Movie Review - The Nice Guys (2016)

I had been itching to see The Nice Guys since I saw the trailer in front of The Hateful Eight, so at 5 months, it's been a long time coming. While I've been aware of Writer/Director Shane Black for a long time, having written 80's Action Comedy staples Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout and Last Action Hero, I really came to know him for his directorial debut, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a movie I absolutely adore. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang really pulled back the curtain on Black as a creative mind, showing us a lot of what he likes to write and direct, which amounts to Noir-styled buddy-cop detective movies with a dark and irreverent sense of humor. He followed it up with an entry into the Marvel universe, Iron Man 3, a film that Disney-fy's Black's sensibilities, but keeps them true at the core of the film. With The Nice Guys, Black has put out another foray into the Noir-styled buddy-cop detective movie with a streak of irreverent humor, this time with the style twist of it being set in the late 70's in L.A.

So without mincing words, I totally loved this movie. I'm sure some people will find flaws with it, but as a creative entity, Shane Black is a man who I share many similarities with. I'm inherently drawn to what this guy likes to make. The Nice Guys does an excellent job of matching and inter-playing beats. What I mean by that is that generally the action and comedy go very well hand in hand, without overpowering each other, as well as putting comedy in the action scenes, and putting action in the comedic scenes. You never go too long in the movie without getting an action beat or a comedy beat without getting the other, which really helps keep you invested.

Crowe and Gosling do a great job and have fantastic chemistry together, and both of them play common trope detectives that you would find in a typical Noir. I think a special shout-out has to go to Angourie Rice, who plays Gosling's daughter. She does an excellent job of not only acting her age, but also acting like someone stuck in the situation she is in. She doesn't steal the show, I think Gosling is doing that throughout the movie, but she keeps up with adults and has fun interplay with both of them.

I think the only real gripe I had with the film is that it runs a little long, clocking in at just under two hours. It feels like our detectives start just two-threads too far behind where they need to go, meaning I think they have to connect just one or two clues too many to piece everything together. This means that when it comes time to wrap-up the movie, they still have a couple things they have to tie up before the story can resolve itself. Like I said before, I absolutely loved the movie and it is incredibly watchable, but if they had just somehow got the jump on the first couple clues and cut the run time by about 15 minutes it would have been just the amount of tightness needed to take this from a good movie to a great movie.

The Nice Guys is a movie I will buy when it comes out, and I would turn on whenever I'm not sure what to watch when I don't know what else to watch. Not every movie has to be Citizen Kane, but it doesn't have to be mindless drivel either. The Nice Guys is a movie that is an excellent exercise in genre work that delivers a fun and interesting story with characters you just want to spend time watching, which is why I really hope this movie ends up doing well enough to warrant a sequel. I would be there on opening night for a sequel, that's for damn sure.


Check out the trailer below, and if that seems like a fun time, that's because it is. Go see it.

TV Review - Bojack Horseman - Season One

After being prompted by a friend and hearing mixed feelings about the show, I decided I should check out Bojack Horseman, one of Netflix's new original series, an animated show about a washed up 80's actor and his life post-stardom, starring an anthropomorphic horse and a whole star-studded cast of comedy cold.

In the weird world of Bojack Horseman, we follow our title character (voiced by Will Arnett), a delusional ass-hat who starred in a late 80's, early 90's sitcom like a Full House or Step by Step situation, but has been pretty much out of work since, due to his attitude and behavior. We follow Bojack and his friend/unofficial roommate Todd (Aaron Paul) as Bojack puts off writing a book he has promised Penguin Books until they convince him to get a Ghostwriter (voiced by Alison Brie.) From there, the show is watching Ghostwriter Diane try to capture Bojack's life while she befriends him and he continues to be a mess.

Between this we also meet Princess Carolyn, a cat voiced by Amy Sedaris that is both Bojack's agent and his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Pinky Penguin, voiced by Patton Oswalt as his book publishing agent who is in dire need to have Bojack finish his book, and Mr. Peanutbutter, voiced by Paul F. Tompkins, an anthropomorphic dog who starred in a show just like Bojack's that is also dating Diane. The cast is wonderful, the world is weird and it's hard to describe why exactly I liked it.

