Iliza Shlesinger: Confirmed Kills (2016) Reviews

• Unfunny, pseudo-feminist Agony

  DrFreeman862016-09-23

  It seems she burned down really fast after the last one, which was more enjoyable. But now its real agony, void of jokes and filled with stale and preachy feminism. "All women should love their bodies and are perfect, being oppressed by insecurities dictated by the media", that type of thing. The structure of the bits is lacking or unoriginal and there is no real narrative that would feed jokes or interesting callbacks. If any, they refer to the last special. The whole torture is garnished with thinly veiled self-congratulation by the comic. Not even low-brow pandering by utilizing cheap American patriotism was left out (" i love America, being American, the army keeps us save" and such American tropes) Watching it is quite pointless.. Better go re-watch Louis CK.

• Complicated but Funny Comedy by an Amazing Performer

  kurtvs-12016-09-27

  I have watched Iliza since she won Last Comic Standing in 2011. She's grown tremendously since then. She's polished her delivery, expanded her material, hardened her body, perfected her voices. Her performance in this show is intense, rapid fire and wonderful and impressive in many, many ways. The material is at once tight and wide-ranging, aimed at your gut and at your head (not much at your heart), great physical, vocal and intellectual stuff going on. And I think that's why the 3 reviewers before me gave bad reviews. There's kind of too much going on. I'm very fond of Kathleen Madigan and I think I can best explain my thoughts by making a comparison. Madigan's humor seems fairly low-brow at first glance. Her persona is a sloppy drunk floozy, not terribly bright, but her humor is slyly much smarter than it appears. Madigan doesn't want you to necessarily think well of her as a person, she wants you to enjoy the material and unconsciously be subverted by her almost subliminal messages. Iliza, on the other hand, wants you to be impressed by her -- by her material, by her mind, by her body, by her politics, by her comedic abilities, by her command of her instrument. Her messages, and there's a lot of them, are not subliminal, they're stridently overt. Her biggest message, however, is that she wants you to be impressed by her brilliance. And guess what, she actually is brilliant, but there are many points where she eases off the momentum of the comedy for the purpose of showcasing that brilliance. Iliza's comedy is cooking on multiple levels at all times. There's the text, the subtext, the messages, the metatext, her running commentary on her own performance plus all the schtick. It can be exhausting at times and at it's worst, some layers undercut or negate what's happening in other layers. For example, if your text is pointing out how silly and self-defeating it is that women are always trying to impress men and garner their attention and your sub-text is trying to do exactly that, there's a friction going on between those layers that. She even refers to her performance as a stealth TED talk at one point and that was exactly what I had been thing for the last few minutes. It's super-high energy, non-stop. Her approach to this show is like an Olympic athlete. There's a lot of posturing and preening and some of the postures get repetitive and it can be distracting and confusing when she uses a posture you've seen before to a very different purpose. As I said at the beginning, I was very impressed by her and her growth. I wish she could get Elaine May to help her with her next show and help her use her brilliance to bolster the comedy and not the other way around.

• Confirm bombs

  birchallm-453632016-09-23

  Watching this actually made create an IMDb account so I can write how bad this was. Why does she keep putting out specials please stop. I love stand up however this girl I think kind of hurts it in someway by these specials. I think she just goes on stage and doesn't put work in it and once she comes up with enough crappy bits for an hour says to herself great time for my next special that's going change stand up. Why would you call it confirmed kills that's the worst title ever. she should name her next special tricking people into thinking I'm funny by just making as many body movements and weird voices so hopefully I get to be on some crappy sitcom or game show. I can probably write one of her new jokes for the new special doesn't suck when you going out with your girls to the bar and you can't dance or speak to hot guys(begin terrible dance sequence followed by silly voice when trying to talk to the guy) I would have stopped the first line but this website makes you write ten lines. In conclusion didn't like it I wish she would stop making specials.

• Big Step Back

  Kaptain_Bluddflagg2018-07-20

  So this special was a HUGE step back from her previous one, Freezing Hot, and is actually not quite as good as War Paint. There are still some funny parts in it, and it is still very clear that Iliza is a talented comic, but the hamfisted feminist/femal empowerment portions just don't work here. I'm not against the message per se, but she takes some liberties with reality in order to make a point, and that dilutes her message. She goes on for quite a bit about how women are insecure about their weight and all but blames men for this, erroneously claiming that the super thin female beauty standard embodied by heroin chic in the fashion community is the result of male preferences. This has never been true; while men do find models attractive, every man I have ever know (myself included) prefers women of a much healthier weight. Men like curves, and almost always have. I don't say this to diminish anyone's experience with negative comments from former partners, or even random jerks on the internet, but if you are going to try to affect a positive change in society it helps to be more precise, and the perpetuation of of a mentality which seeks to blame others for your own perceived shortcomings and insecurities is not empowering. Women are, in my experience, far more critical of each other than men are of women. This is somewhat touched on in the special, but doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should given how pervasive it is. This special marks a change in Iliza's tone. It is clear that she is trying to raise awareness in addition to entertaining an audience, and she is still a very funny person; it is equally clear that this is an issue that is important to her, but she needs to tighten up her message a bit if she wants it to have the impact she feels that it deserves.

• redundant, disappointing, and painfully annoying

  aakker2016-09-26

  If you want to listen to an hour long, live narration of Facebook posts from your high school classmates that went to liberal arts colleges, then this might be the 'comedy' special for you. This special is titled Confirmed Kills, and I can indeed confirm that Iliza Shlesinger has now killed all of her jokes (and that goblin voice), and kicked them while they were down. It seems like each of her specials circle around the same jokes about the same topics that have been told by many other comedians before her. There isn't much originality in Confirmed Kills, and nothing that really sets it apart from anything else she's ever done. I found it irritating after about fifteen minutes. I love stand-up comedy, and initially was excited to watch this, but all-in-all I would not be so quick to recommend this to people. I really hope Iliza Shlesinger can come up with some new, original material soon because, based on other reviews I've read after viewing this Netflix special, Confirmed Kills may just kill her popularity.