Reviews of Super Mario Brothers, Beau is Afraid, Tetris, Air

Super Mario Brothers-Chris Pratt, Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy, Seth Rogen, Jack Black

This animated movie isn’t just a filmic homage to the Super Mario Brothers game you grew up with as a kid; it’s hodgepodge of every video game with the Super Mario label. Kind of like Ready Player One except there’s thematic consistency. And that nostalgia factor lights a bulb in your brain. And talk about that score! It’s almost worth the price of admission to see the most memorable tunes of the early 90s outside of the Billboard top 40, to be put to orchestration. As for the story, it’s pretty typical but not lazy enough (from an adult perspective) to have made a negative viewing experience for me.

Air-Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Viola Davis, Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, Chris Messina, dir. Ben Affleck

In the mold of films like Syriana, Moneyball, and Ben Affleck’s own Argo, this latest edition of Ben Affleck is simply about a man (or group of men) and his goals. It’s in the tradition of 70s anti-hero films like French Connection, Marathon Man, China Syndrome, and especially All the President’s Men where character development is secondary to action. And Air is definitely worthy of all its predecessors: It’s paced very well and the stakes are high. Sonny Vaccaro is a fascinating rogue of a character who plays a hell of a game of speed chess against bigger companies to land the greatest player of all time. Ironically, for a film that lionizes athleticism vis-a-vis Michael Jordan -- Vaccaro’s big speech is about how no one really matters in that room but Michael Jordan, how much of that entitlement has produced college athletes who skip classes and add to rape culture?—Jordan himself wasn’t evolved. I couldn’t help but feel the film was too afraid to touch a societal golden cow.

Beau is Afraid-Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPonte, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zoe Lister, Parker Posey-Jones, dir. Ari Aster

Not a fan but it wasn’t that far away from working. The film’s marketing describes the movie as about a lonely man’s odyssey home, and the director described it as a “nightmare comedy” on press tours. I would classify it as the kind of ride that amusement park’s convert into a haunt-fest for Halloween. Only it lasts three hours, and it was seemingly co-written by Carl Jung and Franz Kafka for maximum symbolism. Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely man who’s ill-at-ease with the world. It’s kind of justified, however, because, he seems to live among the worst possible humans alive and Murphy’s Law appears to be in hyper-drive around him.  It isn’t all miserable; he’s saved from near-death on a couple occasions and finds the occasional moment of love from a stranger.   The best I can say about It, is that at three hours, it doesn’t feel that long. I was genuinely on the edge of my seat trying to work out where things would go. But at the end of a day, I’m usually not satisfied with the genre of reality-bending films. Perhaps, it was one twist too many.

Tetris-Taron Egerton, Anthony Boyle, Neketa Efremov, Oleg Stefan, Sofya Lebedeva, Tobey Jones –

Without overthinking it, I’d say this is the best film of the year so far. It’s hard to understate how impressive it is to take a subject that bores me to tears and make it a gripping thriller. Of course, it helps that the real-life story is equally mind-boggling: In order to acquire the rights for Tetris, Henk Williams mortgaged his house, risked trouble with the KGB, and was initially dependent on a company that was actively trying to screw him. When he finally broke free and secured the rights with the Nintendo company, he realized he didn’t have the rights because he was lied to. Although it’s easy to root for him in retrospect, movies like these often overlook that these bold risk takers simply can’t be classified as responsible adults. I’d love to see a deleted scene between Henk and his financial advisor. Throughout the film, Hank is in a bidding war with two other parties and the film makes great use of dramatic irony: The narration is omniscient enough to let us know what’s happening with all three parties, but the POV is tilted towards the hero and away from the villain (Anthony Boyle) as he generally knows the least of the three.  My only problem was why that I spent much of the film wondering why cast Taron Egerton when Shia LaBeouf is still alive? Egerton’s makeover here feels like he’s entering a Shia LaBeouf look-alike contest, and who needs him when this is the kind of part LaBeouf would kill?

Kyle Mooney's Saturday Morning All-Star Hits (Netflix) Review

It's hard to find a better word (or rather compound word) to describe this then Kyle Mooneyesque. The SNL comedian has cultivated a very specific brand of nostalgia-based parody from the late 80s and early 90s and it's extra meaningful if you grew up on TGIF or Fox's Saturday morning block.

Each of the eight episodes follows a series of cartoons. There's one following the heroics of two professional athletes who live in the shadows of their more famous brother (Robin Lopez or Jarron Collins must finally be seen!) and are unusually violent that has shades of the 90s X-Men cartoons. Another has a dinosaur (based on Denver the Last Dinosaur) who gets suicidally depressed in the first episode.

The show is framed by two twin brothers cosplaying as Saved by the Bell extras who talk like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and even make up their own words like "zwaaz" (likely, a play on the turtles adding "cowabunga" in the vernacular). There are also public service announcements that highlight, well-- the ineffectiveness of 90s public service announcements (think DARE) if nothing else, previews of live action films (extremely softball plugs) and promotional tie-ins that are hilariously obvious but not too different from today's corporate synergy.

Then the show begins to get more serialized in a way that Kyle Mooney's SNL sketches never have the capacity to be. This is why this show exists.

One of the less overtly funny shows (based off Thundercats and He-Man) starts to get a better gimmick when one of the twins, Skip, gets a one-line cameo. Similar to how Jaleel White famously wreaked havoc on the rest of the cast's air time on "Modern Family" through accidentally hitting upon the show's catch phrase "Did I Do That?", Skip instantly gets catapulted as the face of the show and spearheads a live action film. Meanwhile, his brother gets left in the dust. On top of that there's a casually played out murder behind the scenes.

It would be all very dark and complex if it wasn't filtered through the "cowabunga" air-guitar-shredding cheeriness of 90s TV.

As opposed to broad and aggressive (Mike Meyers), random (Lonely Island), or exploring the "what if"s and meandering on tangents (Seth MacFarland), Kyle Mooney's style of parody is an intricately-constructed recreation with glaring holes. It's the juxtaposition that's the joke and while many reviews say he might not be for everyone, there's a lot to appreciate.

What I'm Watching: Thanksgiving Edition

A Teacher (FX)-A thought-provoking look at female teachers who sleep with high school students as exemplified through one example. Kate Mara plays young teacher Claire Wilson who’s stuck in a bad marriage and forms a friendly relationship with an economically disadvantaged student named Eric (Nick Robinson). The characters are based on composites rather than a real person which gives the show freedom to expand in any which direction.

Watching the show and absorbing it’s aftertaste on the internet reveals a dissonance. The TV show is about a complicated forbidden love affair. Wilson makes bad decisions but so does Eric (who instigated the relationship twice) and it’s a progression of mutually consummated destruction that the pair goes through.

The internet chatter, however, wants to make clear that Claire is the instigator and this is a horrendous crime. I’m not personally well-versed on the psychological case studies on this phenomenon, but the TV show does what it should do by showing us complicated characters in a horrendous crime. It’s gripping drama. If you wish to know what’s behind this issue (as you’re supposed to do with every other work of fiction), research the cases behind it.

 

Studio C (BYU TV)-From what I can gather, there's a sketch comedy group on campus at BYU in Provo, Utah. Some kids from this sketch group decided "hey, let's be professional sketch comedians." I'm sure there are lots of other capable college kids in college sketch groups who have had those same thoughts before reality and student debt hit them. But these kids had two advantages: 1) The college owns a successful TV station with a base that pulls on the Mormon community which includes half the state of Utah and 2) These kids have a distinctive brand of comedy.

BYU, and Mormon culture in general, is watchful of things that are PG-13 rated entertainment-wise. As a result, all of BYU's content is family friendly which means no swearing and limited talking about sexy stuff. There might also be other stuff they're not allowed to do on TV- like portray demon worship, express enjoyment towards the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or show people drinking hot tea*-- but I have absolutely no idea as I don't have a copy of the standards and practices in front of me.