Thematically, the closest I think you get to a show like Bojack Horseman is like Archer or Bob's Burgers, but it's definitely not the same. While all three shows trade insults and jokes at lightning speed, Bojack is a lot darker than either of those too and takes a different approach to storytelling. Bojack Horseman follows a serialized pattern, meaning after the first couple episodes, they all fall into place with one another to tell one story, and each episode is a continuation of the last. That's one way the show is different from most animated adult shows of it's type, it's trying to tell one singular set of stories episode to episode, instead of each episode being self-contained. Another thing is that it's way more of a drama than a comedy towards the back half of the season, but still contains funny moments.

I think Bojack fits in with the other good matieral Netflix has decided to support, as it's just as hard to classify as one of those things. Take a look at Orange is the New Black, you can't call that show just a Drama, certainly not a Comedy, but it has a mixture of both that probably fits that moniker "Dramedy" as well as switching narratives and episode formats a lot. While Bojack focuses primarily on this one set of characters, it does expand out to tell the stories of other characters as well as telling a serious story with jokes instead of a funny story with some serious moments.

Bojack Horseman is actually fairly bleak. I've head a lot of people have problems getting past the first episode, some people don't get into it until episode 4-5, and that's when the narrative really picks up speed and the show switches up style. While the first four episodes further the overall narrative, they work as standalone episodes of the show that try and contain their whole story arc in 25 minutes. From episode 5-12 however each episode follows the other and ties into this overarching story and I think this is when people get hooked. Starting with episode five we find Bojack falling in love with his ghostwriter Diane, who is dating his longtime rival and Bojack finds out his old best friend is dying of cancer. Two very serious subplots with very serious repercussions.

I'm not going to spoil the show because it's still pretty new and a lot of people haven't seen it yet, but I think what gets people hooked with these subplots is how human they really are. Bojack reacts in an exaggerated yet truthful way to finding out the girl he is in love with is going to get married to a guy he resents and the situation with his old friend dying of cancer is a very believable and true-feeling one.

I think the conceit of Bojack Horseman is that it's telling a very human story through the guise of this cartoon anthropomorphic world so people take it less seriously, but it's darker than most animated shows I have seen, and that is part of what I think makes it so great. There are also great light-hearted moments, like director Cameron Crowe being realized as a Raven that people mistake for a Crow because of his name, or Neal McBeal the Navy Seal (voiced by Patton Oswalt) who called dibs on a box of muffins, which Bojack ignores and it spirals out of control into this idea that Bojack hates the troops because he didn't respect the guy's dibs. I like the animation style, the voice work by Arnett, Paul, Oswalt, Brie and the rest of the crew is exactly what the show needed, and the into song (written by half of The Black Keys) and the outro song are tonally great and fun.

Overall, I really enjoyed Bojack Horseman, and I recommend people who either haven't started it or haven't gone past the first few episodes to make it to episode 5-6 and see if they still don't like it. It seems to be polarizing overall, and I know at least one person who never ended up liking it despite watching all the way through. All I can say is to give it a chance and you might find it as rewarding as I did.

TV Rewatch - South Park - Season Eight

So I've given up the idea of catching up with South Park before the new season in a couple weeks, but I will catch up eventually, just on a much slower time table. I've finished Season Eight and decided I should get around to writing about it. While not my favorite season of the show and less funny than the last two, season eight is still a solid effort from Parker and Stone, delivering their now trademark brand of humor to real life current situations.

The first episode of the season Good Times With Weapons was a favorite of mine for it's contrast of humor and serious situation. In the episode, the boys get Japanese weapons and the show uses anime art style conventions to convey when the boys are role-playing with their weapons. Everything is silly and a laugh until they go to fight Anime Butters, when Kenny actually throws his Throwing Star at him and it lands square in his eyeball. Then it cuts back to regular animation to show the severity of what has happened, Butters actually has that Throwing Star stuck right in his eyeball and the rest of the episode is them trying to figure out how to get poor Butters help while not revealing it was their fault. Not the funniest episode of the season, but the combination of an ultra-serious situation with this ridiculous anime schtick thrown on top made me really appreciate it.

In Up The Down Steroid, Timmy and Jimmy are training for the Special Olympics, and Jimmy takes steroids to try and give himself the edge. The episode plays off the tropes of what happens to those who take steroids to get ahead in sports but places it in context of disabled people. At the same time, once he finds out there is a cash prize, Cartman decides he will disguise himself as developmentally disabled to win. What I love most about the episode, besides Jimmy's end rant on how using steroids are unfair to competition, is that Cartman's plan backfires epically when he spends all his time training and researching how to be believably disabled and not training to win the Olympics themselves and falls last in every single competition.

