MARGARET CHO: ASSASSIN

Margaret Cho is a master at finding her audience's line of comfort and boldly stepping across it.

In this concert film of her 2005 tour (this show was filmed in Washington, DC), Margaret Cho's theme has pretty much narrowed down to two topics: The Bush Admininstration, and The Gays. I myself saw this show live when the tour hit Seattle, and though there are a lot of funny bits, I found the relentless "f**k you" to Dubya to become a bit repetetive, especially as she is preaching to the converted.

I'm a Margaret Cho fan, and have enjoyed her previous concert films, including I'm the One That I Want, and Notorious C.H.O., as well as her honest, moving, and funny autobiography. I've seen her a few times live, and even when her jokes miss, you can at least give her credit for daring to go there. Because that is one thing Cho is a master at: finding the audience's line of comfort and boldly stepping across it. With an audience filled up with open-minded lefties, liberals, and gays, she can still bring up topics to make people squirm.

But she is at her best, I think, when she tackles issues where she can pull from her own personal experience: sex and the gays, modern women's issue, racism, and growing up with immigrant parents. In Assassin, she explains that her mother had a heart attack recently, yet still manages to pull some gentle humor from her most famous (and funniest) "character" impression. Too bad there is so little. The rest of the time she pulls from extremely topical subjects that are already dated (like the Terry Schiavo case and John Bolton's appointment as Ambassador to the UN), or else falls back on the crowd-pleasing impersonations of queenly gays.

I couldn't help but think what her routine has morphed into now, with fresh material like the release of the very non-queenly Brokeback Mountain, and the fiasco of the government's response to Hurricaine Katrina (in Assassin, she mentions Bush's appointments of unqualified candidates... boy, she would have some ammunition now). But even with misses, there are still many laugh-out-loud moments. It may not be the overall best of her concert films, but I'm betting she has many more barbs to fling at us in the future.

  DVD NOTES  

The (rather long) extra "Making of Assassin" is actually more of a profile of Cho, her politics, and her personal involvement in political issues. It adds quite a bit of background to Cho herself, and gives you insight into why she has such personal rage about certain issues. Not bad.

There are a couple short films included as well, the cute and funny "Ode to Margaret Cho", and the excellent "Invisible Son" directed by Edward Lee. I can see why Cho chose to showcase "Invisible Son" on her DVD: It is like a special gift for her audience, the ones who will be watching her DVD in the first place. Lee's film is an extremely personal rumination on his own coming out as a gay man, but centers around his deeper yearning to be accepted for who he is by his traditional Korean immigrant parents. It is a universal story of yearning for acceptance, and it is wonderful that she is giving a wider audience a chance to see it.