From my favorite movies..

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

"Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic" features very funny comedian stuck in a very bad movie. At her stand-up Silverman can be the master of her instrument. Yet, here she is stuck in a movie that is distracting and disorganized. It is part concert film, part variety show. The former works, but the latter is like throwing a rock through the rest of the movie. You're left with the intense urge to hit the fast-forward button.Silverman has, like all stand-up comedians, a specialty. Yet her act is somewhat different than the usual comedians who stick to time-weathered material about the everyday battles with the universe like sex, politics, coffee shops and microwave ovens. Instead she talks about edgy subjects such like AIDS, race, pornography, even 9/11, and then punctuates her comments with shocking commentary. She pushes herself into unhealthy waters and her fearlessness is brought home by the fact that she doesn't seem to be bulldozing the material by being crass or mean. There's poise and intelligence to her delivery. She is pretty and well-mannered but her words take an unexpected U-Turn into commentary that is shocking. "I believe that the best time to have a baby is . . . when you're a black teenager" she tells us. That's offense, and it's funny.Part of the problem with her first movie "Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic" is that there's not enough of that. Her act has a conversational flow to it, a pattern of beginning as something mundane but then ending it with something shockingly un-PC. Yet, the movie breaks this pattern every few minutes by bad skits and musical numbers of no consequence. We came to see her stage act, I think the image she wants to project (at least on stage) is the image of a person who is insecure but unaware of the racist and sexist language that she uses. That's fine, but it requires an artist who can orchestrate it like music. She's done it before, but somehow it all falls flat here. There needed to be some measure of consistency. Throw out the lame sketches and the music and get down to the business of doing what she does best. Sadly, it's not here.*1/2 (of four)

Sarah Silverman is clever, hilarious and sucker-punches you with unanticipated reversals. She's one of the most skillful current young comics at prickly and violating humor that cuts through the watered-down amateurism of so many modern male comedians who kill their own timing with a rock-star façade and stadium atmosphere. Silverman is tall, brunette and certainly attractive, and she says outrageous things with the clear-cut diction and self-assurance of a girl who was raised knowing how to make a good impression. The detach between what she says and how she says it is part of the effect. If you're going to use not merely the homeless and the handicapped but sacred cows like cancer, AIDS and 9/11 in jest, it's good to know how to pick up the go-ahead from the audience. Her way of doing that is by seeming as if to be too polite to understand what she's saying. When she uses the word "retards" she at once clarifies that it's offensive and explains: "When I say 'retards,' I mean they can do anything." None of her shticks last long enough to develop. She gets a laugh, and then another one, a third, then quits while she's ahead and goes off on another trajectory. We want her to persist more, heaping one political black eye on top of another. We want to see her in a groove.Jesus is Magic is not the best showcase for that like it should be, seeing as it's a theatrically released feature film. There are episodes of her show The Sarah Silverman Program on Comedy Central that strike comedy gold. Jesus is Magic hardly even plays as a greatest hits tape by comparison to the episode in which Sarah becomes enraged with the Mongolians after learning that her Russian ancestors were raped by them, or the one where she tries to raise awareness about 9/11 by staging a play in which the Twin Towers are speaking characters and a performer dressed in black tights stretches his arms out and chases them, to which they respond with lines like, "I'm a nice building! Why are you doing this to me?" Here, she cuts away from the performance to small sketches. The opener, in which her sister Laura and her friend Brian Posehn boast about their recent endeavors, is funny because she impeccably plays someone who has never finished anything and never will, and lies about it. Then we see her in a car, singing a song about getting a job and doing a show, and then she does a show. No problem. But what's with the scene where she amuses the elderly folks at her grandma's nursing home by singing a song telling them they'll all die soon? It works owing to the ostensible oblivion of the old people, but to talk about the film's editing pattern is to imply it has one. There are brusque and sudden cuts between various forms of material: She's on stage, then she's at the nursing home, back on stage. There's a way to make that changeover, but it doesn't necessitate a cut that seems like she was barged in on in the middle of something. And the movie ends too hurriedly, lacking any sort of culmination or conquest in the material. Her act seems brought to a halt a mile before the border. The 70-minute running time is worthy of note, because if you take away the offstage scenes, we see less of her than a live audience would.If Silverman were untalented or her material wasn't funny, those criticisms would've been a lot easier to write. I love Sarah Silverman. She has a genuine flair, and she is hilarious in a way that's her own. And, as I described before, I think she is skillful at honing writers to her distinctive, self-consciously low-brow style. Jesus is Magic is still a fun watch, but it's mostly because of inestimably hilarious one-liners that she springs on you in pitch-perfect form with the persona I've described, like "I was licking jelly off of my boyfriend's penis and all of a sudden I'm thinking, 'Oh my god, I'm turning into my mother!'" It's just that this is a vehicle that could've launched her, and it's basically a shapeless succession of sometimes hilarious and sometimes not…well…stuff.

Stand up performer attempts to be the next Lenny Bruce and isn't.Sarah Silverman is the bombing comic on the old Johhny Carson show, mysteriously given show business carte blanche a la the bizarro world. Is she offensive? Who can even say anymore. Pushing the boundaries of good taste in the year 2007 means a young woman can now stand on stage and tell "in depth" bathroom jokes one after another without clearing the house. Example:Sarah: Cause now I'm at that point where I'm comfortable peeing in front of my boyfriend, and you know its kinda nice...now Im going to try it in the bathroom. Not just A bathroom joke, but perhaps the Oldest bathroom joke in the catalog. Eyes on the prize ladies, lol. To be fair, the show isn't all 80 year old jokes and vaudeville/burleque. She has a few funny lines and even at her embarrassingly low moments, Sarah Silverman remains an engaging and attractive on-stage personality. Her overt charms notwithstanding, the question that kept running through my mind was not, How is "I hope the Jews killed Jesus, I'd do it again!! considered funny, but "Who exactly is this chick and 'Why exactly is she on my television?' Who exactly is Sarah Silverman other than a look alike for her namesake semi-successful not brother, Jonathan Silverman, and the next Mrs. Jimmy Kimmel? Is there such a dearth of female comics that this is what distills out of the machinery? I don't think so. I think Sarah only gets to do and air a bad show like this or get booed off the stage at an awards show because.... boyfriend Jimmy K has got a lot of juice! That is indisputable. Just as Sarah's nonstop passage on the Bad Comic Forgottenville express was abruptly interrupted as soon as she starting dating Mr. Kimmel is likewise not in dispute. That's Hollywood, and it ain't gonna change. Now if seeing the not particularly funny girlfriends of talented people act out in a feature length video/stand up thingamajig is your idea of a good watch, by all means, have at it, this movie is for you!! I'd personally prefer to watch someone with a little more talent. Or to take a page out of her act, Sarah Silverman successfully debunks the 'all Jewish comedians are funny' stereotype.

Sarah, honey, do you want Santa Claus to bring you toys on Christmas? Then become a Christian. We don't trash Hanukkah and Passover, so show a little respect for our holidays, okay? Everything goes wrong here: the ultra-cheap production values, comedy routines that are no more than mildly funny and sometimes misfire, and mean-spirited musical shorts that leave you wanting to sit Silverman down and give her a parental lecture about respecting other people. One bit with the star running around a nursing home screaming "You're gonna die soon!" to the elderly residents is particularly cruel. Sarah, what was supposed to be funny about that? I'm not persnickety about edgy humor. However, there's a fine difference between edgy and just being a jerk. Silverman's a jerk.