*They did a pretty clever sketch with a couple going on a romantic dinner and milk was used a stand-in for wine. Maybe that's poking fun at a restriction the writers have on using alcohol in sketches?

The end result is a sketch comedy that goes out of its way to be family friendly. The show might be less edgy in terms of blue content but one can admire the way they work with less punchline options to produce more. 

Another great thing is that, regardless of your religious affiliation, most parents wouldn't let their kids skip straight from Sesame Street to Saturday Night Live. This show has the potential to get kids involved in sketch comedy before they're old enough to watch Saturday Night Live.

The show's cast was originally comprised of students transitioned from college to the show. They deserve credit for taking the idea and launching it successfully but it was clear that this was a college sketch troupe.

At some point, the old cast went to form a patreon-funded sketch troupe independent of the TV station and there was a nationwide casting call that drew in professional actors to the show. The show now has a new level of polish and a universality (the original cast relied on inside jokes) that takes the concept to a new level.

Animaniacs (Hulu)-I grew up on this show and it personifies the 1990s for me. As a result, it’s a bit jarring to see this show updated to have Dot reference having a crush on Chris Pine and having the theme song discuss being pronoun neutral, but I’m no purist. Rebooting a good thing doesn’t ruin the original and the show does a pretty darn good job of keeping the spirit of the original in tact. It’s a little disappointing to see the lack of Slappy the Squirrel, Rita and Runt or the Goodfeathers. It’s interesting that those sketches were based on then-recent hit films (Goodfellas, Rain Man) but those films have survived the test of time and one would hope they’d do some of their long-storied rejected characters.

One thing I can appreciate is the way the animation supplements the comedy the way Mad Magazine or Futurama does. Everything from Easter egg gags in the background to the way faces are drawn to convey what we should expect from their personality sets the stage.

Bless the Harts (Fox)-I love this show. Each of the four main characters is extremely 

endearing and there’s been a lot of world building towards some of the lesser characters (the high-pitched Randy is becoming a favorite, the cheery news lady who’s mouth is glues into a smile like the Joker’s victims in the 1989 Batman, etc). The show is about a lower-class family in small town North Carolina features a waitress with modest aspirations to rise within her station, her sly mother (whose primary motivations in life are besting her rival Crystal Lynn, feeling young enough that she can flirt with construction workers, and pulling off semi-fraudulent schemes), her boyfriend (a trucker persona with a teddy bear persona underneath), and her dead panning daughter. It’s an extremely strong quartet of characters who exhibit great chemistry.  

Saved by the Bell (Peacock)-I’m not sure if this is needed past Saved by the Bell The College Years and The New Class. Let’s not act like this is the only sad attempt to revive the show. This show is a bit more woke but it’s also self-conscious about the limits of that wokeness. On paper, the show’s not bad but it’s far from the best teen comedy on the air right now  

Fargo (FX)-I’ve rarely seen organized crime justified so well through a work of fiction. Much of the television I’ve watched in the mob genre simply takes killing and mob violence as a necessity but this show portrays it in pragmatic economic terms. The show is a masterclass in visual storytelling and it shares the touch of Joel and Ethan Coen of a fascination with the quirky sides of dark characters.  

We Are the Champions (Netflix)-For a long time, I’ve been fascinated with some of the world’s craziest sports and have even played underwater hockey myself. This is a documentary-style TV show that’s heartwarming, revels in the bizarre, and tells a consistent narrative.

Finding Dory (2016) Review

For its grandiose reputation as a creative mecca, even Pixar has been unable to resist the Faustian bargain of a sequel every now and then. While Ellen DeGeneres' popularity and the Best Picture Oscar nomination for "Toy Story 3" made a sequel inevitable, it shouldn't be discounted that Dory (DeGeneres) was deservedly a breakout character in her own right when she debuted thirteen years ago as Marlon's (Albert Brooks) memory-addled sidekick. The circuitous dialogue resulting from Dory's short-term memory loss makes for the kind of back-and- forth of an updated Abbott and Costello routine. Similarly, Dory's chipper attitude in the face of her (presupposed) inability to accomplish anything outside a 30-second window makes her a spunky can-do everyman.

The challenge coming for "Finding Dory" is similar to nearly every TV spin-off from Gomer Pyle to Joey: Can a comic relief character carry his or her own storyline? In this case, yes: It turns out there's a lot of depth to Dory when you factor in the potential that her memory could resurface and, indeed, that's the route we go down.

Dory begins to experience flashbacks that take her, Nemo, and a reluctant Marlon (taking each other for granted is a theme here) all the way to a Seaworld-like aquarium in California where Dory, Nemo, and Marlin find themselves in and out of various rooms and fish tanks. Lack of opposable limbs or bodies larger than three inches be damned, this is the Pixar universe and pesky human contraptions like doors are no match for you if you have determination and some crafty friends to help. These include a beluga whale (Ty Burrell) with echolocation, a near-sighted whale shark (Kaitlin Olson), and a curmudgeon of an octopus whose congruence with voice actor Ed O'Neill's screen persona makes him the film's breakout character.

If you're someone with a deep-seated love for aquariums and Jacques Cousteau like me, there's an enchantment in the animation that you would never get from the renderings of toys, ants, superheroes, or dystopian garbage piles that Pixar has previously done. There's also the added bonus of the biological accuracy and the clever ways in which these traits are ingrained in their characters. Yes, octopi could can change color and have dangerous levels of dexterity. Do not let them near your steering wheel.

High-quality animated flicks typically come with moral parables and the original one here is the way that people with disabilities can contribute to society and are capable of surprise. Although Dory couldn't really navigate the freeways of California, it all feels surprisingly organic here.

As far as sequels go, "Finding Dory" makes its case well as unique and fresh enough to justify its existence.

Every Film I've seen in 2015 Ranked:16-30 (Part II)

The Bottom Half of my 2015 Cinematic Viewing (The Better Half):

16. Bridge of Spies dir. Stephen Spielberg, starring Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Scott Shepherd, Sebastian Koch, Alan Alda-A visually beautiful film and a nice compliment to Spielberg’s filmography. I’m happy with this film earning a Best Picture nomination as it was an interesting contrast to the other seven choices and this is superior to that subgenre of bland period piece that is made to win these kinds of awards (looking at you “The Queen”). That said, I felt like knocking it down a few notches because the historic character seemed tweaked a bit to fit the standard Tom Hanks persona so it wasn’t as much of an acting challenge. I also feel like the film could have been more kinetic even though the film’s fans say that is a complaint of the ADD generation.

17. Ant Man, co-written by Edgar Wright, starring Paul Rudd, Corey Stoll, Michael Douglas, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Pena, Bobby Cannavale, w/small doses of Judy Greer-I’ve pretty much reached my saturation point with superhero films but you can’t deny the originality about a superhero who goes microscopic. Some of the stuff (i.e. “I’m in a tight spot, time to go subatomic!”) seemingly comes straight out of a 1950’s B-movie (or at least the version that was gently parodied on that one episode of “Star Trek Voyager”), but hey, the film has a lot of built-in novelty with the special effects and action scenes. There’s a fair amount of going through the motions with the action scenes but the principals are game enough to carry the material and, hello, microscopic action scenes!

18. Jurassic World, dir. Colin Trevorrow, prod. Steven Spielberg, starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent Denofrio, Irrfran Khan, Jake Johnson, Lauren Lapkus-Was I wrong in expecting a Spielberg-produced film to have more of a pro-nature leaning? Spielberg’s past films that featured monstrous animals (i.e. the original “Jurassic Park”, “Jaws”, the Spielberg-produced “Super 8”) never really posit the beast as the villain but rather uses them as a metaphor for fear of the unknown. But Jurassic World’s baddie is cartoonishly amoral and it’s a mildly disturbing creative direction to take the series. Other than that, I didn’t find the kids as annoying as most critics did, I liked Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s chemistry, and Lauren Lapkus and Jake Johnson played admirable comic relief. The Lapkus-Johnson non-romance (she has a boyfriend, ouch! oh wait, there's an awkward hug, awww) is the best lampshading of romantic conventions I’ve seen from a film in a while.

