More TV

We’re writing about TV a lot, so deal with it. It’s the new TV season.

I had some words to say about Community for the pilot episode, and while I enjoyed it a lot, it was a bit too pilot-y for my tastes. Stock characters, setting up the plotlines, establishing the tone. It was so stock, that I still had no real indication what the show would exactly be like when it got off the ground running. The second episode had the benefit of Ken Jeong as an aggressive Spanish teacher, Chevy Chase and Joel McHale performing an absurd Spanish presentation, and Don Glover and Danny Pudi beatboxing and rapping nonsense in Spanish. As if that weren’t enough to get me hooked on the show, it was genuinely hilarious and well paced, with McHale playing the lead man better than I gave him credit for. I also laughed aloud a lot. Consider me hooked.

I also checked out the premiere for ABC’s Modern Family, which in a lot of ways is NOT a typical pilot. It’s amazing in how much it packed into twenty minutes, establishing three sets of families, interweaving their stories and bringing it together for a warm, heartfelt moment. It’s so great, that it’s almost hard for me to believe that the season can keep up the quality throughout 22 episodes. And being such a well made isolated pilot, I kinda have no idea what the season is going to be like.

Regardless, two shows worth watching.

New Site

Ideal Reader

a side project blog with me and my good friend the Yoppster, to dump our ideas for writing, and where I’ll be posting my movie reviews, along with Blockstravagasm 2009, which starts today with my viewing of Star Trek. Hooray!

Le Fin

Hello blogosphere. So I unfortunately have some bad news for everyone. As of this entry, I am no longer going to be blogging here. To put it simply, I am too busy to keep up this blog with my podcast going on, and I’ve come to a sort of crossroads where I need to remember why it is I like doing this blogging thing. It got to the point where watching a movie became more about writing about the movie, and it made me not enjoy movies as much. And that’s a shame.

But fear not, my movie writing will still exist in some form somewhere on the Internet, and when that side project is set up, I will come back and link it here. Me and the magic elves (I am working with someone else) are setting up shop, and I will be writing my ass off about movies there, but just not in typical review movie-critic form.

As for now, please enjoy the archives of the 100’s of movies I’ve reviewed (search bar in the upper right hand corner of the screen), and check out The People You Don’t Know. And go watch some movies, for God’s sake.

Crank High Voltage [movies]

Crank High Voltage and its predecessor, Crank, are by no means “good” movies. What Crank High Voltage manages to do is keep a franchise alive, maybe the last franchise that exists solely to entertain us and induldge that action exploitation movie nerve that exists in all of us. It’s a loud, violent, lewd, and utterly ridiculous movie that in almost every way stays true to the spirit of the first movie. It’s the extra dollop of frosting on top of a cake that you never asked for, but you eat because it’s sitting right there in front of you. Diet starts on Monday.

Chev Chelios died in Crank. Or at least as close to “dying” as possible, being that he fell out of a helicopter and landed on the concrete face-first. And while the first movie had him keeping his adrenaline up to stay alive on that “Chinese shit,” this movie has him needing to stay juiced with electricity to keep his battery powered artificial heart beating so he has enough time to find out who stole his ticker, get it back, and have it reinserted into his chest. And whether this means cattle prod, taser, grabbing on to high voltage fuses, or skin-to-skin friction in public places, Chev Chelios is a man that does what is needed to survive.

Directors Neveldine and Taylor move the camera around in CHV like music video pros. Jittery jabs and swoops keep the story dynamic, kinetic, and frenzied. And while you want to say there’s something simplistic in the camera work of a movie that seems to use the same tricks that the first movie did, there’s something undeniably pulsing that keeps this movie alive and beating at all times. Add in to the mix a soundtrack by Mike Patton and utterly over the top performances by Amy Smart, Bai Ling, an array of porn stars, and action movie god Jason Statham, and what results is a mash up style of  moviemaking that quite honestly, is kind of awesome to experience.

Whatever Crank High Voltage lacks in seriousness or sincerity, it makes up for in the brazenly unapologetic way it slams itself into the wall for your enjoyment. Some may say it’s offensive, but I say it’s an homage to the exploitation films of earlier eras and the pulp fiction that involved absurd storylines and hammy dialogue. Crank High Voltage is packed with sex, violence, bravado, and amoral decay that when viewed from a distance, may seem like it’s unenjoyable, but when enjoyed in the seat of a movie theater, makes for the kind of experience that big screen, THX movie theaters were made for.

