Community - Season 2

Community was my favorite comedy last year, and the show didn't have to do much besides keep being itself to maintain that honor this season. But the Community I know wouldn't rest on its laurels, so they pushed things even farther and took a lot of risks. It could have fallen on its face, but thanks to great writing and my favorite ensemble cast on TV, Community did the opposite, and became an even better series. I know some people do think it went a little too crazy, but I don't see it all. Community throws itself into everything it does, and the results are always at least pretty funny, and occasionally downright transcendent. There's just so much the show does well, and while it's far from flawless, the great way it always makes me feel always manages to make those problems seem like trifles.

What makes the show work is how it can bounce between standard sitcom storytelling and plots with much grander ambition without it ever seeming like there's a disconnect between the two. Part of it is how straight the pop culture send-ups are always played, despite the occasionally absurd scenarios. The most obvious example of this from season one was the finale, which used paintball guns to play out a typical action movie scenario. The thing is, if you took out the paint, the episode would basically just be a pretty good twenty minute action movie. Sure, there are jokes, but the genre tropes are laid bare and used to tell a fun story, instead of just being mocked and misused. This is the template season two often uses, whether it be a story about simulating a space mission, or pseudo-zombies attacking a Halloween party, or revisiting paintball guns in the two part finale, which managed to be a great Western AND a great war movie (with some Star Wars flavor, to be more specific). The tone is just right, which is what allows the show to keep working when it's just being normal. Or, as normal as this show can be. It's not disappointing when an episode is just about the group playing Dungeons & Dragons together, or trying to find Annie's special pen, or visiting a bar on Troy's 21st birthday. The characters are the same people every week, so there's no disconnect in either situation.

And then you just have standout episodes like the fully animated Christmas special, which worked both as part of the ongoing series and also as one of the best genuine holiday cartoons ever made. I can't think of another show that would even try something like that, let alone totally nail it. I love the way the outside cast has expanded, too. Only a few guys like Dean Pelton and Dr. Duncan are really more than caricatures at this point, but guys like Starburns and Leonard and especially Magnitude are just fun diversions that somehow stay amusing without a lot of development, and bring joy whenever they pop up again. Or pop pop up, as the case may be. As far as the actual main cast, Jeff, Troy, Abed, and Annie remain great, and I liked the work they did developing Britta and Shirley more this time. Pierce and Chang are a bit problematic, though. All season long there's a running story about Pierce butting heads with the rest of the group, and while I liked the payoff at the end, the way they handled it wasn't always consistent or interesting. And even though I continue to enjoy Ken Jeong in anything he's in, his Spanish teacher persona was a lot more consistently incredible than his reluctant student one, and I hope they find something better for him in season three now that's he's a permanent cast member. These problems seldom brought down the show though, and it was one of the best, funniest, and most imaginative single seasons of a comedy I've ever gotten to see. It seems like a miracle that the show is coming back again (thank God for NBC's consistent failure to find better ratings draws), and I'm going to enjoy this while it lasts.

Community - Season 1

I only gave the pilot of Community a shot because it was in the middle of NBC's comedy night, though it didn't take long for it to become my favorite new show of the fall season. The problem with the advertisements is they weren't honest about what the show really was. They showed Joel McHale, a pretty funny guy but not really an actor, as a sort of jerk named Jeff who's forced back to school after his law license was revoked. There were a couple decent jokes, but not a lot to on. But the show isn't about Jeff, not really. He's the protagonist, sure, but the show is about the whole cast - a hodgepodge of misfit Spanish students who form a study group together. It may not sound like a lot, but believe me, when everyone on the show is working right it's pretty hard to beat the amount of laughter the show can produce. It might be easy to dismiss the great diversity of the group as a cloying attempt at diversity, but that's sort of the point, and they play around with it enough, and the actors are good enough, that you like them all anyway.