19. Pitch Perfect 2 dir. Elizabeth Banks, starring Anna Kendrick, Brittany Snow, Skyler Austin, Rebel Wilson, Hailee Steinfeld, Katey Segal, Adam Devine, Keegan-Michael Key- Not a bad film. Points are docked for originality, of course, but as sequels go, it fulfills its destiny pretty well by knowing the original’s sweet spots and expanding upon them. Plot credibility, of course, flies out the window here to keep the cast in tact: A senior intentionally flunks three times just to stay in an a capella group, somehow the guy who ditched the group to sing back-up for John Mayer is back, etc.

20. Chappie, dir. Neill Blokamp, starring Dev Patel, Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver and the voice of Sharlito Copely-Not sure why the critics are hating on Blokamp here, but I found this to possess that same kind of regional cinema charm as District 9. It’s a moderately thought-provoking sci-fi concept about whether one can truly become sentient and if it falls short of answering that question, it’s because there really isn’t a satisfactory answer anyway (I’ve always  had the same complaint of Data on “Star Trek: TNG”). The film has some wickedly funny moments that are funnier than the film has any right to be and, for me at least, it worked.

21. Home, voiced by Rhianna, Jim Parsons, Steve Martin-These three were so adorable as an odd triplet of sorts on the press rounds that I gave in and watched this on Netflix. It’s about as good or as bad as you’d expect: A passable level of charm, some multi-level humor, and mildly impressive visuals.

22. No Way Out, starring Owen Wilson, Lake Bell, Pierce Brosnan-Times really have changed that critics and the vocal subset of movie goers who voice their opinions online no longer tolerate anything that’s politically incorrect. Hey, as long as you don’t retroactively move to revoke the Best Picture nomination for “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”, I’m ok with highlighting the faults of something this ridiculous. At the same time, this was a year in which I saw a lot of politically correct films that are terrible in other ways, so this film is still pretty far from the bottom. It’s actually a narratively interesting film in the manner of Alfonso Cuaron’s “Children of Men” or “Gravity” in which the outside world is painted through the periphery of a single character’s journey. Also, the action is pretty intense in a good way.

23. McFarland USA, starring Kevin Costner, Maria Bello, Carlos Pratt-A sincere and well-shot film but one that’s ultimately forgettable. That it was released in cinema’s graveyard season (January-April) is a good indication that it wasn’t particularly good but I had to see it for myself because I was an avid cross-country runner in high school. The efforts by the film to turn cross-country into an action sport come off more like Terrence Malick than an ESPN-driven style and (while there’s merit in the former), perhaps the latter might have made the film a bit more memorable. Marginally worth watching if you run. Oh and there are white people and Hispanics getting along and learning about each other's cultures (in other words, a very tacked-on atttempt at thematic racial harmony).

24. Terminator: Genysis, starring  Arnold Schwarzenegger, Emilia Clarke, Courtney Jai, Jason Clarke, JK Simmons-Although I didn’t experience Terminator until I was in my 20s, this was my most anticipated film of the summer. Even the bad reviews couldn’t steer me away because the franchise has such a great pedigree (intricate time travel scenarios, cat-and-mouse games with an indestructible robot, etc) but somehow the film found a way to mangle a can’t-lose situation. How? By attempting to tie into the plot continuity of the series while simultaneously erasing everything that came before it. I could listen to a defense of whether the new storyline makes sense but the film’s reasoning is just surface-level dumb. This is one of those situations where the only way to salvage a chance at an enjoyable viewing experience is to turn your brain off which is shame considering this is such a thought-provoking series.

25. Hunger Games IV: Mocking Jay Part II dir. by someone other than Gary Ross, starring Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Helmsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Julianne Moore, Donald Sutherland, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Woody Harrelson-To be fair, I went into the film (more like dragged) thinking it should be ashamed of its existence. Aside from the fact that splitting up the last part of the trilogy strikes me as the low road, The Hunger Games seems like a perfectly self-contained story. One could make the argument that Katniss and her empty gaze as she looks out the train towards an uncertain future is a poignant way to end a serviceable adaptation of a very good book. Why do we need to know all the details of what comes next? I still more or less maintain that the film would have been better off not existing, but if it HAD to exist, it wasn’t terrible (only moderately disappointing) but better stories have been told about dystopic politics. The special effects were certainly innovative.

26.  Rikki and the Flash, dir. Jonathan Demme, starring Meryl Streep, Mamie Gummer, Kevin Kline, Audra McDonald, Rick Springfield-I still haven’t forgiven Demme for scaring the hell out of me when I watched ”Silence of the Lambs” as a kid. I’ve enjoyed some of his films since, but his problem is the opposite here: This film is completely and utterly boring. Demme uses a similar style to 2008 critical hit “Rachel Getting Married” but repeating the framework of the last film verbatim is like trying to use the same magic trick twice on the same audience: It doesn’t feel like this film has anything to say that hasn’t been said more profoundly with Jenny Lumet’s screenplay in RGM.

27. Staten Island Summer, written by Colin Jost, starring Graham Williams, Zach Perlman, Ashley Johnson, Bobby Moynihan, Cecily Strong, Mike O’Brien-You would think that the increased prestige of the home market that people would be doing innovative things with direct-to-video movies. So far, the stuff I’ve watched (I saw Coffeetown in 2013, Camp Takota in 2014, and this) has been equivalent to the stuff you’d see in the $3 bin at Target. In other words, the new class of  direct-to-video movies seems about a s good as the old class of direct-to-video films. Written by that SNL Weekend Update anchor who has been roundly criticized for lacking in personality, this film isn’t much of a step up for him. It aims low (which isn’t a good thing) and moderately delivers on that low mark, but considering the degree of difficulty is so low to start with, why bother?

28. Tomorrowland, dir. Brad Bird, starring Britt Robertson, George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Raffey Cassidy-One of my goals in writing about film is to argue that the state of moviedom would be better if we collectively acknowledged that George Clooney is overplayed. And yet, I am guilty of occasionally buying a ticket to a George Clooney film on my own volition because there’s a catch to trying to avoid a star you don’t like: The man works with some of the best directors in Hollywood in projects so promising, that even his unwanted presence can’t bring down a film to the point where I wouldn’t want to see it. The premise of a film about the future based on the world’s fair exhibits with Brad Bird at the helm seemed too good to resist, but I wish I made more effort. This is an incoherent mess with simultaneously little and too much interest in investing the viewer in what little coherence there is. And did I mention that the main relationship is with a grown man and his unrequited love for a robot who still looks nine years old?

29. San Andreas, starring Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Alexandria Daddario, Ioan Gruffudd, Hugo Johnstone-Burt, Paul Giamatti-This falls to the bottom of the list because the film’s reason for existence is just so paper thin. I might have been satisfied if the film didn’t pretend it was about anything more than things going kaboom, but devoting precious minutes to a B-plot in which Paul Giamatti plays a doctor of geology trying to exposition away something that makes no sense is a ridiculous gambit to try to turn exposition into meaningful drama. It would be the equivalent of adding a dramatic subplot to "The Fast and Furious" involving the guy who designed the fuel mix. Not that the A-plot has any meaningful characterization. I’m thrilled to see Alexandra Daddario and Carla Gugino get gainful employment in movies but their chemistry with Dwayne Johnson is utterly unconvincing as a nuclear family. The only way I’d make an exception for a film this shallow is if it were directed by Roland Emmerich whose entire skill set as a director is restricted to blowing up cities in style. I can marginally tolerate Emmerich exploiting the same cinematic blueprint in marginally different scenarios but filmdom doesn’t have room for Emmerich and a no-name emulating Emmerich’s style.

30. Pixels, dir. by some guy who basically did whatever Adam Sandler told him to do, starring Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Michelle Monaghan, Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage-I was intrigued by the video game concept but silly me for not taking into account the squandering of a good thing by the black hole known as Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Production Company. Twenty years after his departure from SNL, Sandler’s comic career is a prime example of what happens to a comic if a lack of studio interference and a steady (but not great) box office following inhibits a comic’s growth. I would argue that Sandler’s 8-year-old-in-a-grown-man’s-body shtick never held that much appeal but the rest of the public seemed to like him when he first broke out and even those supporters now agree his star wattage seems to be fading.

More Random Trivia Items

Whenever I hear some interesting about a film, I often add it to the trivia section on IMDB. Over the years, I've accumulated quite a few contributions and since they are my own property, I occasionally post a few here. Give a thumbs up if you find any interesting:
 
Review

• The season finale to the first season was shot with the intention that the show would not be renewed.
• Andy Daly said in a Reddit AMA that the writers decided that Forest should get divorced early on so he could go on sex adventures.

Back to the Future II

• The motivation for writing a scene with an automatically hydrating oven in the future was due to product placement needs with Pizza Hut's sponsorship.
  Pizza Hut provided a professional food stylist and pizza kitchen to be at the set of the future McFly house to make hot, attractive pizzas for each take.
• The plot line of George McFly dying in 1985 was based entirely on Crispin Glover's refusal to do the sequel.
• Screenwriter Bob Gale was inspired to write science fiction by the George Powell version of The Time Machine that he watched as a kid and subsequently gobbled up a lot of time travel novels thereafter.
• One of the conceptions of the 2015 universe that didn't make it on screen because of the budget cuts was a sport called "Slam Ball" that would be played in an anti-gravity chamber and combine Jai Alai, handball, and roller derby.

The Brink

• Not only are the translations accurate when characters are speaking in Hebrew, Urdu, or German but the dialects are as well.
• The show was screened for Ex-President George HW Bush who is friends with Executive Producer  Jerry Weintraub 

School Daze

• Thanks to Columbia Pictures exec David Pickler, Spike Lee got final cut rights for the film which was pretty rare for any director at the time.
• "Straight and Nappy" was written by Spike Lee's father Bill Lee. His sister, Joie Lee, who would play a more prominent role in "Do the Right Thing" also got a small part in this film as well.
• Despite mixed reviews, the film cost $6.5 million to make and grossed $15 million making it one of Columbia Studio's most profitable films of 1988.
• To the degree that the film is considered a musical, it is the first studio-funded musical to be directed by an African-American. 

Key Largo

• In honor of its connection to Humphrey Bogart with this film, Key Largo, FL hosts a Humphrey Bogart film festival every year. 
• Rocco's character was modeled after Al Capone who retired to South Florida shortly after the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
• An urban legend has sprouted from a misquoted line of Rocco's dialogue that this film predicted the recount battle in the 2000 presidential election.
• Claire Trevor didn't want to do the singing scene and was tricked by the director, John Huston, into doing a take that ended up winning her an Oscar

X-Men (Cartoon Series)

• The voice actors were largely cast from the Toronto theater scene
• Fox initially had a lot of resistance to the cartoon series before it became a success. They felt that the target audiences, kids under 10, wouldn't be interested in a romantic love triangle between Cyclops, Jean, and Wolverine. They also thought kids wouldn't keep up with a show that was serialized
• Story editor and writer Eric Lewald liked the "Nightcrawler" episode best because he felt that the religious themes made the episode weightier than the network usually permitted
• Stan Lee was not creatively active with Marvel comics at the time the series was being produced so his involvement wasn't particularly big on the series. He gave some producers notes on the first thirteen episodes

The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 (2009 remake)

•  The production team worked closely with the MTA and was given access to the MTA control room for research
• The actor who plays Bashkim was an ex-convict, just released from prison, who was originally hired as a consultant for the film. 

Charlie Wilson's War

•  Charlie Wilson's aides in his Senate office were all beautiful well-endowed women nicknamed "Charlie's Angels." In real life, his chief aide, played by Amy Adams in the film, was often played by a man.
• Former New York City mayor and presidential candidate is referenced in the film. Rudy Guiliani was never able to find enough evidence that Wilson had done cocaine, though Wilson hasn't flatly denied it either.
• In addition to the deviant lifestyle being portrayed on screen, Charlie Wilson also had a DUI Hit-and-Run Charge outside Georgetown on the Key Bridge. If indicted, he would have been far less successful in securing money for his project in Afghanistan, but thankfully he got away. The History Channel documentary about his life suggests that he drank that night and other nights to ease the pain he felt for the Afghan people.

Animation Round-Up: The Awesomes, BoJack Horseman, Fugget About It

Small disclaimer here: Not everything on my blog is created equally. Entries vary by how much thought into them, how confident I felt about my analytical and putting-words-together skills, and the simple matter of time constraints. In other words, I'm not entirely sure this entry measures up to my other ones and I especially am conscious of this because I told several AV Club commenters who I met in real-life (along w/my boss at my retail job) to check out my blog, and I advise them all (as well as potential employers) to skip to the next entry if they want to see me supremely pwn the blogosphere with my critical mastery. At the same time, I did go through the trouble of putting some words down and I view this blog as a sketchpad for my critical thoughts. Why delete them?



BoJack Horseman

The rap from several reviews I've read on this show is that it fits in more with the height of the Adult Swim reign of animation and not the intelligent cartoons of today like "American Dad" or "Archer" (I’d insert Bob’s Burgers in here except I personally don’t agree with the assessment of the show as amazing).

The show stars Will Arnett as a washed-up actor (who also happens to be a horse, more on that later. I promise) 20 years after his heyday (or should I have gone with hay day for the easy pun?) as the star of a TGIF-like sitcom.

"BoJack Horseman" suffers from a slow start out of the gate with a couple substandard episodes and that is generally all the time a critic can give a show in a TVscape as crowded as this one.

The pilot episode, heavy with exposition (which is understandable), zeroes in on protagonist BoJack Horseman before all the character development kicks in and he's as uninteresting as a seemingly irredeemable jerk can be. The jokes and pacing are somewhat awkward here.

The second episode tries to mine humor out of a taboo topic: Political correctness and how we regard the military as heroes and not only fails. When handled well (See "30 Rock") something like this kills but it just paints BoJack as somewhat of a buzzkill a la one of the Crane brothers (from the Frasier era, NOT Cheers) at a Tiki bar (or pick whatever plebian setting you want to complete this analogy).

The show's primary gimmick-- anthropomorphicizing (I wrestled spell check for a while on that one) the characters in subtly clever ways and mixing them into the human world-- is enough to pique one's interest during the early episodes but if one quits the series early, that's all they'll find: An only occasionally funny Hollywood satire that's been done before.

"BoJack Horseman" isn't particularly easy to get into, but a few episodes in, the show's pathos and interesting character dynamics shines through. Like Will Arnett's previous work, "Arrested Development," the show features characters who aim to be dynamic and get out of their ruts in life. Unlike "Arrested Development" however, the show dares to give them, and us hope, at actual improvement and toys around with the idea of whether the characters are going anywhere at all. Either way, there's a definite investment to the characters by season's end that gives the show life.

The satire also starts getting sharper once the hidden jokes and the parallels to ABC's TGIF line-up of the 1990's start to reveal themselves. People might not notice on first viewing how spot-on "Horsing Around" gets.

The character dynamics also offer a lot. Mr. Peanut Butter (another TV has-been who happens to be a dog and is a great people pleaser) as a mirror universe version of BoJack and the two have an odd rivalry that occasionally bleeds into friendship.

Awesomes:
The latest to get in on the superhero parody trend is Seth Meyers who developed this show during his days in the writer’s room of SNL. Apparently, he still has room for the show in a busy schedule that has included running the SNL writer’s room and launching his own talk show in the last 12 months.

