Childrens Hospital - Season 3

I feel like this year, Childrens Hospital really cemented itself as the best show on Adult Swim that isn't The Venture Bros. Maybe not the highest praise with some of the channel's best stuff no longer airing,but that doesn't mean Hospital isn't itself great. Television comedy is doing extremely well in general right now, but Hospital definitely holds its own against some of the better known shows that have the privilege of airing before midnight. The entire cast is great, the writing is sharp and unafraid to go anywhere, and they seem to be able to draw from a bottomless well of ideas, sending up medical dramas, the business of television, and pop culture in general. There seems to be nothing they won't try.

Plenty of episodes that would be wacky digressions on almost any other show feel pretty standard on Childrens. Kids being trapped in quicksand, a doctor's former police partner being trapped in a blocked off ward with insane patients, an episode all about a creepy, possibly nuts ambulance driver, all just seem like another day at the office for the staff. I loved the return to the news show that went over the history of the show last year and explores all of the cast members' various spinoffs, and stuff like the Our Town parody and the brief Party Down reunion was great as well. The latter is a good example of the show's fantastic casting, which can get pretty much everybody you've seen in alt comedy, and even guys like Jon Hamm, to show up and do something silly for a few minutes. Every episode is unique, and though they're only about 11 minutes long, most of them have more fresh gags than most episodes of sitcoms that are double the length. Season four is coming, and the wait won't be that bad with the way the show has caused an influx of solid comedies parodying various genres of hacky television.

Childrens' Hospital - Season 2

I enjoyed the first season of this show, which crammed the ten original web episodes into five fifteen minute segments. But when they started actually making it for TV, it really came into its own. Malin Akerman and Henry Winkler are fine additions to the main cast, gelling well with the rest of the cast and the show's surreal sense of humor. Things like the six year old with advanced aging disease and a doctor discovering a cure for cancer in butterfly fluids are fun even when they aren't entirely clever, and luckily it is often pretty darn smart. It's a show that doesn't bother terribly with character development, and it really shouldn't, as it's the most fun when everyone's just bouncing off each other and the jokes are flying every five seconds. The guest actors are a lot of fun too, with Michael Cera returning to read the dispatches and the imminently recognizable Kurtwood Smith as the representative of a government agency that wants the cancer cure stopped at all costs.

Although it's not the most inspired subject matter, the show is actually often at its best when it acknowledges that it's a TV show, like the episode that's a cast reunion after the long running series is canceled and especially the completely amazing "live" season finale. It's funny that it aired so soon after 30 Rock's terrible live episode, but it's really a send up of all silly TV stunts, as everything that can go disastrously wrong does. Cameras get broken, actors quit or injure themselves in the middle of filming, and crew keep accidentally getting caught on screen. It's mostly a single take of absolute madcap brilliance, and just the epitome of what this show can do when it's on its game. It's a bit too silly and niche to be a comedy on a real network, but it embraces that and fits perfectly with the Adult Swim lineup despite the relative high profile of its cast. Season three is coming, and it should be fun.

Watchmen

Much like 300, Watchmen is Zack Snyder's faithful take on one of a comic book icon's original stories; in this case, the most celebrated and influential graphic novel of the last 25 years. Obvious comparisons aside though, despite sharing some similar flaws, it's a more involved and interesting story, and he does a pretty solid job telling it. The movie is far from a perfect adaptation, although it's pretty legitimate to say that a lot of the reasons for that stem from the very nature of the comic itself. It's simply not structured like a film. It was originally released as a series of twelve issues, and several of them focus on a single character's background instead of really advancing the central plot forward. A truer translation would have been a miniseries instead of a theatrical release. But there's probably no way you get them to do that with a large enough budget to really pull off the story, and a compromise like this is the best we can really hope for. The script probably could have used a bit of tweaking to account for the different way a movie would flow, but except for a few segments to explain character that almost completely halt momentum, it worked out.

There are a few things that can be blamed on less than amazing filmmaking, though. It's clear from his comic work and Dawn of the Dead that Snyder does not have an ounce of subtlety in his being. The comic certainly didn't shy away from violence, being fairly grisly in places, but there's a difference between a panel showing something and a film lingering on it for several seconds. The fights are far crazier, and while I thought the choreography was actually pretty good and don't mind the speed ramping effect nearly as much as a lot of people, it was a big feeling of cognitive dissonance to see the heroes kicking people across rooms when the whole point of the story seemed to be about the fact that (except for Dr. Manhattan) these were just normal people who fought crime in costume for a living. I didn't mind a slight increase in vulgarity, but one of the sex scenes was really over the top too, not aided by the absurd choice in music. It wasn't the only occurrence of this either, with a lot of the choices either being too obvious or just seeming out of place with what was happening. I would have preferred an original score most of the time.

Not that the movie was all bad. I thought the entire relationship between the second Nite Owl and Silk Spectre was pretty laughable, and Veidt was pretty horribly miscast, but other than that the main cast did solid work despite there not being a big name among them, and in places excellent. Jackie Earle Haley's performance as Rorschach was 100% spot on, and just like in the comic, he easily stood out as the best character. It was very interesting to see the audience react more and more favorably to him as his actions become more and more psychotic. The Comedian also worked very well, and Carla Gugino was nice to see again even though most of the time she was covered in crappy "old person" makeup. There were a few other issues with makeup actually, especially the film's version of Richard Nixon, which was too comically out of place to take any of his scenes seriously. The changed ending actually seemed to work better within the existing plot and definitely would go over with a normal audience better, so I didn't mind that change terribly. All the little changes, missteps, and successes added up to a very long and divisive film, one that in general I liked but wasn't completely satisfied with. Still, an interesting experiment.