Win a Copy of the Mikey & Nicky Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection!

I recently had the incredible honor of being asked to write the liner notes for the Criterion Blu-Ray of Elaine May’s 1976 masterpiece Mikey & Nicky. It’s no exaggeration to say that being associated with this film in any way is easily one of the highlights of my career. It’s right up there with being asked to speak at the 2017 Juggalo March on Washington. I like to think that me and maybe Leonard Maltin are the only two people equally qualified to do both. 

Mikey & Nicky is a hell of a film, an incendiary drama about a dark night of the soul for two longtime friends that also happens to be darkly, brutally funny in that inimitable Elaine May fashion. The Blu-Ray is director-approved and it still boggles my mind that an absolute creative God like May read what I wrote and signed off on it and did not pull a Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall and indignantly insist that I know nothing of her work. 

In writing the liner notes for Mikey & Nicky, I tried to do justice to the film’s depth and complexity as well as the story behind the film, a wild, quintessentially 1970s drama about a brilliant, uncompromising filmmaker on the edge fighting a heroic battle to preserve the integrity and purity of her vision. 

It was a battle that entailed years of legal and practical skirmishes as well as May hiding reels of the film from Paramount so that it could not finish it without her and release a bastardized version. 

I could not be prouder of my minor contribution to Elaine May’s incredible legacy so to help promote this very worthy offering from the classiest folks in home video I will give a copy of the Mikey & Nicky Blu-Ray autographed by me, Nathan Rabin, to the person who writes the most eloquent one paragraph appreciation of Elaine May in the comments. 

So have at it, you appreciators of genius, you. And read my essay here and get excited about the long-overdue release of one of the darkest, most brilliant and most resonant explorations of toxic masculinity ever made, from an utterly singular talent, a stone-cold comic genius even when expertly dissecting the pitch-black psychodrama of complicated, difficult men’s relationships with themselves and each other. 

I make my living largely through crowd-funding , so I would be ever so grateful if you would considering pledging even a dollar a month over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace