Parks and Recreation - Season 3

The constantly-reinventing-itself Community is still my favorite comedy on TV, but if it didn't exist, Parks and Rec would be a perfectly admirable substitute. The additions of Adam Scott and Rob Lowe as regular characters does a good job of growing the show a bit without interfering with the chemistry that had already been built. They fit right in, with Lowe as Chris, the super eager and optimistic new guy running the city government, and Scott as Ben, a disgraced former 18 year old mayor who's now a budget expert. They were introduced at the end of season two to kind of push the plot along, but they're fully integrated into the cast this time, with Chris' new ideas disrupting the flow in the office, especially for Ron, and Ben being both lovably awkward and an interesting match for Leslie. I like how the show has handled relationships, not wasting too much time dancing around the idea before having actual fun with it.

It's not just there where the show is as enjoyable as ever - every character seems to be getting better with age. Donna isn't quite as funny as the show wants her to be, but she at least has a full personality now, and the way they've explored Jerry's interests makes him a more worthwhile punching bag. Tom's big city attitude in a small town schtick gets a lot of play to, and the end of his arc this season is one of the things that has me most excited for this fall, when the show is thankfully returning this time. They only had 16 episodes to screw around with, but they generally made the most of them,  expanding on the insane little universe the show takes place in, with some of my favorite bits being Perd Hapley's talk show and the fabulously wealthy citizenship of nearby Eagleton. I like that there's a continuity in there too, with certain wacky citizens coming back when appropriate, and basically any scene where a bunch of town folk are in the room together is fun. Not every moment is great, and the show has some really weird identity issues that revolve around the whole mockumentary thing. But it's still an exceptionally funny and joyful show, with a fantastic and growing cast (I didn't miss Mark once) and a great sense of where it's going. I don't want to speak too soon, but when all is said and done, I think Parks might end up being viewed as a better series than The Office. At least by me.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World

By the time I saw this movie my Scott Pilgrim fandom had waned slightly, not because of anything in particular, but just because the novelty had worn off a bit. Still, it's a very entertaining property, and Edgar Wright managed to strike a perfect balance between faithfully bringing Bryan Lee O'Malley's unique vision to the screen while changing enough to keep it fresh. I think the books and the movie both have their own strengths, the comics obviously have more time to spend developing secondary characters and the setting whereas the movie rushes through that a bit, but it also helps towards the end where it builds to a natural climax and exciting conclusion instead of the weird vibe I got from the final volume. It's a good companion to the books, and also stands well enough on its own for someone who's never read them to still enjoy the heck out of it, even if some of the background comes off as shallow.

Visually, it's one of the most kinetic and unique things I've ever seen. Wright is constantly playing with reality, having scenes warp and distort to fit the mood, and the editing is intensely in tune with whatever is being seen or heard. It calls a lot of attention to itself, but it works for the type of story it is, frantically racing from scene to scene, musical performance to martial arts fight, and it creates an atmosphere of giddy energy. All of the bands sound pretty much how they should, and the use of music to accentuate the mood or a fight (or even be a fight itself in one instance) is effective. There's also a ton of video game crap all over the place, tons of borrowed sound effects and musical cues and a few visual elements that pull you into the strange version of Toronto the film is creating and are also a nice bonus activity for nerds to spend their time identifying. The movie is primarily a comedy, and it's very funny, but what's impressive is how well the action works. The movie combines the weird gaming sensibility with some genuinely entertaining fight choreography, and while the stunt doubling is occasionally obvious, they're still very well produced scenes and I'm confident in saying they're actually the best action scenes I've seen this year. Fast, exciting, and you can actually see what's going on the entire time. It's an impressive feat.

The movie also works because almost everyone is right for their parts. Michael Cera actually doesn't fit how I pictured Scott Pilgrim acting in real life, as he's usually much closer to his completely awkward and shy persona. But that version of Scott manages to work in Wright's film, and he's surrounded by a pretty great supporting cast. A lot of the faces are recognizable elsewhere, as they pretty much got as many hot young people with talent that they could find. The evil exes in particular stand out, the twins are pretty much gone before they can do anything, but Matthew Patel is extremely weird, and the other actors who I actually know all do good jobs. Thomas Jane as a member of the vegan police was a bizarre but welcome cameo, and Bill Hader has a great narrator's voice. Kieran Culkin is a standout among Scott's friends as his awesome gay roommate Wallace. It might have been a good idea to tidy up the parade of Scott's acquaintances and merge a few parts just to make it easier to keep so many minor characters straight, because I'm not sure how manageable that is without prior knowledge. Still, it was fun seeing everyone so well realized in live action form. Not my favorite movie this year but certainly one of the most fun, and it continues to show how much skill Edgar Wright has with putting pure joy on film.

Funny People

After creating two very good comedies with a bit of heart and building a movie empire as a producer, Judd Apatow returned last year with his third film, which has quite a bit more focus on sentiment rather than laughs. I saw a lot of people skeptical of his ability to pull this off, although I would guess most of them haven't seen Freaks and Geeks. I had no issue with the idea of Funny People, and it's successful in a lot of ways. The fact that it's not a great movie isn't because Apatow shouldn't try to be serious, it's just that a large chunk of the movie ends up being pretty unwatchable.

