some really stupid skit as to why the show is happening and how the comedian gets to the stage. Jesus is Magic is no exception which is not a good sign. Yet it does struggle to be something more than a stand-up special and that's admirable. But mostly it showcases the gorgeous wickedly funny Silverman as it should... in different outfits and making dirty jokes.

I have to say that the number one reason I didn't laugh as much as I expected is because I had already heard most of her material in this film. Not just from a New Yorker article on her but also from a long time ago. And when you've been passing off Sarah Silverman jokes as your own they aren't very funny when you see them in a film 2 years later. Anyway, that's my problem. My other problem is Sarah Silverman's publicist or lack thereof. She got an inordinate amount of press for this film. Sarah Silverman in the span of about two weeks went from a comedian that you'd never heard of or had no real opinion about to someone you could profess "Oh my god, I love her" simply because she was around. After watching Silverman's material which consists of jabs at 9/11, jokes about racism and AIDS, and gratuitous bits about facials and anal sex, you would think the Lenny Bruce-wanna be would hate what she's become. An over-hyped alumna of SNL and Mr. Show ("I'm Fran and I'm a woman").

But then maybe that's exactly what she wants to be and she has no interest in being Lenny Bruce. For all her outrageous shock and bull material, she's an even more outrageous narcissist and I really admire that. She full on makes out with her own reflection and I've done the same gig in a performance art class. From these gags I gather she's much more interested in getting a platform for what she wants to say than saying anything she really means. What she's doing and hopefully will continue to attempt is a sharp female take on the privitization of left-wing American stand-up. While the right-wing comics are appealing to large audiences, those who reacted misanthropically to Sept. 11 and the war in Iraq have been sequestered into limited venues or banished to MySpace but fawned over by critics. But even if comics don't have political agendas they still seem to getting more and more pedrestrian. As the other break out comic of 2005 Dane Cook illustrates you don't even have to be that funny... people just have to like you. Sarah Silverman ascribes to basically the same thinking. As she says in Jesus is Magic: "I don't care if you think I'm racist, I just want you to think I'm thin,"

Bottom line: Smart and edgy but for the fans of Sarah only.