Bill Maher: The Decider

I picked up a DVD lay away I had at Wills the other day and was surprised to find Bill Maher: The Decider in the batch.  I remembered putting a bunch of DVDs on lay away, but all I could recall was that most of them were wrestling DVDs.  Someone had turned loose of some WWE, ECW and ROH DVDs on a day when I was low on funds, so I put them on lay away along with a few other titles.  The Decider was one of those other titles.

I have already watched and reviewed the other Bill Maher DVDs I purchased, and so I decided to pop this one in as well.  I enjoy Bill Maher’s sense of humor, and he tends to be an intelligent comedian, a humorist or satirist if you will.  His shows aren’t full of one liners, instead he makes you think while you laugh.  The Decider was filmed live for HBO during the end of George Bush’s years in office.  At this point Maher’s Real Time is doing well on HBO, he is prepping his documentary Religulous, and Maher boldly predicts that our next president will likely be Rudy Giuliani.

The bulk of The Decider is about George W. Bush, the Iraq War and the Republicans in congress.  Maher also has his say on religion, especially its connection to the aforementioned Bush and congress.  If you liked Bill’s earlier specials that were released on DVD, you’re bound to enjoy this one as well.  The bonus feature offered here is an encore that featured Maher reciting passages from Rick Warren’s book, A Purpose Driven Life.  It’s not nearly as funny as the show itself, and is less interesting and entertaining than some of the other bonus features on previous discs.  Of course my big question while listening to this was how did they get Rick Warren’s permission to use excerpts from his book.  My follow-up question was how much money were they having to pay him for the rights and royalties for using his writings. 

Bill Maher: The Decider is a very funny DVD and I give it a 10 on the Night Flight scale.

Bill Maher Be More Cynical

Did you ever look at an old picture of someone and think, “Wow, they look totally different”?  Or maybe you see your son getting serious about a girlfriend and you think about how it was only a few short years ago that the only thing he was serious about was collecting Pokemon cards.  That’s the way I felt when I sat down to watch Bill Maher Be More Cynical.  Be More Cynical was shot in 2000 before the election.  Clinton was still in office.  We weren’t at war in Iraq or Afghanistan.  George W. Bush was a fairly unknown commodity.  The twin towers were still standing, and Bill Maher was still the host of Politically Incorrect. 

The world was a different place and so was Bill.  Many of the more controversial stances he would take were not fully formed or else were hidden because of the state of the world and his presence as a late night network talk show host.  He discusses in the show how the network forbade them from making jokes about drugs.  They had to make sure that nothing they did or said might possibly cause children to experiment with drugs.  He also had a toned-down approach to religion.  On Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, Maher openly states that he is an atheist.  He even made a documentary with Larry Charles that dealt with the world’s religions and his stance as a non-believer.  During a section in Be More Cynical concerning religion it is shocking to hear him state, “I believe in God.”  Not because it’s such a radical concept, but because Maher has been so outspoken on his belief that there is not a God in recent years.

Another topic where Maher’s views have changed is on the subject of Al Gore.  In Be More Cynical Maher tells the audience that he “hate(s) Al Gore”, but during the run up to the 2008 election he spoke highly of Gore and even had him on the show to discuss climate change.

Of course people don’t watch a comedy special just to see how a performer has changed over the years.  They watch to laugh at the performer’s material.  So does Be More Cynical score in this area?  Yes, it does.  Maher is a gifted stand up in the tradition of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin that can mix social commentary with humor.  He has sections in his show dealing with then candidate Bush as well as then president Clinton, but he also has sections dealing with drugs and religion, as I mentioned, and with women and death among other topics. 

This was one of Maher’s earliest stand up shows for HBO.  His next special was Victory Begins at Home which was filmed 3 years later.  I picked it up at Big Lots but haven’t gotten around to watching it yet.  I figure I’ll be catching it fairly soon while this performance is still fresh in my mind just so I can compare.

Bill Maher Be More Cynical gets a pretty solid 9 on the Night Flight scale.  It’s a funny show, and it’s also helped by the nostalgia factor for a time when we were more concerned with the sexual indiscretions of the commander-in-chief and had a booming economy as opposed to today where the economy is in the toilet and people have to make up presidential controversies (the birthers for example) because no one has gotten a blow job in the White House since Clinton left office.

Bill Maher: New Rules

I used to love to watch Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher when it aired on Comedy Central.  The show switched to CBS late night and I didn’t watch it nearly as often.  When it was cancelled post 9/11, I was sorry to see it go because it was proof that freedom of speech and an opinion that differed with the government were not welcome on network television.  About a year after this, HBO launched Real Time with Bill Maher.  Bill was given real freedom and I was excited to see how the show would do.  I watched the first episode and was not overly impressed.  I don’t recall if it was that show or one of the other early episodes, but I had real issues with one of Bill’s frequent guests and friends, Anne Coulter.  I quit watching.

A couple of years ago, I started watching Real Time again.  Bill’s humor seemed to have gotten more pointed and Anne Coulter was nowhere to be seen.  I also got hooked on the segment that closed his show every week; New Rules.  New Rules was a bunch of little barbed pieces of political or social humor.  They might not all be funny, but the ratio was pretty good of winners to losers.  I found a copy of Bill Maher’s book New Rules in the bargain bin at Books A Million and purchased it.  It was an enjoyable read.  Then I found out about the New Rules DVD.  I had just purchased 2 Bill Maher HBO DVDs from Big Lots when I first saw the New Rules DVD at B-A-M in their promotional DVD bin.  I had paid $3 a piece for the two I bought.  BAM wanted $6.99 for New Rules.  I passed on it at the time.  Last night I was looking in a new liquidation center that went in out at Cross Lanes and in their DVD section I found New Rules for $2.99.  This time I snapped it up.

I was looking for a short DVD to watch today and I happened to think about New Rules.  I checked and the running time was only 45 minutes.  I dropped it in the DVD player and sat back.  The DVD contains selections of the best of New Rules from the first 3 seasons of Real Time.  You have the option to watch them straight through or to by season.  Season one with bits from 2003 features what appears to be the very first round of New Rules.  A good portion of the bits featured are jabs at the Bush administration.  There are also a few of Bill’s fake commercials or other comedy bits interspersed as well.  The bonus features include still more New Rules and 4 of Bill’s New Rules editorials, longer bits that typically close out the New Rules feature and usually the show as well.  I won’t say these were the best four they could have chosen, but they weren’t bad.

The bits that were selected for the DVD were pretty solid choices as well.  I would have liked to have seen a few of the ones that the audience felt were too harsh and that didn’t get a laugh, but that’s just me.  I really wish HBO would consider doing some box sets of their comedy talk shows and other comedy specials instead of these best of single disc collections.  They had shows from Chris Rock, Dennis Miller and Bill Maher, but none of them have produced a season set.  HBO used to do annual Young Comedians specials, but there has yet to be a box set release of these classic shows.

I don’t know that it’s fair to judge stand up specials and clip shows on the motion picture rating scale, so I’m going to fall back on the Night Flight scale for this disc.  On the Night Flight scale, New Rules gets an 8 1/2.  The bits are funny.  I just wish there were more of them.  I also give them credit for keeping them separated chronologically by season, but I would have loved to have been given the date each segment originally aired like they did with the editorials in the bonus features.