Take a moment to push the sensitive, liberal guilt away. Cast aside your film snob. And just let yourself indulge in a kick ass time. Sure it’s stupid. But it’s stupid in the best possible way. And when you’re watching it with a crowd of people, you may find yourself clapping and cheering with everyone else and remembering what it’s like to just have fun at the movies again.

Crank It Up

How much do I love Chev Chelios? So much, that Crank 2 is getting the Opening Night treatment. That’s right, I’m going to be sitting in the theater tonight, drinking red bull, attaching jumper cables to my nips, and punching grandmas in the face.

And then later, I’ll write a review. Stay tuned.

Observe and Report [movies]

From Foot Fist Way to Eastbound and Down, a lot of people try to categorize Jody Hill’s films into some sort of mold or convention that existed before him. But what makes Hill such an interesting filmmaker is that he’s doing something new, at least for this modern era of moviemaking. While other writers and directors make movies about losers and their quirky, lovable qualities, Hill’s movies are closer to documentary expose’s. Because rather than turn the losers in his movies into lovable characters, or make them bumbling idiots for laughs, he tears away their skin, exposing them for what they are: LOSERS. And while he may be unapologetically ruthless in how he does it, you’ll never see him laughing at their loser status. In fact, if you look hard enough, you’ll see a mourning for their lack of redemption, a kind of can’t-look-away, unwavering eye for the kind of horrible demon-infested mire that exists in all of us to some degree, amplified to the point of realization akin to a slap in the face. This is not a pretty world to step in, and many viewers may find themselves reacting with anger, disgust, or sheer terror at the things they will see.

Observe and Report may be the best representation of what Jody Hill strives to do, and unfortunately it works mostly to his detriment. It’s incredibly unrelenting, unforgiving, and almost unbearable to watch. The story of Ronnie (Seth Rogen), a mall security guard, trying to catch a criminal in the mall, while also using the excuse of a flasher to woo the girl of his dreams, Brandi (Anna Farris), doesn’t have the peaks and valleys of regular character development. Even in the scene where Ronnie supposedly “wins” a small battle towards the middle of the film, it opens up to be a rather horrible act that doesn’t really make you laugh at its absurdity. It just confirms what you already suspected, that Ronnie is a raging sociopath, and the things he does aren’t so much outside of reality enough to laugh at them. Things hit a bit too close to home, and the result is the visceral reaction of horror or tragedy, rather than comedy.

His character develops from stupid, idiot loser into raging, moronic, delusional, psychopathic loser, and while some may accuse Hill of glorifying the idiocy of Ronnie, there is a winking juxtaposition of the slow-motion shots, dynamic camera work, and down-home country rock soundtrack that works both as a foil to the evil stupidity occurring, or as a commentary on the ease of the glorification of those who don’t deserve it, that sometimes actions are misconstrued for the worst, and that sometimes people are seen in their best light, hiding their worst qualities. Keep it in mind when you see a moment that makes you groove along with it, Hill’s not necessarily wanting you to buy in all the time, and it shows his skill as a visual filmmaker at how easily he slips in and out of both sides of the same coin.

And then there’s the date rape controversy. Hill shows Brandi to be a rather horrible person in the first place, and seeing two horrible people drinking, popping pills, puking, and engaging in questionably consensual sex doesn’t really do much to assuage the protesters. There’s really no question that the scene was supposed to play as a “did he just date rape her?” moment for the crowd, but the point that a lot of people seem to be missing is that it’s not really making a joke about date rape. It’s SUPPOSED to be a horrible act, that only goes to solidify the kind of stunning realization that maybe Observe and Report ISN’T a comedy at all. There’s nothing really…funny about it, and whether that’s a failure of the writing, or the intention of Hill to break away from simple guffaws, it comes across as both an exciting success and a fairly big failure.

I’m not trying to duck the date rape issue. The long and short of it is, yes, it uses this event as a shock-the-audience moment, but no, it’s not a joke used to simply laugh about the underlying issue it represents. The scene is one of countless scenes in the movie that prove that Ronnie is completely deluded in his perception of reality, and that he engages in actions that make him a terrible, terrible person. And it’s for this reason that he’s a loser, and Hill constructs a machine that lets us viciously hate him while also indulging that side of yourself that loves seeing the scum be scum. It feeds into the reality tv, Jerry Springer, voyeuristic sick part of all us. It’s not a pretty world that Hill wants us to step into, but once you’re there, it’s a movie that lets you indulge the sick fuck in you, and admittedly, it makes you feel like no other movie has really ever made you feel.