In the superhero universe of “The Awesome”, the world is overwrought with superheroes who are heavily regulated by a bureaucracy that subdivides superheroes into classes. At the bottom of the barrel class is our mild-mannered hero Prock (Meyers) who compensates for his lack of an effective superpowers through intelligence (Prock stands for Professor Doctor). When Prock's dad, a highly revered God-like superhero, announces his retirement, Prock begs him to take over but must build a team from scratch.                        

The superhero spoof genre is becoming pervasive enough that it's hard not to notice overlap between any number of movies or TV shows including "Sky High", "Mystery Men" and "The Incredibles." At the same time, the more superhero stories pervade our TVs and movie screens, the more room there is for entries in the superhero spoof subgenre to find their niche.

The show is capable at times of being clever which is what's to be expected from a self-professed comic book geek and SNL head writer.

The problem is generally that many of the characters are weak and uninteresting and those characters take up a lot of the screen time. Taran Killam plays a one-note redneck speedster, Keenan Thompson plays a mama's boy who sounds like Kenan Thompson always does, Rashida Jones is little more than the girl-next-door who makes the protagonist lovesick, and Bobby Lee plays a boy who turns into sumo wrestler. His character being the kid on the team seems like it has some potential to be any sort of character dynamic but it's quickly dropped (ed. note: I wrote this review before the Sumo-centric episode) .

Ike Barinholtz is moderately potential-filled as the sidekick, and a lot of the more interesting characters come from outside the superhero team: Bill Hader as supervillain Malocchio and Josh Meyers as rival Prock..


Interestingly enough, a couple of SNL's writers Emily Spivey and Paula Pell voice characters here. Pell's character is equally one-note with a moderately gross angle about an old woman being sexy and Spivey's character, a super-secretary of sorts with a charming Southern accent named concierge, is the kind of character who feels like she belongs in a more well-rounded cast.

The second season takes a few more risks and branches out in a few more directions. So far, none of the episodes have left any lasting scars like the episode last season in which Barinholtz's muscleman is dragged into a paternity suit with an alien race and it's revealed he has a thing for houseplan----oh God, I don't want to talk about it anymore (This episode made the 26 worst of the 2013-2014 season list by The AV Club).   The funniest running gag to date is Rashida Jones' Hotwire coming back to life in disguise and awkwardly attempting "Dudespeak" around former love interest Prock.

While the show is moderately watchable, it still has to work extra hard to convince us it's not just something that the "Saturday Night Live" cast threw together between the Wednesday night read-through and Friday's rehearsal.

Fugget About It

A hitman for the mob goes into witness protection and hides out with his family in Regina, Saskatchewan. The show gets down and squicky in a way that cartoons are allowed to get away with these days: Blood and guts usually feels more comic in animated form, although is it really necessary? The show is watchable and has its moments but the show suffers heavily from being in a genre where it's hard to differentiate oneself from the many imitators that have come before it.

Whereas "The Awesomes" gets away with genre humor (or rather genre parody humor) because the thing being parodied is continuing to evolve and comprise an increasingly large share of the cinemascape, the mob parody film has been done to death.

From "Analyze This" (or for that matter, everything Robert De Niro has done since "The Score") to "Kiss Me Kate" (I'm referring to the play, although I believe there's a movie or three?) to "Bullets Over Broadway" (once a movie, now a Broadway play, will probably get a movie eventually), mafia parodies are as old as time.

While the show even has some pretty ambitious plots (the elder daughter joins a menomite clan in one, the Queen of England accidentally comes to Jimmy's house, etc.) and delivers on them with satisfying comic execution but with a genre like this, the show falls well into the "comfort food" category of viewing.

2012 Animation Round-Up: Madagascar III, Wreck-It-Ralph and Internal Consistency

I know it sounds silly to say I want more realism from a film about four talking zoo animals, but Madagascar III was so far removed from any sense of internal logic or consistency that it was just plain stupid.

One might think that internal logic might not matter in a cartoon like the Madagascar series but the first Madagascar was charming because it treated hypothetical questions realistically. A thoughtfully built-out isn't trivial: It's what separates a Saturday Morning Cartoon from a smart animated film that appeals to an adult. Case in point: In the animated X-Men series, Rogue would fly and punch through walls. In The Incredibles, Mr. Incredible would have to deal with a potential lawsuit whenever he punched a wall and his superfast son has to deal with making for an even playing field when he participates in the school track team.

Very little about the first Madagascar falls out of line with reality. They even go so far as to explain why the animals can't talk: When the quartet is nearly apprehended at Grand Central Station and Alex (the lion) tries to reason with the crowd but his speaking comes out as roaring. Likewise, if we could hear the internal monologue of a lion, it would likely be a diva from all the attention it was getting. Similarly, a giraffe would naturally feel awkward and a little scared of the world with his head dangling high above the ground on top of a very thin neck. I'm not sure why a zebra would be so Chris Rockish but what matters is he's consistently Chris Rockish. This all serves the film's fish-out-of-water angle well because when they get stranded in Madagascar and they see their new environment as zoo animals would. 

The third Madagascar got so ridiculous, I eventually tuned its attempts at making sense  like white noise" We have the animals deciding to swim halfway across the planet, a tiger who can jump through a wedding ring, the circus now being run by chimpanzees and selling out to a human audience, and a lion suddenly learning the trapeze.

None of the new plot developments are particularly additive. In one, Sasha Baron Cohen's lemur monkey falls madly in love with a big bear (which by the way, is kind of gross) and the two go to the Vatican to kiss the pope's hand and get his blessing. What?! I'm not sure where the pope stands on monkey-bear unions but at least the first and second installments had a clearly spelled out humans-animals relationship.

The movie also feels rushed. It wasn't just the actual running time of 93 minutes, but the storyline weaved its way from one plot point to another at right angles with no transition. The gang decides to go to Monte Carlo and are suddenly there one scene later. One scene after that, they're being chased out of Monte Carlo and onto the next adventure. There's a weary Russian tiger played by Bryan Cranston who warns against cliches and nearly quits the circus but is talked out of it in 30 seconds by Alex. What do you call a sudden 180 reversal like that again? Oh yes, it's a cliche.

This was such a shame because while neither of the two previous Madagascar installments were groundbreaking, they were both consistently entertaining films.

On the other end of the spectrum is the other animated film I saw this past year in Wreck-It Ralph which borrows heavily from the early days of NES and arcade games from that era.

The film already has a lot going for it before we even get to the actual story: The premise of a video game villain wanting to be a hero is highly clever and the setting promises a  nostalgic trip for anyone who grew up on Nintendo.

Most importantly, the film takes a shaky premise that video game characters are sentient, and sketches out all the hypotheticals out thoroughly. The video game characters reside at an arcade and, due to the fact that all the games are plugged in through the same power strip, they're allowed to leave their games and visit other video game universes (one video game whose objective is serving of root beer serves as a popular gathering spot) after the arcade closes. The biggest fear among the characters are their games being put out of commission which would spell out an end to existence. Therefore, they have to play out their assigned roles during arcade hours, whether hero or villain, or else the arcade player will complain about the game malfunctioning and the game will be shut down.

As for the film, Wreck-It-Ralph delivers thoroughly and I highly recommend it. It's got heart, it's interesting, and the visuals are wonderful. My only two complaints are 1) The cybugs are way too scary for a kid's movie. The 9-year-old version of me would have had nightmares for weeks and the current version of me found them a bit creepy and unsettling even if I was nightmare-free. 2) Jack McBrayer is a bit miscast as the hero character and even more miscast as a suitor to the commando played by Jane Lynch. Can you imagine Kenneth the Page and Sue Sylvester hooking up  with each other in any universe?