Other highlights include You Got F'd In the A, a You Got Served parody, Awesom-O, when Cartman disguises himself as a robot as a prank on Butters and ends up on a hijinks-filled adventure, The Jeffersons, when Parker and Stone point out what was wrong with how Michael Jackson lived his life and the corruption of cops, Goobacks, where Parker and Stone tackle immigration issues, Quest For Ratings that talks about the real-life problems with making tv shows and movies in this day and age, Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset, that talks about the true-to-life and still on-going problem of having socialites like Paris Hilton be role models for young girls and Woodland Critter Christmas, in which Rankin/Bass looking animals are preparing for the birth of their lord and savior, the anti-Christ...the animals are all followers of Satan.

As you can see, a lot of good episodes in Season 8, but it just didn't feel as funny to me as the last couple were. Season 8 was notoriously difficult to make, as yet again it was a season made at the same time as Parker and Stone made a movie, this time being Team America World Police. They felt like they were hitting a wall trying to write episodes, and although it feels like they pulled through and did a good job, it also feels like they could have done better had it been their main project.

Movie Review - Chef

So I finally got a chance to watch Chef last week, and I absolutely loved it. While not a perfect movie, it's a passionate movie about somebody's passion for the things in his life, and it was an incredibly enjoyable experience.

The basic story is that actor/director/writer Jon Favreau stars as our main character, Carl Casper, a well respected Chef working in an upscale restaurant. While Carl is shown to be passionate about the food he makes and wanting to take things in new directions, the owner of the restaurant is constantly stifling him. This all comes to a head when a famous food critic is going to come into the restaurant and the owner forces Carl to stick to old standards instead of doing anything new, which leads to a disparaging review from the food critic. After an altercation at the restaurant because of this, Carl decides to leave, and the rest of the movie is about him re-discovering what he wants in life. I'm trying not to give much away because even though it's a predictable movie, I still liked not knowing every detail before I went it to the film.

What I found surprising about the movie was that despite it's name, the movie isn't really about food, or being a chef. Instead, the movie is about a man's journey to find himself after spending years doing things just for other people. It's about his relationship with his estranged wife and especially his son, who he is always blowing off for work. Surprisingly, it's also just as much about social media and the power it has in this day and age. It just so happens that the medium for this story is about a chef and his number one passion is food, but otherwise this film could have been told with any artistic  profession.

One of the reasons people are really positive about this movie is that it mirrors, most would say intentionally, the professional life of Jon Favreau. He started off as a very well recieved indie director who kept getting bigger and bigger. Then he was picked up by Marvel, and as stories over the last couple years have shown, Marvel was the one calling the shots ultimately on those movies, as evidenced by Iron Man 2, a movie that got a lot of flack for how messy it was. Then he got Cowboys Vs. Aliens, a superstar sci-fi spectacular that just bombed. After that, Favreau disappeared from the spotlight. He directed a couple episodes of TV and had producer credits on some things, but then came back with Chef, a movie he wrote, directed and starred in about a man quitting a high-profile restaurant where he had no control to re-discover his roots and what was important to him. It's a film that is beautifully shot, well acted and what I will assume is a small budget. It's Jon Favreau going back to what he became famous for, well shot and written character pieces.

Like I said, the film isn't perfect. The movie's last 15 minutes kind of feel rushed and aren't as fleshed out as the rest of the film, but it's the kind of movie where you don't need like every single detail as to how something happens, the joy is in the journey, and once our charcters learn their lesson the movie goes out on a high note. Ultimately it's a feel good comedy that will make you hungry, especially for some Cuban sandwiches.

TV Rewatch - South Park - Season Seven

I'm about halfway through Season Eight currently, so I figured I'd take a step back and evaluate what I thought about Season Seven in relation to the others. I think Season Seven is an even season, continuing on the success of Season Six, with some new concepts and fun ideas, but mostly delivers the South Park everyone knows and loves. I say these things because even though I have yet to see them, I've heard the more recent seasons of South Park take a dive until Parker and Stone's Book of Mormon play came out, and then the show apparently picks back up with renewed creativity and energy. I'm not sure exactly when the slump happens, but as I progress further and further I must assume I'll be upon it soon enough, and I want to be able to critique exactly why it will feel inferior to these seasons.

This season Parker and Stone continue to play with the character of Kenny, in that this time he continues on from his appearance in the Christmas episode of Season Six, with no explanation as to why he's returned, and not once explains why he's back nor kills him at all this season. On one hand I feel like one of the stand out points of the early seasons and the character of Kenny is the no-further-explanation death sequence in most episodes followed by his appearance and then subsequent death in the next episode. It was something absurd in a show that otherwise played off of otherwise just exaggerated stereotypes of people in a small, backwoods town.

On the other hand, I definitely understand why they decided to stop killing him. They literally did it for 4 seasons straight and a feature length movie. "They killed Kenny, those bastards!" Became a part of the cultural identity of the show, and after all that time I assume they just felt like they had done everything they could with the joke and to do it longer would just be treading upon the same material over and over again. Plus, as the show gets weirder and weirder as Parker and Stone look for boundaries to push each season, Kenny's death not only feels less absurd, but limits how they might want to tell an episode. So all in all, I'm glad Kenny is back in Season Seven and isn't killed once. It shows growth and expansion from the writers and creators.

Season Seven to me isn't as good as Season Six was, but it's only just slightly inferior. Right off the bat, the first episode of the season, Cancelled, which re-uses scenes and dialogue from the very first episode in a plot that involves Earth being just a big reality show for some aliens and that they're stuck in a repeat. It's just the right amount of meta humor and new content mixing with references to the old that I enjoy from the series and while the concept itself is nothing new, it's presented in true outlandish South Park style.

The next episode Krazy Kripples is one of my favorites. In it, Jimmy gets mad that Christopher Reeve upstages him at a speaking event and decides to declare war on those made crippled after the fact instead of being born with it. After a series of misunderstandings, Jimmy and Timmy join the Crips, thinking they're actually crippled people, and fight the Bloods. All the while, all the main characters check back in at major plot points and just comment that they're "not going anywhere near this one." and walk back off-screen. This was a storytelling device I really enjoyed because it indicates that Parker and Stone clearly know the story they're telling could be considered offensive if told through the format of a regular episode, but since the whole thing plays out with the characters two crippled characters and shows them at the focal point and how they could come up with the idea that Crips is a gang for crippled people, it comes off as not making fun of the handicapped and instead the situation the kids got themselves into.

The episode Toilet Paper is one that I felt was weak, but still enjoyable. The episode plays off as a series of references and homages to famous crime dramas and thrillers, mostly Silence of the Lambs, but includes references to Godfather Part II, Scarface and a scene from Platoon. While I stilled laugh with the episode, it felt weaker since it was taking most of it's jokes from references than things actually happening in the episode.

There are absolute gems in this season however,Red Man's Guilt, an episode where a play on history reversal happens and the Native Americans that own the new Casino near South Park intend to take the town of South Park to demolish it and build a highway to their Casino no matter the cost. Special mention for that episode for having their main Native American character named "Runs With Premise" and by the time they beat the joke into the ground in the last third revealing his son's name to be "Premise Running Thin." It's a 4th wall joke I can get behind because they know it's bad. Other highlights include South Park is Gay!, where all the males in town become "Metrosexual" and Kyle and Mr. Garrison go off to kill the men behind it, the cast of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. Christian Rock Hard, where the boys use Napster and get caught downloading songs illegally and end up coming out against music piracy while showing how ludicrous some of these "artist damages" claims are. Plus Cartman's attempt at creating a successful Christian Rock band is hilarious to me because I grew up Catholic and heard a lot of Christian Rock music, and every parody was spot on.

The episode Grey Dawn not only parodies Red Dawn but also brings forth another culturally important topic that had been newsworthy at the time and is still relevant, should senior citizen's be allowed to drive? The episode is the perfect South Park mixture of being funny while also being culturally relevant and presenting the argument in a fair and honest way. Another highlight is the episode All About The Mormoms, which is literally an episode about how crazy the origin story of Mormonism is, followed by another two favorites, Butt Out and Raisins, where Rob Reiner comes to town and demands everyone stop smoking and where Stan gets dumped and joins the Goth kids, respectfully. Both episodes drive down to the heart of the matter and get just as many laughs as insightful moments into the situation and it reaffirms why I love the show so much. No matter how crude, the show finds interesting and compelling ways to portray real-life issues with a no-holds-barred mentality.