I don’t want to give Observe and Report a pass, because in the end it’s not a great movie. It’s not even close to a great movie. And aside from a few lines by Aziz Ansari, there are barely any laughs in the movie. But I do feel like it’s an important movie, because it gives us a reason to hope that something new is coming, something unlike anything we’ve seen before. Something that we don’t have to apologize for, while at the same time, we don’t have to make concessions to enjoy either. Because if Hill can harness whatever energy that led him to create this shocking, insane, ugly, and bleak movie into something more palatable, but without watering it down, the movie that results could be phenomenal. And if you can rise above the noise that this movie’s been generating, you might see that sometimes you call a spade a spade, and that yes, Observe and Report is all the things people say about it.

But then tilt your head to the side and consider what it all means as a whole, and it becomes something else entirely. Not necessarily something enjoyable to watch, but something important, something visceral, and something fiercely its own that you kinda have to stand back and respect the hell out of it, even if you didn’t love it as much as you thought you would.

Party Down

If by any chance you actually get the Starz channel, I strongly suggest you check out Party Down, which is basically my favorite new tv show. I mean, created and written by Rob Thomas and Paul Rudd, and starring Adam Scott, Jane Lynch, Martin Starr, Ken Marino and Lizzy Caplan. Really, can TV get any better?

View, Rinse, Repeat

I remember watching Superbad in the theater and laughing, but not really loving it. But because I love Apatow special features (the Knocked Up 2 disc set is probably my favorite DVD of all time), I bought the DVD and gave it another spin. The jokes were spoiled, so I didn’t laugh much, and realized that I intensely didn’t like it. I got the idea they were going for, a modern day Porky’s, the kind of raunchy R-rated high school “let’s get laid” comedy that hasn’t been done well since probably American Pie. But I just found it listless and kind of pointless, nothing about it stuck out to me. So for a while, it sat on my shelf between the other Apatow movies I’ve watched and rewatched countless times gathering dust. And then a few months ago, I decided to pull it out again, for old time’s sake. And weirdly, I found that I actually liked it. Even weirder, I REALLY liked it.

I began thinking back on all the movies that I didn’t like at first, and grew to enjoy later. Office Space is probably the definitive example of this phenomenon in my movie viewing history. When I first saw Mike Judge’s modern classic, I didn’t get it. Maybe it’s because I was young and had never worked in an office (something that, as a business student, I would come to learn only too well later in life), but something about the movie was too..on the nose. The jokes were well written and well delivered, but nothing about them made me laugh aloud in the way that a simpler comedy would. Nothing about it was special to me, and so I just chalked it up to a movie that I just assumed wasn’t my cup of tea.

Office Space only became great when I spoke about it with friends over the next nine years of my life, as moments would occur and I’d catch a glimpse from my friend on a joke we could both remember from the movie. It started with the endless quoting, referencing, and late night discussions about the how we wish “Damn It Feels Good to be a Gangsta” could be the soundtrack to every shining moment in our lives, and then culminated in college dorm movie marathons where Office Space became something easy to throw on, because everyone could laugh at it, while ignoring it. The movie was more about the community it created, rather than the movie itself, and to this day when I watch Office Space, I don’t laugh at the movie, I laugh with it and remember all the moments it’s created in my mind.

In a lot of ways, that’s Judge’s charm. While there may be plenty of people who love his movies on first viewing, I find myself outside of that circle, as the same phenomenon happened with his newest movie Idiocracy. I’m not one of the people who walked out of this movie and pointed at our current society, saying it was close to Idiocracy’s dumbed down view of the future, but the genius of this movie is the way it puts these time bombs inside of your mind, on paper they may not be utterly hilarious, but shared with friends, they become classic moments. It’s something that Judge seems to understand, the difference between relatability (i.e. say, an Apatow movie) and the viral aspect of humor. You could arguably say that Beavis and Butthead started this age of viral humor, something that on paper, looks completely vapid, but when engaged with and relayed to others, it becomes a proactive experience. And because you own a little bit of it, it becomes personal, it’s all our inside joke, so we laugh a bit harder.