American Dad voices

Blog News: I'm currently facing the conundrum of how to continue to pour my best efforts towards writing and support multiple endeavors. This blog does not pay (you can always fix that by donating or simply clicking on my examiner and gunaxin links where I do get paid per page view, but I've near given up on that) nor does it get the support in eyeballs to justify great efforts. At the same time, it is my blog and one of the first points of entry to familiarize someone with my work. If someone goes to this URL (which is on my business card) and sees a poorly-written entry at the top, he might not want to look further, which requires a demanding amount of work to proof and edit pieces. As a solution, I will try to be more bloggy and casual and borrow message board postings of mine to shorten the amount of effort. Thanks for those of you who do read (if you're out there, say hi). Onto the show

 I just started thinking about how difficult it must be for a cast to continue to find distinct sounding timbres every week to create new voices. I can't imagine I could do more than say 10 voices in me. When you have Roger doing an Al Pacino impression, that's an extra layer of depth to just doing an Al Pacino impression, for example, cause you have to filter it through Paul Lyde and come up with a rough approximation for how well Paul Lynde can cover Al Pacino.


Two of the smaller parts were played pretty excellently and added quite a bit. The guy who made the pizza begal (Jonah or Judah, I believe) was a unique creation as a nebbish tough man. Additionally, the drugged-out homeless guy added humor through distinction. He sounded like a cross between the two perverts in the Family Guy neighborhood (the old guy who preys on Chris and the guy with the earring who goes "oh no") but he was in a slightly higher ranger than the old guy and seemed a little more enthusiastic. It was a lesson in how you can create an interesting sounding voice with just a few minor tweaks.






If you listen really closely you can hear the occasional lapse. For me, there were three things that were pretty off to me from the last episode "Mo Money, More Problems":
1. The woman who said "This was my elbow" sounded kind of like a man.
2. The woman at the clinic who called Stan Rudy Huxtable sounded pretty much like Hailey. Also, she was black which isn't as big of a deal is that there was no differentiation between her and Hailey.
3. The women at the grocery store who Stan sold samples from sounded different when she went out to the parking lot than before. She also seemed entirely unenthusiastic about having Stan sample her food. She seemed near catatonic about it and I thought that was the character's little moment of humor: she's like a lot of grocery employees who care very little. Then, in the next scene she was passionate and aggressive.

Capitol Critters

Anthony Scibelli on Splitsider.com had a particularly inspired article about the early stages of prime time cartoons. Apparently, the success of the Simpsons sent networks in a rush to develop cartoons for the prime-time landscape in the early 1990's but it took break away tonally from children's shows. As a result, the first batch of prime time children's shows occupied an awkward middle ground between preachy Disneyesqe and the animated shows of today which are indistinguishable from live action TV shows in quality and maturity.

I just watched several episodes of Capitol Critters which first aired in 1992. Five minutes into the show, the protagonist's family is brutally murdered by fumigators which is very jarring. In his article, Scibelli seems equally jarred by this:

"It opens with what may be the most horrific scene I've ever witnessed in a cartoon. The series stars a young mouse named Max, voiced by a young Neil Patrick Harris, who lives on a Nebraska farm with his parents, grandfather and what appears to be about four or five brothers and sisters. After spending a day gathering corn, Max returns home to find an exterminator truck parked out front."

To be fair, Finding Nemo opens with one such tragedy and Bambi has a more tear-jerking scene. Unlike those two films, "Capitol Critters" makes the mistake of treating this opening passage relatively casually. The little guy lost his entire
family yesterday and it's treated as just a typical first act designed to move the plot along and explain Max's move to D.C. For comparison's sake, imagine how jarring it would be if a show with a similar premise, "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air", described Will's mom being killed and raped.

One of the show's strengths, to me, was the ensemble. None of the characters (with the partial exception of Jammet) were overly bland.

1. Max's cousin, Berkley, is a hippie mouse who calls everyone fascist. She has the least screen time of the five main characters on the show, yet the writers impressively mold her into a fully formed satire of the kinds of socially-conscious people I see in D.C. all the time (I live less then a third of a mile from the nation's capitol, I should know).
2. Trixie is a landlord and maternal figure of sorts with a Jersey-accent who gets some choice lines. Her vague resemblance to some regional New York/New Jersey/Boston stereotype (she'd fit in with the ladies from the SNL sketch "Good Morning Bronx")that somehow worked for me.
3. Trixie's son, Jammet, is the most broadly drawn character. Scibelli describes him as "streetwise" (because of his idiosyncratic speech patterns? he doesn't exactly sound like he's from the hood). Mostly, he's the bad influence on innocent Max. The group troublemaker, who inexplicably remains friends with the people who's plots he foils (think Shake in "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" or Dr. Smith in "Lost in Space"), is a long-standing sitcom staple that I'm a sucker for.
4. Lastly, there's the particularly inspired invention of Muggles. Voiced by Bobcat Goldwaith (who has a voice suited for comedy like no one else), Muggles is a former lab rat (or is he a mouse? he doesn't look like Jammet and Trixie) who still has the after effects of countless experiments. He goes on an LSD trip in one episode and in another he turns into the Manchurian Candidate. He also possesses an inordinate amount of knowledge like Chuck (from "Chuck") and regularly explodes like a popcorn kernel.

Like a kid's show, the episodes have moral themes and teach a lesson. One episode is about the danger of drugs while another is about cultural acceptance and so on and so forth. This didn't strike me as cleverly conceived satire so much as the remnants of a children's show which the art form hadn't yet transitioned out of.

To make a show about mice and rats in the White House be an effective satire about politics presented a lot of challenges anyway. The mice are primarily interacting with each other and have little to do with the lawmakers. If you wanted to overthink the premise, you might ask why Berkley is invested in the happenings in the White House when the legislators make laws that probably don't affect the lives of mice and if so, only inadvertantly. The show might have been better if there was something along the lines of a separate mouse congress.

When they get the mice interacting with the human world, it creates a few moments of effective satire. In one episode, Max gets stuck in the briefcase of a congressman, and he learns the truth about bribery in Washington. The show can also be kind of cute when it asks us to look at things from a mouse's perspective, although that's
what most Disney cartoons of that genre do.

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Oscar win for Milk's Screenplay- Deserved?

Good News: I've been published at TopTenz.net again.
Also check out this article on Movie Remakes

The Oscar for best original screenplay is a measure of pure creativity. Ideally, the director's vision, the special effects, or whether the actors can elevate the material has nothing to do with the award. Or, sometimes, politics.

This brings me to a particular Academy Award choice I feel like nitpicking on today.

Milk won an Oscar for best original screenplay in 2009. It was written by Dustin Lance Black. Black, a former Mormon, has become a well-respected artistic figure and activist in the gay and lesbian community since his win.

I wondered out loud the last time I saw Milk if there was anything particularly notable about Milk's screenplay that endeared it towards a best screenplay win. It seems equally as likely to me that the screenplay win for Milk was just a reaction to proposition 8 (controvoursey took place earlier that year) and a way for the Academy to voice their support of gay rights.

I like to think of the screenplay winners as something that film students would be assigned to read in class as examples of great running. I see that with most of the other recent winners. Almost Famous is a humorous story with such a strong personal touch that it doesn't feel like it could be written by anyone but its author (Cameron Crowe). Gosford Park demonstrates intricacy in tying together the arcs of various characters and veers away from cheap imitation. Lost in Translation has a very strong grasp of mundane human behavior. A meaningful relationship is weaved together from suddle moments and silences. Eternal Sunshine , like Kaufman's other films, navigates narrative in a new mobius loop of a story. Little Miss Sunshine creates a very quirky atmosphere for its main troupe of six characters while providing a contrast to a world that's unforgiving of tardiness or other forms of eccentricity.

I'm not sure where Milk falls into anything notable. It just seems like a run-of-the-mill biopic elevated by good performances. It also came along at the right place and time to be notable.