TV Rewatch - South Park - Season Six

I ended up taking some time off between Seasons 5, 6 & 7 of South Park because I realized I was burning out on the show, as most readers could probably have guessed would happen with a show this long. I'll write later the stuff I watched in-between, but for now I guess I better focus on Season 6.

Season 6 was a lot of fun and delivered a lot of laughs and shook up the format once again, proving the show still had things to say. At the end of Season 5, Parker and Stone took a big risk and "really" killed Kenny. No one knew what that would mean for the show until the beginning of Season 6, when Kenny was shown to be truly dead in universe. This gave the creators a way to talk about death, and how kids might interpret death, as the first 12 episodes of the season deal on and off with the fact that Stan, Kyle and Cartman have trouble accepting that Kenny is dead and can't seem to find a replacement friend for their gang. This leads to one of my favorite characters, Butters, to get way more screen time than he has previous seasons and it's refreshing to see how his character flourishes in this world, and all the weird shit that it brings.

The season starts off with a bang with Jared Has Aides, an episode about Subway spokesman Jared Fogle coming to town to speak, and through a serious of unfortunate phrasings, makes everyone think he lost all his weight from AIDS, instead of with the help of personal trainers, or aides. While I found that plot initially funny it itself, about halfway through I just got tired of the joke because it just kept going and going. What saved it for me however was the fact that they knew it has gone to long and right towards the end of the episode have Jared beating a dead horse, aka, beating the joke into the ground. That saved it for me, knowing that they knew the joke was becoming less funny the more they said it. This same kind of 4th wall breaking logic showed up again in Season 7's Red Man's Greed, but I suppose I'll get to that when the time comes.

The rest of the season had great episodes too, like Asspen, an episode where the boys visit Aspen and invariably get sucked into an 80's romantic comedy about skiing, Fun With Veal, where the gang learns about how Veal is made and go on a hunger strike. Really the whole season is a hit, with episodes like the two parter Professor Chaos and Simpsons Already Did It being among the best. In these episodes, Butters gets kicked out of the gang and decides to become a supervillan, but he's so innocent and nice he can't do anything that bad. In the second part, Butters realizes that all of his evil plans to take over the world have already been done by The Simpsons, and the whole episode turns into a pastiche of the Simpsons, where the rest of the gang re-create a famous plot about acquiring sea people and raising their own society in a fishbowl and the characters turning into Simpsons designs in Butters' eyes. It's a set of episodes I praise highly, and not only because they're actually funny, but also as a kudos to the writers for making an episode of the show about how another show has basically taken every wacky plot they could think of. That's a level of meta-referencing Family Guy wishes they had.

Other standouts for me included Free Hat, a Raiders of the Lost Ark parody surrounding Spielberg and Lucas continuously changing their films; A Ladder To Heaven, in which the boys win a shopping spree in a candy store but realize Kenny had their winning ticket they need to redeem on him when he died, so they attempt to build a ladder to heaven to get it back from him; "The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers, a Lord of the Rings parody about returning an accidentally acquired porn video back to the video store;  The Death Camp of Tolerance, where the overly PC-nature of our culture is brought into question when Mr. Garrison tries to get fired for being gay, but can't no matter how many obscene or inappropriate things he does, and My Future Self  n' Me, where adult versions of the some of the kids in town shown up to warn their kid selves about their bad habits. Like I said before, the whole season was pretty spectacular, I can't even really think of a low point, even the Christmas special parodying Black Hawk Down was wonderful.

One of my favorite things of the season is how they treat the character of Kenny, someone who has been their go-to punchline joke for the previous 5 seasons. They killed him at the end of last season, spend the first 12 episodes having the kids explore topics of death, grief and mourning over the loss of their friend, then have the last 4 episodes involve this wacky plot where Cartman swallows Kenny's ashes thinking their chocolate milk mix and Kenny's soul starts possessing him. Then after all that is resolved without Kenny coming back to life, the Christmas episode at the end of the season has him show up at the very end and go "Hey guys, what did I miss?" And the Stan says they'll fill him in on what happened. One of the things that works both for and against South Park is it's sitcom-y ability to forget or remember any plot points that might be relevant at any point in time, and while sometimes it gets annoying (like most religious episodes where they don't have the Jesus character) I think conviently forgetting anything that happened to Kenny just to bring him back as a main character in the next season was a funny move by Parker and Stone in similar tradition to how they used to always kill him and have him be fine the next episode.