To turn away from straight up comedies, I had a similar experience with The Big Lebowski, and really most Coen Bros. movies in general. On paper, there’s no reason that Lebowski works, even in viewing the movie it’s kind of a wandering fever dream of a movie that isn’t grounded in reality, but not fully in the abstract. But the massive cult following that it’s built up is anchored in a similar quotable, viral, inside joke aspect, that this movie is “ours,” and we love it because it speaks to us. A lot of Coen movies find this kind of following, if you find someone who’s a Miller’s Crossing fan, chances are he’s not a passive MC fan, he thinks it’s one of the greatest movies ever made (like me). But Lebowski takes that shared experience to a new ground…it’s not about the laughs, and it’s not about the weed, and it’s not about the quotes, it’s about the religion and culture that the movie creates.

Superbad is strange, b/c it’s not so much about a religion or culture, and it’s not about quotes. The one thing that’s interesting about Apatow movies is their lack of quotability. Sure, there are funny lines, but rarely does the writing push the dialogue to the front in the way that other humor movies do. Quick, think of your favorite Apatow movie quote. It’s probably something embedded within regular speaking between characters, or an improvised throwaway line that just stuck in your head. But upon repeated viewings, when you ignore the jokes (or rather, the jokes have no effect on you), you start to see that it’s just an enjoyable world to be in, regardless of how aimless it might be. Between 40 Year Old Virgin, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Knocked Up, movies that contain jokes within the structure of an emotional narrative, Superbad is the break from all that, it’s floating around in the pool after swimming laps, and though I can’t explain it, there is something enjoyable about it in a way that doesn’t require any kind of a shared experience. In the way that Office Space and Idiocracy get better with community, I’ve found Superbad to get better when viewed in isolation, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because the jokes are simply not meant to be talked about. It’s a weirdly earnest movie, that doesn’t try to hide the fact that it loves the brand of humor that it does, even though at times, it’s dripping with self deprecation, or even as far as self loathing. And that’s appealing, in a weird, masochistic way, and better viewed when you’re by yourself.

I don’t mean to overinflate the importance of raunchy comedies. It is what it is. But there’s something more going on with simple, stupid movies, and I don’t mean that the stories themselves are more complex than we believe them to be. They’re communal experiences, and when done right, they create the community, rather than pull in the already existing age demographic that likes to laugh at fart jokes. And sometimes, movies like that deserve a second or third look before you toss it in the loss column.

Save Chuck

I will weep if this show gets cancelled. Support the cause.

Kumar Jokes Aside…

I am so sick of hearing these snide, sarcastic remarks about Kal Penn being named to the White House office of Public Liason. Not so much from the media, though they are having their fair share of cheap jabs, but more so from people I know personally. The guy’s been a surrogate for Obama since the Iowa primaries, and has been a passionate, committed activist for this administration. And all your “Kumar?!?!” comments piss me off for two reasons.

One, the jeers from the cheap seats that somehow actors or celebrities can’t be valuable contributors to our society in a meaningful way is annoying to me as much as if it was the other way around. For a lot of actors, they live their entire lives trudging through everyone else’s shit, a parade of rejection, crappy jobs to pay rent, and doing Valtrex commercials so they can put another bullet point on their resume. Sure, some are overprivileged idiots, but so are the people who work two offices down from you. And the simple fact that someone makes it in their industry, you want to somehow punish them for their success? To say that they don’t have a right to try to make a difference? How un-American is that?

Second, the fact that some of these people want to contribute back to society in a meaningful way is somehow now something to be laughed at because they come from a place of privilege? It would be one thing if Paris Hilton wanted to be Secretary of the Interior (please, keep your gutter jokes to yourself ::giggle::), but to paint a brush so broadly to say that because someone acts in a comedy is an non serious buffoon, that’s a childish, juvenile and narrow-minded way to see the world. Guess what, Al Franken used to run around SNL acting like an idiot, and he’s now a Senator, and is going to be a damned good one at that (you hear me Coleman, HE’S A SENATOR).

People need to get out off of their high horse and shut their mouths. He mobilized volunteers, was there on the ground, and put in tons of work in the battleground states where Obama needed as much help as he could get. I say, kudos Mr. Penn. B/c while some may say it’s easy to come from his place in Hollywood and give back, I say it’s all the easier to have fallen into the same slothful, apathetic, meaningless existence that so many people, both famous and not, fall into. And anyone who’s fit for the job deserves a chance at it, regardless of what kind of movies you used to make. Everyone who’s making these acidic jokes on this appointment needs to think hard on what you hope to accomplish by the time you’re 30 like Penn turns this month.

I don’t even LIKE Kal Penn (I kinda hate him), but seriously, everyone should shut the hell up.