There's hardly anything in the story that isn't predictable. The fact that he fails in his personal relationships as he becomes famous is pretty much what you'd expect of nearly every movie character or famous person who simply has larger and larger chunks of his time being taken by the masses he serves.

Just ask yourself: If you could only get your hands on one original screenplay, would it be? I think there's little doubt in my mind that Wall-E
is the remarkable feat in creativity. To be able to convey romance in the bleeps and bloops of robots in a post-apocolyptic landscape and to write a first act almost entirely devoid of dialogue, that's something. The debate over the best Pixar film is usually a long one, but consider that Wall-E was the Pixar film that made fans call for an end to ghettoization of animated films at the Oscars. It is also the primary reason (along with Dark Knight) that we have 10 films for Best Picture (a number that has since been reduced).

I also think In Bruges had a stylized language and a strong sense of identity that would have also made it a worthy choice.

Related Article: My picks for best films of 2008

How do I honestly look at the 1990's?

In order to make my top 100 List or for any discussion on films in the 1990's period, it's near impossible to look at that decade with any objectivity and I thought it was worth discussing that because we all are children of one decade or another, aren't we?

The 90's was when I grew up. My movie diet during the 90's was a very different regiment than it is now.

One of the very first films I fell in love with was "Batman Forever" which has been eloquently torn apart all over the internet since. It's now remembered as the omen before the storm that was "Batman and Robin." While the performances of Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones would seem like overacting to adult eyes, they were larger-than-life to my 11-year old eyes. "Batman Returns" was too scary and dark for me but "Batman Forever" was bright and colorful and the violence was playful rather than just violent. Of course, if you're desensitized to violence, you would be dissapointed. Still, I can't say "Batman Forever" wasn't one of the best moviegoing experiences of my life.

I remember watching "Home Alone" and loving it, but it was hard to retain that love after watching it at least 10 times. Watching Home Alone was the go-to activity for any summer camp on a rainy day or any teacher without a lesson plan.

I had the same experience with the "The Lion King" which I remember watching it 3 times in one day in school. My homeroom teacher, my science teacher (same as my homeroom teacher) and my drama teacher all had their classes watch the same film. Talk about overload. Then a month later, I went to visit my aunt and uncle whose 2-year old daughter watched that movie all the time. When they took us on a big yacht trip, we got so seasick and had to be put down in the galley. To take our mind off our seasickness, my aunt put in a movie but the only thing they had was the Lion King, so it was the worst thing ever. I just wanted to throw up from seasickness and to make it worse, I was watching this film, I had recently watched 3 times and had practically memorized the Lion King by then.

I also grew up thinking all the great films involved sports and dogs. "Oliver and Company" "Homeward Bound" "All Dogs Go to Heaven" were some of my early movie-going experiences. I don't know if this is still the case today with kids' films but "Cool Runnings" "Iron Will" "Sandlot" "League of their Own" "Rookie of the Year" "The Air Up There" and "Mighty Ducks" were among the defining films of my childhood and they all revolved around sports.

If there were great films going on at the time like "Crying Game" "In the Name of the Father" "Howard's End" or "Ed Wood", I was pretty unaware of them and watching them in retrospect isn't the same as being there in the moment. It's true that argument applies to any film before the 90's too, but there's much more distance from a classic film so that we appreciate it as a classic. 90's films are still looked at through the same paradigm as films of the 00's which I'm much more familiar with.


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Archer: How to do a parody/live cast

Archer has had such a strong sophomore season that it's gaining notice as one of the strongest comedies of the 2nd half of the 2010-2011 TV season.

The show isn't just another spy parody but a first-rate spy parody. The key to the show is that the characters are uniquely idiosyncratic creations. They don't really fall consistently toward the stereotypes that they're targeting.

For example, let's compare Archer to James Bond which is what most spy parodies are aiming at:

James Bond is a ladies man. Archer sleeps around a lot as well but he doesn't have any standards, he's completely willing to pay for sex and often confuses his girlfriends and paid escorts for one another. He also pays consequences for sleeping around (paying child support, risk of STD's, etc.) which is an avenue tbat everyone from SNLto Austin Powers has used.

However, Archer (H Jon Benjamin) wasn't created solely to parody James Bond. He has other idiosynchratic (and positively entertaining) habits that have absolutely nothing to do with James Bond: He's a spoiled child with severe issues to work out in his relationship with his mother.

His mother (Arrested Development's Jessica Walters) is the equivalent of M but there's added value: The repercussions of her past sexual exploits figure a lot into plots, she cuts corners to save costs, she has a rivalry with the neighbor.

Lana would be the equivalent of one of the more competent Bond girls. Because she's black (or mixed-race) and sassy, it's easy to compare her to Halle Berry's Jinx, but we could easily go with Moonraker's Holly Goodhead or Spy Who Loved Me's Triple X. Nonetheless, Lana is somewhat of a high-maintnence girlfriend and she's a bit catty with the other ladies of the office. Speaking of which....

Moneypenny's equivalent is a character (played by Judy Greer) who's changed her name from Carol to Cheryl to Karina over the course of the show because of a need to get noticed more. Reading this as a Bond parody again, the Moneypenny-Bond sexual tension is subverted by the fact that Moneypenny's equivalent is a very loose woman who's already slept with Archer multiple times before and it's not even that big of a deal to either of them. Reading this as more than a parody, Cheryl/Carol is also wierd in a way that's difficult to categorize: She's particularly vicious to HR rep Pam, she's borderline abusive to accountant Cyrill and sometimes gets overly excited. It all comes to full circle in the second season when we realize that Carol/Cheryl has spent time in an insane assylum.

The Q equivalent, who has been given considerably more screentime this season, is mad scientist Kreiger (Lucky Yates). It's exactly where you'd expect a parody to take Q. In one recent episode it was revealed that he was making clones of himself.

The other characters are equally complex and cooky: HR rep Pam is slightly condescending, has a big mouth, and is sexually undesirable. Accountant Cyrill, on the other hand, is very much a stud but is in sexohaulics anonymous (sexual insecurity figures into a lot of characters' backstories for some reason).

Because the characters are so rich, I was thinking that the show might be undervalued because it's in cartoon form which is less geared for deep characterization. Still, it might be just a little easier if these characters were attached to live actors.

Which is why, I thought I might theorize on who would play Archer if it were live:
Archer: Josh Hartnett, Mark Wahlberg, Ashton Kutcher, Adam Scott, Luke Wilson
Lana: Jennifer Garner, Jessica Alba, Mila Kunis
Cyrill: Rob Lowe, Topher Grace, Dean Cain, Will Ferrell, John Michael Higgins
Mallory: Jennifer Coolidge, Frances McDormand, Catherine O'Hara, Jane Curtin
Cheryl/Carroll: Molly Shannon, Cheri Oteri, Judy Greer (honestly, if I had to pick one person from the cast to play their voice part, I can't think of anyone else who could pull it off but Greer)
Pam: Alex Borstein, Drea de Matteo, Jennifer Coolidge
Krieger: Will Ferrell, Matt Bessar

15 Best TV shows in post-Seinfeld history

Here's a list I've been working on. Criteria is it must be half-hour format for a sitcom AND I bend the rules a little on when it first came out vs when seinfeld ended, along with best season. I also think about a show when it's at its peak:

1. Arrested Development (2003), S2 or S3
The show has been pretty evenly excellent. The levels of neuroses that the Bluth family is so complex and hillarious at every turn. Seinfeld was about nothing but it had a twisted way from getting to start to finish. Arrested Development has those same kind of disparate story lines that connect, but it has to work through it's own internal logic much more since it has such a complex web of characters (including one of the best arrays of guest stars ever produced over a three-year run). It also has heart (or a sort of satirical version of it). The best thing, however, is that repeat viewings never ever disappoint.