Not every episode of Community is a total winner, but enough of them were brilliant enough that it wasn't long before it was my most anticipated show every Thursday night. Ken Jeong as the Asian Spanish teacher and the bald dean who's overly obsessed with political correctness tend to be the ones who set the plot in motion, coming up with crazy assignments or school activities that the group have to navigate through. There's some other notable recurring characters, like John Oliver's psychology professor who Jeff pushes around at first but gets more ballsy (and drunk) later, and an antagonist fellow Spanish student played by Dino Stamatopoulos that they know only as "starburns". My two favorite characters though are Abed and Troy, two of the youngest members of the group who come from different backgrounds but turn into the best of friends. Troy is sort of the token idiot but the writing and his performance keep him more interesting than that, and Abed's obsession with pop culture usually provides what seems like the majority of the show's best jokes. The show tries to keep you invested in what girl Jeff will end up with, but I'd keep watching even if the whole thing was just the little bits of genius between Troy and Abed that close most of the episodes during the credits. I already can't wait for season two.

Role Models

I wasn't expecting a whole lot out of Role Models besides a few laughs, but it ended up about as solid as any comedy these days that dips into the same pool of actors. Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott make an unlikely leading duo, and in a way they were both just carrying their own half movies that crossed over a number of times, but I bought their friendly if undesired (on Rudd's part) rapport. Rudd co-wrote the screenplay with some of his longtime comedy buddies, and it was a nice mix of some smaller faces with more currently popular names. Rudd's as wryly funny as ever, and Scott continues to somehow be likable despite his general personality being something that would usually make me want to shove a fist in his face. After an unfortunate incident they're forced to enlist in a Big Brothers Big Sisters-type program run by the hilarious as usual Jane Lynch in lieu of jail time. Scott gets a problematic kid, Rudd is assigned McLovin cast as a LARP-obsessed dork, and hilarity ensues.

I had some issues with the story, as things run just a little conveniently parallel between the two characters and the ending is perhaps overly tidy and happy for everyone. I'm not quite sure it earns everything it tries to do. It's not a big issue though, as I liked most of the characters and it was funnier than I expected. Everyone I already mentioned does a fine job, Elizabeth Banks continues to be underutilized for how good she is at this stuff, and Ken Jeong provides his usual unique brand of bizarre comedy as the "king" of the LARP community. It's not always his words that sell the jokes, it might be just the way he touches someone's face or just a look he does. And despite the general vulgar tone of the film, it actually does a few things to change perceptions of the unusual topics it covers. Again, the clean ending undermines a bit of the realism in the story, but overall it was a solid, funny movie.

The Hangover

I don't think it's much of a stretch to say this is Todd Phillips' best film, as he's always done acceptably fun comedy, but this seems unique among his work and just a bit better. Not a great movie, but pretty damn funny once it gets the ball rolling. The key to all of it really is Zach Galifianakis, who steals every scene the same way that Steve Carell stole them in Anchorman, and hopefully it will be a similar boon to his career. I get plenty of enjoyment out of his stand-up and cult TV appearances, but any extra Zach I can get is good. His character is pretty unusual here, and hard to classify. He's fully functional but definitely off in a significant way, having lots of strange tendencies like an aversion to profanity and an urge to imitate those he likes, and often makes really terrible decisions, though he manages to mostly redeem himself. I think this is the biggest role I've seen for Ed Helms too, again playing a guy who just can't see how badly his girlfriend is treating him, and his character is a nice balance of uptight and humorously incredulous. I really don't know much about Bradley Cooper, but I liked him in this movie too, playing the most emotionally stable one who still has some definite issues.

The movie's biggest problem might be that it takes too long to get really cooking. I don't know where the additions were made in the unrated cut, but I assume they're mostly after the forgotten night in Vegas that the plot centers around, and in any case they spend too much time establishing things before the main characters wake up in a trashed hotel room completely oblivious to what happened in the previous 12 hours. It's nearly half an hour before we get there, and I understand the desire to make the relationship between the three leads and the missing Doug clear so we know why it's so important they find him, though that was already pretty set from the fact that he was getting married and they were the ones throwing him a bachelor party. I wouldn't have minded the long lead-in so much if it itself was funny, but I really didn't laugh much at all until after things went wrong. Once that's all taken care of though, things move briskly as they try to puzzle out what they can remember and figure out from clues to solve various mysteries like the presence of an infant and tiger in their room and eventually track down their missing friend. There are some good appearances by various funny guys like Rob Riggle and Ken Jeong, and Heather Graham is fine in her part but you wonder why they got someone as famous as her to do it, unless that was the point. The denouement was similarly a bit too lengthy for my tastes, but overall it was a pretty strongly crafted pure comedy, one of the better I've seen in some time. It mostly worked because I liked all the characters, and it was nice for once that they weren't played by Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell, and Owen Wilson. I don't hate any of those guys, but keeping things fresh is always good.