It's an odd thing, really. The movie's dangerously long for what could still be called a comedy, approaching two and a half hours. But Adam Sandler gives a surprisingly good performance as an actor and comedian who finds out that he has a very dangerous disease, and tries to get back to his stand up roots. Seth Rogen is his typical likable self, playing a much less confident version of himself who's struggling to make ends meet and gets hired by Sandler to be his assistant and help write jokes. Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman are both very good as his roommates who he must occasionally butt heads with because this movie is more dramatic. For reasons I'll get into in a moment, the movie needs a love interest for Rogen, and Aubrey Plaza does her usual sarcastic thing pretty well in that position. It was funny seeing the origins of Aziz Ansari's Raaaaaaaandy character, and tons of people make cameos as themselves, either in casual interactions with Sandler's character or in brief snippets from his fake filmography.

For the most part, the movie manages a good balance between the humor and the drama, with its great cast doing the typical improv-heavy vulgar conversation thing in one scene and seriously considering mortality in the next. There might be a few too many sad musical montages, but it never really goes over the top trying to sell Sandler's plight, maybe because his slightly self-destructive tendencies make him feel like a real person rather than just a sad sack trying to manipulate your emotions. So it's really disappointing when the movie hits the breaks on what it's been doing to spend like forty minutes wasting our time with a romance subplot. Leslie Mann and Eric Bana are both pretty good, likable actors, and they do a fine job in this movie. It's just that the part that they're in really doesn't belong with the rest. Everything else pretty much grinds to a halt as Sandler reconnects with Mann as the one that got away, as Apatow proudly presents his wife and daughters again, and then her husband played by Bana shows up to create a whole lot of awkward and difficult to watch tension. These scenes just keep going and going until the breaking point, while I was desperately waiting for them to get back to the real movie.

Eventually they do, once the scripts reaches its Time to Wrap Things Up phase with some predictable character development and resolution, although even being a bit rote as it was it was still better than what just came before. People reconcile and part ways as necessary, and everything ends just about the way it should. It's really too bad the movie went on that whole tangent, because apart from that I really liked it for the most part. As it stands, it's the least of Apatow's three films, though still worth seeing if you like the cast enough. I don't mind if he still wants to be sentimental last time, as long as he makes sure the script is a lot tighter than this.

Parks and Recreation - Season 2

I said last year that while Parks and Recreation wasn't that amazing out of the gate, its sister show The Office wasn't either, and with time it could become something special. I didn't imagine it would get this good this fast, though. Definitely the most improved show of the year, which just makes it all the worse that NBC made the bone-headed decision to use the third season as a midseason replacement for some other upstart comedy. I get that they have a lot of faith in their new stuff, but that doesn't mean they had to pull this.

One of the things that made this season so much better is that the cast seems more comfortable and works together a lot better. Everything just hums with electricity when they're all in their zones, riffing and joking at light speed. By the time Andy is working as a shoeshine, it's pretty much golden. I wasn't a huge fan of how Jerry became a punching bag on the level of Meg Griffin, but otherwise these characters and relationships were so funny and well written that it seemed like they'd all been doing this for years. I can't say I was interested in the various romantic entanglements as much as they wanted me to be, but it didn't interfere with the comedy so it was fine by me. Leslie's brief relationship with a cop might have been the most enjoyable, mostly because of Louis C.K.'s understated performance.

At this point, the show is better off than its counterpart in Scranton. It's definitely on the upswing rather than the decline, and assuming this whole midseason fiasco doesn't harpoon it, it could be good for a while. They get a lot of good guest stars that don't feel like stunt casting, they seem to have a whole lot of things they could do with it, and it often just crackles with energy. You might not expect that they could get that much out of something like an opossum on a golf course, but then laugh your ass off for half an hour. It's definitely gonna be a long wait for the next episode.

Parks and Recreation - Season 1

To be honest, the thing I liked the most about this batch of six episodes was the opening theme. It's delightfully chipper. That doesn't mean I don't like the show itself though, which is a pretty good if not great mimic of the style from its sister series The Office. It's created by some of the same people, and that definitely shows. I've seen people call it a rip-off, which is weird because plenty of creators who keep the same feel among their separate projects don't get the same knock, but there is something unique enough about the mockumentary-about-mundane-setting-with-wacky-people to maybe raise an eyebrow or two. Still, I thought it did enough to create it's own identity.

One thing to remember is that The US Office was a bit shaky in its first brief run as well. It took some time to get out of the UK original's shadow, and we could be seeing the same thing here. The comedy here was sometimes restrained to brief flashes of brilliance and Amy Poehler's combination of likability, blockheadedness, and romantic ineptitude is a bit too reminiscent of Steve Carell's Michael Scott, but I still mostly enjoyed watching it. Aziz Ansari has emerged in the last couple years with small parts on shows like Flight of the Conchords and Scrubs, and he's probably the brightest spot in the first season. His way of getting in fairly vicious jabs at people without them even realizing what he's doing never gets old, and he and Poehler work well together.