TV Rewatch - South Park - Season Five

Season Five of South Park really picked up where I thought season four lacked. It was not only shorter, which made the season feel stronger overall, but it also had more cohesive writing and interesting new character developments that brings some new life into the shows fifth season.

This season is full of winner episodes and really is a must-watch overall. Episodes that had an interesting take on a cultural message this time were in full force. This time, they include the first episode It Hits The Fan, as well as Cripple Fight, Cartmanland, Proper Condom Use and Here Comes The Neighborhood. All of these were stand-out hits for me this season, with It Hits The Fan making fun of the overreaction of NYPD Blue saying "shit" on network TV, Cripple Fight taking on the Boy Scouts banning homosexuals from being in the Scouts, Cartmanland about dreams vs. reality when it comes to getting the thing you want most, Proper Condom Use about the various inappropriate methods in which sexual education is taught in schools and Here Comes The Neighborhood, where Token feels ostracized from his friends because he's richer than everyone else in town, but realizes he doesn't fit in with actual rich kids he convinces to move to town when he's ostracized by them too.

Each of those episodes swiftly and expertly get their message across while being funny in their own right. The episode Osama Bin Laden has Farty Pants is a special one because it intentional skews the line with an outrageous sub-plot but also a message driven main plot. Of course, this was the first episode made after September 11th, 2001. The main plot of the episode is that South Park elementary forces the boys to donate a dollar each for supporting kids in Afghanistan, and an Afghani equivelant of the gang send a goat back in return. The boys get caught in the middle as they try and send the goat back and end up in Afghanistan themselves. The sub-plot being a parody of a Bugs Bunny cartoon with Cartman and Bin Laden. The boys learn a new world perspective from the Afgani kids and Parker and Stone give America exactly what they wanted and has Cartman as Bugs Bunny beating down Bin Laden as Elmer Fudd. Many people list this episode as their favorite, and it's understandable why. South Park was pretty much the only show of it's kind where they could tell a cartoon-y story making fun of Osama Bin Laden, and in a time where America needed something to laugh about in a time of immense tragedy, they really pulled through with not only a message about tolerating and accepting other cultures and accepting that our Pro-America world view might not be shared by people outside America, as well as a fist-pumping, patriotic nod to the country as Cartman takes down Bin Laden. It's definitely a highlight of the season for me.

The other two highlights of the season for me is Scott Tenorman must die, where Cartman's Hannibal-based plan to exact revenge on a 9th grader takes Cartman to a darker, more diabolical place that they make note of in future episodes. It also signifies a shift in how Parker and Stone make the episodes, where now the majority of episodes from this season onward try to focus on just one plot and not an overarching plot and several minor plots. This allowed them to get more creative with the stories they were telling instead of focusing on a whole revolving cast of characters they need to include. My absolute favorite episode however, which I didn't realize was special when I saw it as a kid, was the episode Kenny Dies, where Kenny gets a muscular disease and dies a slow, agonizing death that's played for real.

Parker and Stone pulled another trick like they did at the end of the Season One, where they set up the question of who Cartman's dad was and then went on season hiatus, then came back for a Terrance and Phillip only episode before coming back later revealing the conclusion of the story. At the end of Kenny Dies, Kenny obviously dies. But it was the second to last episode of the season, and the last episode was a Butters only episode (which was also a highlight for me in how dark it was) so viewers had to wait until season six to know whether or not Kenny was really dead.

Overall, this season was exceptionally good, and brought us both Jimmie (a personal favorite) and Towelie. The episode I think I liked the least was How To Eat with Your Butt, a whole episode based around a single joke, that there were people in the world born with a butt over their face. Not a terrible episode, but it was pretty much the entire joke of the episode, in a season full of great jokes, that one just felt middling to me. In the end, Season five was totally worth it and a nice pick-up from the dip that season four was for me.

TV Rewatch - South Park - Season Four

I spent a good half a week nerding out about Guardians of the Galaxy, so now I'm back to marathoning South Park from beginning to current. And here I am with Season four completed.

Season four is the first season where I thought the show was lacking. While it had a good lot of funny jokes and gags, nothing in this season made me laugh as hard as anything in the first three seasons or the movie. The show still delivers on some quality jokes, laughs and interesting ways to view adult scenarios, some episodes just felt like they were either a little too loose or too out there and could have used a little tightening up.