Pineapple Express

Pineapple Express is yet another success for Apatow Productions. He and his crew rose to fame by bringing back the fun of sex comedies, but they've branched out, and Express' humor is all about pot, with Seth Rogen and James Franco's characters being high for most of the picture. Whereas they usually do straight comedy, this is sort of an action hybrid as the two friends get in trouble with crooked cops and drug lords and end up experiencing quite a few thrills. In some ways, it's more like a lower-intensity action film than a comedy, with most of the humor arising just from the way the characters talked instead of more discrete jokes. The pacing is a little strange, as several scenes, usually involving baked characters, go on for quite a bit longer than you'd expect, as they just keep riffing off each other. I wasn't bothered by it at all though, it fit the characters and gave it a unique feel that I enjoyed a lot.

The cast is full of the usual suspects, with funny, small parts played by Gary Cole, Craig Robinson, Bill Hader, and others. Like with Superbad, Rogen co-wrote with friend Evan Goldberg and does a solid job, but he gave the best part to Franco. I saw one reviewer say he was the funniest stoner character since Brad Pitt in True Romance, and it's not a thought I'd disagree with, although Pitt didn't have nearly as much time to be hilarious. Franco sometimes seems off-putting to me, but he really is great in this movie. He's never without something strange yet poignant to say, and has a great chemistry with Rogen. The movie is full of "bromance", possibly too-friendly, ambiguously gay camaraderie between two guys. There are tons of tropes from normal, heterosexual relationship development in other movies, and once in a while they get downright obvious with it to comedic effect. I haven't seen any of Green's other work as a director, but he does a fine job balancing the action and comedy. The climactic encounter is probably too over the top, although I strongly suspect it was intentional. I liked it quite a lot, and you should see it if you can see the humor in stoned idiots just acting like stoned idiots.

Knocked Up

So our mall's opening a new Regal theater with stadium seating, and it's actually fairly nice. No more will the tops of the heads of strangers be an issue when I'm watching the latest blockbusters. Not that I get a chance to see many movies anyway. As a special promotion, they were showing slightly older movies for a dollar a ticket yesterday, and I wanted to see Knocked Up, so it worked out pretty nicely. I had to get up to pee a few times (Special $1 soda will do that) but otherwise it was a nice viewing experience.

The movie itself was good too. It's the same director as The 40 Year Old Virgin and a lot of the cast is the same as well. Even people who don't have real parts make some cameos, and you can tell they're a group that enjoys working together. The star, Seth Rogen, had his breakout role in Virgin as Carell's coworker Cal, and it's interesting to see him as the main character. He's funny, but in a much different way from famous comedy stars like Jim Carrey and Ben Stiller. He's not playing a crazy character, he's playing a normal, likable guy. He has problems doing the right thing sometimes but you can tell his heart's mostly in the right place and he just needs some help sometimes. Katherine Heigl is also very good as the female lead. She holds her own and is believable as the girl struggling to come to grips with a situation she didn't plan for and a guy she isn't sure about. The supporting cast is also great, with Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd as the slightly older couple that serves as an example of marriage's troubles, a decent group of funny guys as Seth's friends, and Craig Robinson in a small but memorable role as the reluctant doorman at a night club. Why he isn't in more movies is a mystery to me.

The movie starts off a bit iffy, with some hit-and-miss pop culture humor, but it comes into its own as it develops the plot and the different relationships that form. Like Virgin, there's lots of drug use and constant raunchy dialogue, but it still comes away feeling charming because of the human element that can be seen through all of the vulgarity. It's an adult movie, not just because of the mature humor, but because it honestly deals with real issues like unplanned pregnancy. It's not without some errors. It's probably a bit too long. It's also a little predictable with the whole plot conflict as it gets closer to the end, of course they have to have a big fight and split up for a while before realizing it's all gonna be fine in the end. Honestly, I'm a little tired of the same old romantic comedy storyline, and just once I'd like to see a film eschew it. Why couldn't it just be about two people coming to grips with having a baby, why introduce the whole say-hurtful-things-under-stress-and-feel-sorry-later thing when nobody really likes it? It also gets a little heavy-handed with the message about not blaming others and being responsible for your own actions, but it never gets too bad and it all evens out to a hysterical movie with a good heart.