Ellen DeGeneres: The Beginning (2000)

Sadly Over-hyped

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

You can read what some nay sayers post or you can read a professional critique, without a slant that one much question if homophobia played a role instead of fair and balanced review. Ellen doesn't have a top rated TV show AGAIN by mistake, read below..............This post-coming-out performance fully acknowledges Ellen DeGeneres's status as America's most famous lesbian, but it is nevertheless imbued with a sense of fun. For instance, rather than describe the experience of closet-exiting on her self-titled situation comedy in the late 1990s, she performs an amusing "interpretive dance." She uses her trademark goofiness to ruminate on the necessity of directions on shampoo bottles, ant road rage, and the possible nightmarish consequences of buying cheese. While the performance is not orientation-specific, the comedienne spends a fair amount of time on sex-related issues, including jokes about blow-up dolls and people who videotape their relations. She does venture into the political with an appeal for same-sex marriage and a monologue on meeting God, who turns out to be a middle-aged black woman. None of this fazes her clearly supportive audience at New York's Beacon Theatre who get to ask her questions at the end à la Carol Burnett. The best moment of the 65-minute performance for HBO comes at the end, when DeGeneres accidentally exhibits some gender confusion with a young audience member, who then pays her moving tribute as a role model. --Kimberly Heinrichs

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 De Generes at her best. This is a must see for anyone into comedy. Timing is excellent and routines are brilliant. De Generes proves she still has what it takes to wow an audience. The opening dance sequence displays another side of De Generes to her fans. Don't miss this...

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.