Ellen DeGeneres: The Beginning

Ellen makes a great comeback in this stand-up comedian movie. She is funny throughout and talks a little bit about her personal life. If this comes back on, I suggest you watch it because I know you will like it.

Ellen Degeneres is one of my fave actresses and I admire her honesty and her ability to babble to an audience for over an hour without stopping! I live in England and you can only get this on video here, I watched it with 4 of my friends (all aged 16) and only me and one of my male friends enjoyed it. No-one else quite understood Ellen's quirks and rambling habits. Still, I give this one an 8 or 9. Nice work Ellen, keep it up. :)

I know I'm probably gonna get a lot of negative votes on this comment, but this was honestly one of the least enjoyable stand-up routines I've ever seen...and I've seen many! So on to my personal reason why I was barely able to watch this till the end:

Ellen to me is like a person in a wheelchair who everybody feels sorry for. Because she got treated badly after she "came out" there's now almost this unwritten obligation and sense of right to applaud to everything she says and does. It's pathetic! I condemn the spiteful reactions towards her coming out & everything, but empathy stops at a certain point. What's happened in Ellen's case is that now her loving and devoted fans are mostly people who've been hurt themselves. So they gobble her every word as if it came from high above...Ellen is to her fans what the AMWAY director is to his devoted fanatical ant workers.

The most she made me was smile on a couple of occasions, but the crowd seemed to want to eat her up. Everything was to-die hysterical to them and I couldn't fathom it. Her material wasn't really bad, but her delivery and timing were painful to watch. She was waaaaay too predictable and what's even worse, she went for the cheapest laughs: "God...is a She" (and the mostly female crowd bursts into applause)

Somewhere towards the end she even steals stuff from other comedians, but by that time I had already begun writing this woeful comment. Why I bothered to watch this till the end I honestly don't know. Maybe it was the empathy in me, trying to want to approve of this woman's comedic skills. She has none!

Ellen DeGeneres seems like a very nice person. She may remind you of the most helpful woman at the food co-op or an extremely affable first-grade teacher. She is not, however, what we call real funny. Nor is she a very good joke-teller (her funny parenthetical asides are given GIANT CAPITAL LETTERS). Nor is she what we call especially interesting--her routine here resembles the attempts of a pleasant but not particularly bright person to make chitchatty conversation. Crunchy (but not gnarly) lesbians will have a warm smile. For everyone else, it's kind of like watching someone else's massage.

This performance marks 3 years after the "come-out" of Ellen Degeneres. FYI, Ellen was raised in a strict Christian Science environment, and although she no longer goes to that church, she believes in God and her belief is evidently shown in this performance. As she always has been funny and witty style, Ellen also shows her love and passion for people and animals. My favorite part is how Ellen chooses to end the show with such impressive story of her meeting with God. It makes us laugh for the moment, but then when we find "the silence", we can see how incredible and sophisticated this woman is. If you are a fan of Ellen DeGeneres, you cannot miss this.