2. The Office (2005), S2
At its peak, The Office was the most relatable show on television and the humor of tension and awkwardness was so masterful. How many shows have you so engrossed in a moment of tension that you're yelling at the TV. The show declined a little as Jim and Pam's romance has become pedestrian, but the Office has wisely expanded its ensemble so that it has characters on the back burner it can throw at the fire to spice things up.

3. 30 Rock(2006) S2
On 30 Rock, Tina Fey writes comedy with such dexterity and precision, that scripts to her show should be used as textbooks to aspiring TV writers because she layers her scripts every kind of comedy imaginable: screwball comedy, anarchic comedy, satire, parody, character-based comedy, rapid-fire-blink-and-you-miss-it dialogue, straight-man-funny-man comedy, self-conscious comedy, etc. The key to the show is Tina's overworked head writer Liz Lemmon being the only basis for normality in this wonderful universe she's created that's ever so slightly off-center.


4. 3rd Rock from the Sun(1997) S1 (technically, this show overlapped with Seinfeld by a season or two).
3rd Rock from the Sun is one of those fish-out-of-water premises like The Beverly Hillbillies that when handled well never gets old. The Solomon family is a family of four in Middle America but they're also a team of aliens sent to Earth to learn more about it. Actors as talented as John Lithgow, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, and Jane Curtain sold the material too.

5. Newsradio (1995): S2 and S3
The best of the Manhattan-based nondescript workplace comedies that came out in the late 90's (Working, Caroline in the City, the Naked Truth, etc. are more examples). Phil Hartman, Andy Dick, Joe Rogan and Vikki Lewis created malleable comic characters that could be funny in any situation you threw them in. Dave Foley and Maura Tierny had a screwball comedy for the ages (not to mention the hilarious sexual tension that arose out of that single sort-of-date between Joe Rogan and Khandi Alexander's characters). Throw in Stephen Root as the least sensible boss ( yet somehow the most successful) and you've got quite a show.

6. Futurama(1999) S2
I think it's safe to say that Matt Greoning's futuristic universe is one I'd like to live in. It looks so neat and it's apparent that the Futurama creators had just as much fun making that universe as you do watching it. Part sci-fi, part satire (a lot of references to 20th century Earth), part comedy, Futurama is a tremendous amount of fun. The characters (particularly Bender) are just a couple of tics away from completely narcisstic and dislikeable but the show has enough heart to overcome these gaps. The episode plots are always highly inventive as they play with the Rosewell incident (what sci-fi show doesn't?), alternate universes, university life in the 30th century, the lost city of Atlanta and more.

7. Spin City(1996) S1
Spin City was definitely not a very progressive sitcom but it made for a great ensemble comedy with fast-slinging dialogue and stinging humor coming from all directions. Michael J. Fox was impeccably cast to his role and made a great comic character and supporting roles by Alan Ruck, Jennifer Esposito, Connie Britton, Michael Boatman, Barry Bostwick, Richard Kind, Alexander Chaplin provided a colorful palette for humor. The show went downhill in later seasons when Fox started being eclipsed by Heather Locklear and eventually replaced by Charlie Sheen. Another source for the decline was when the characters started becoming less believable as city hall employees since they became increasingly goofy and caricatured.

8. Family Guy (1999) S6
When I start downloading an episode on itunes, I have doubts and ask myself, "Is this going to be worth it?" because I continually forget how great this show is. The sheer depth with which Seth MacFarlane and his staff can rip across pop culture is part of the fun, but it wouldn't be the same (for proof of this, just watch Seth MacFarlane's comedy clavacade) without the situational humor of the characters: Especially Brian and Stewie.

9. Just Shoot Me(1999) S3
Another nondescript workplace comedy that often gets overlooked. If I had to pinpoint one thing that makes the show so great, it's how well the five characters complement each other. Each of them has strengths and needs that the other wants. Maya is possessed with intelligence and the ability to think for herself, but she wishes she had the beauty of Nina and the interpersonal skills and love of her father. Jack, highly successful as a businessman and well-liked person among friends, has been successful at everything in life except being a good father. Nina, Elliot and Dennis are all childlike and helpless in different ways and need Jack as a father figure to guide them. What's really great about all of this is that this layer of wants and needs that drives the group together is balanced with a surface-level atmosphere of bickering, put-downs, office pranks, and even people stepping over each other to get ahead. But at the end of the day, it's about how what's most important is the sense of what each person brings to the people around him and the sense of family that's formed. Just Shoot Me is for every straight-A student who wishes she were prettier, every class clown who wishes he would have the respect of the valedictorian, every successful businessman who wished they could connect to their family, every nerd who wishes they could be friends with the prettiest girl in the room, and every overgrown child who wishes their boss could be more like the dad they never had.

10. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005) S4
The last season they really started picking the show up. First off, the show's dialogue is truly one of a kind: The way in which they all start talking over each other and gradually turning practically any civilized situation into complete chaos must be so difficult to write for. I love how these guys are so narcissistic yet so loveable at the same time. I think what's tacitly acknowledged is that the characters have some good qualities: They are, in their own way, more loyal to each other than anyone else is to them and they are unusually ambitious in their quest to better themselves. Of course they wind up screwing each other over by the end of the episode and they do things for the basest of instincts, but don't you want to secretly hang out with them? They are walking and talking affronts to political correctness in society. They're pretty much not afraid to broach anything. In particular, they have a lot of fun mocking the concept of the father figure for some reason.

11. American Dad(2005) S4
The show started out horribly but as it progressed, the writing shifted from political satire to a unique take on the American family sitcom where every cliche is driven to the extreme. Seth MacFarlane, showrunner of Family Guy, took this on as his sophomore project, and shows that he can make you laugh without using cutaways. Of course, like Family Guy, they add in two completely ridiculous additions to the ensemble to shake things up: Klauss, the talking fish, and Roger, the sexually-ambiguous self-involved alien.

12. Aliens in America (2007) S1
The show only lasted one season, unfortunately, but it was truly one of the most astute and painfully self-aware takes on the high school comedy genre I've ever seen. With the addition of Raja, the Pakistani exchange student, the show also doubled as a satire on "Middle American" ignorance.

13. Extras (2005) S1
This was a show like the British counterpart of "The Office" that ran way too short. The concept of fame and how far people are willing to go to obtain it was the source of this comedy about a guy who goes from film to film as an extra in hope of finally being able to break through to an acting career. The appearance of guest stars and the sheer unpredictability of what they would do added to the fun, but the show stood on its own merits as well.

14. 8 Simple Rules (2002) S3
As someone who grew up on family sitcoms, I'm a sucker for the traditional three-camera format and "8 Simple Rules" has been the best family sitcom of the last decade. The show started off particularly generic but when James Garner and David Spade joined the cast, things really started to gel and Katie Segal was already a pro. Again, it wasn't groundbreaking but who needed to expect anything better?

15 (tie). My Name is Earl (2005) S2
Part of the secret of comedy is that its about making us feel good inside, and at times My Name is Earl isn't a sitcom but a parable. At the same time, there's enough comedy in there to mine a sitcom out of due mostly to the solidness of the cast. Jamie Pressley, the bitchy ex-wife, is definitely the high point of the show and she won a deserved Emmy for the show. A lot of the show is making fun of trailer trash or lower income people and the comedy is kind of "look at how dumb these people are," but it's somewhat redeeming that by writing the characters played by minorities, Darnell and Catalina, as the smartest characters.

and

Big Bang Theory (2007) S2
Like a number of shows, it took a few episodes for the characters to develop and grow on us, but once that happened, Jim Parsons and Jimmy Galecki become pretty addictive as theoretical physicists with varying degrees of social ineptness. Kaley Cuckoo is charming as the girl next door (even though, honestly, how many girls that good-looking would hang around those guys in real life?). One problem is that for all the growth Leonard (Galecki) and Sheldon (Parsons) have made, the two side characters, Raj and Wolfowitz, have stayed pretty one-dimensional. Another one of those shows to watch just to see an example of how good stylized dialogue is written.