While I though early season episodes Cartman's Silly Hate Crime and Timmy 2000 were humorous and had a worthwhile statement to make, they spend too long trying to force their viewpoint on the audience, when the audience is likely made up of people who agree on their stance to begin with. Meanwhile, the episode streak of Cartman Joins NAMBLA, Cherokee Hair Tampons, Chef Goes Nanners, Something You Can Do With Your Finger, Do The Handicapped Go To Hell?, Probably, 4th Grade, and Trapper Keeper were the strongest episodes of the season, which generally provided an  interesting if not overzealous condemnation of some part of American culture and provides the best jokes and laughs of the season. The idea that Cartman, who looking for older men to make friends with becomes the poster child for a pedophile group was in particular one of my favorite sub-plots because it plays the line so well of being both a mockery of such a ridiculous group like NAMBLA and also making it believable (though unlikely) that someone like Cartman in real life could have this happen to him.

That I think is what is one of the strongest features of the show, bringing in believable child-like innocence to the plots. The show often deals with incredibly adult situations that the boys get themselves into, but the way in which they get themselves into it feels like it's something an innocent, well-meaning child could accidentally get into...unless they play it up to the incredibly absurd which they do on episodes like 4th Grade and Trapper Keeper, which both involve convoluted time travel plots played up as taking off nostalgia blinders in the former and the comically-absurd dangers of ever-changing technology in the later. But then even in the episode Trapper Keeper, the subplot of Ike's Kindergarten class having immense difficulties picking a class president is a direct parody of the 2000 election of George Bush and the recounts that took place in Florida at that time.

The weakest episodes to me were Quintuplets and Pip. While both had merits, they just kind of fell flat to me. Quintuplets felt like the weakest episode overall, because although I didn't like Pip a great deal, I appreciated the fact that they were comically recreating the novel Great Expectations as told through a show like Masterpiece Theater but in South Park style. It worked better as a concept as it does in reality I think, and I do want to give them credit for doing something different, it just fell flat for me.

My favorite episode overall however has to be the second to last episode, The Wacky Molestation Adventure, in which one by one every kid in town reports that an adult molested them, until only children are left, and they create themselves a land without order. The writing is consistently funny throughout the episode and the idea of all the kids taking over the town and having it go from paradise to dystopian future in a matter of days was great.

I do have to give a special mention to the last episode and Christmas special of the season, A Very Crappy Christmas, where the adults in town no longer believe in the commercialism of Christmas and the kids have to inject the "spirit of Christmas" into them to get them to spend money on the holiday. While a funny observation in itself, the plot anchors around the boys making their own little Christmas movie to raise the commercialism spirits of the people of the town and the entire process and finished product mirror Parker and Stone's work on the first season and their animated shorts before the show. It was a loving reminder of not only how far they had come since then, but also the amount of effort that went into making that content, which took a hell of a lot of effort for such a small reward. But just like in real life, having their animated shorts bring them notice and landing a tv show, the in-show animation inspires the town to believe in commercialism again, and the holiday and town are saved.

While overall this season kind of felt middle-of-the-road to me, I appreciated a large number of the episodes for what they were trying to do and when it was funny I found it very funny.

Movie Rewatch - South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut

I took a slight break from South Park to fanboy about Guardians of the Galaxy for about half a week, but I'm back, and at this point I've finished the movie Bigger, Longer & Uncut and the fourth season. This review will be focusing on just the film.

Bigger, Longer & Uncut came out about mid-way through the third season of the show, and for that I am impressed at how great the movie is and how consistently good the third season is, because it means they had to have been making the movie between the second season and the third, while the third was airing. So not only were they making a feature length movie, they also were producing new episodes of the tv show weekly, and the quality of both things were surprisingly unhindered by this.

The basic plot of the movie is based on the season one episode Death, in which Kyle's mom finds Terrance and Phillip to be too vulgar for people to be watching and organizes a group to get the show taken off the air. Of course, being the movie version where anything goes, the movie takes this plot and takes it to absolute extremes. In the film, Terrance and Phillip release their first movie which happens to be R-rated, and the boys sneak into the film. Filled with vulgarities and situations too adult for their age-range, the boys take everything they heard and saw back home with them and introduces all the adults to the new colorful insults they've learned. When Kyle's mom hears of it, she decides to take a stand and tries to eradicate the effects of Terrance and Phillip from the town of South Park. When this doesn't work and the boys and all the other kids see the movie again, Kenny attempts to recreate a stunt from the movie, and when he dies as a result, Mrs. Broflovski creates a rallying cry to blame Canada for producing Terrance & Phillip, as a misguided attempt at removing the blame from anyone actually responsible for Kenny's death. Soon, the United States capture Terrance and Phillip and plan to publicly execute them before going to war with Canada. All that and more happen in this wacky, raunchy, musical.

Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of South Park know that it's creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone love the idea of story telling through musicals, and this is their first big attempt at such a thing. After having watched the first three seasons I could totally see them doing this, as each season has had it's share of catchy songs and musical numbers, whether it be from Isaac Haye's Chef or the boys themselves. Without a 20 minute time constraint it made sense that they could take that love of irreverent musical numbers and stretch them out to full-length songs for this movie, and they are what really sets this apart from being just 5-ish episodes of the show stitched together.

The animation is a little nicer, and you can tell they had a budget to hire some extra people to work on the Hell sequences which look great, but what really makes the movie great is that it really just feels like an extenuation of the show. Because the movie is animated the same way as the show is, you don't get any change in quality between the two, a problem that often plagues movies that come from tv shows. The only thing that's really different between the show and the movie is that the movie can get away with things they couldn't on cable tv and it's feature length. Parker and Stone have this wonderful, comfy environment they have set up of the South park universe and they still give you that but continue to expand upon it, giving us the character of Satan and some wonderful gags like Cartman's V-chip that never would have and still couldn't work on cable tv.

In the end, the film is a fun romp through the South Park universe with songs that are surprisingly clever and catchy for being so raunchy or irreverent. It really showed us what Parker and Stone were capable of when given a feature running time and the ability to be fully uncensored, and made a movie all about how censorship and blaming the media gets blown out of proportion in today's society.

TV Rewatch - South Park - Season Three

And so I've come to the third season of South Park. I think I found it just as enjoyable if not more so than the second season. Whereas Season 2 went for more of expanding on the same as the first season, Season 3 really tried to once again push the boundaries of what was acceptable, and what you can laugh at. I found myself continuously laughing hard on many occasions throughout the 17 episode season, with barely any low points.

This season we got the introduction of one of my favorite characters Butters, as well as some of my favorite episodes so far, including Korn's Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery, a Halloween episode based around Korn coming to town to play a Halloween festival when a bunch of ghost pirates come to town and ruin everyone's events, ala a Scooby-Doo episode.

While some episodes this season didn't make me laugh out loud, the premise behind the episodes themselves made me appreciate the jokes they were telling. For example, in the season opener Rainforest Shmainforest, the boys join a singing kids group to travel to the Rainforest and encourage people to stop destroying it. However they get lost and people end up dying. By the end of the episode, they're petitioning to destroy the rainforest because of how dangerous it actually is. Another was the episode Jakovasaurs, in which the boys find a male and female of an extinct species and the town  decides they need to help them to repopulate. Once they intervene however, they find that the Jakovasaurs are the most annoying and irritating things they've ever encountered and should have left them to die. They spend the rest of the episode trying to get the creatures to move away from South Park.

There were so many good episodes this season, with things like Sally Struthers as Jabba the Hutt in a Star Wars/Star Trek pastiche episode, the Kyle and Stan's dad's having an eye-opening sexual encounter that makes them define what it means to be straight and gay, and one of my personal favorites, the New Year's episode Are You There God? It's Me Jesus, in which God agrees to reveal himself once every 2000 years to answer one single question they can think up, and Stan wastes the one question they can ask in 2000 years by having to have God explain how Stan can't have a period because only girls can.

Overall, this season was solid, delivering laughs all around. The only episode I didn't really enjoy was the Christmas episode Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics, because as much as I appreciated the novelty of it, it was low on actual jokes for me.

TV Rewatch - South Park - Season Two

So here I am, back again with a review for the second season of South Park, the end of the material I was completely familiar with, and even then I had only seen the first half a decade ago. After this point, I've only seen maybe 10 episodes and the movie throughout the next 15 seasons. Overall, I really liked this season, even if it wasn't as spotless as the first season.

The season started a run of seasons that expanded from the initial 13 episodes to 17-18, which of course means more content per season than before. While at times it does seem like some jokes don't land as well as they could, the season overall was still a fun, raunchy romp through the city of South Park and all it's inhabitants.

One of my favorite bits of the season is actually a continuation of the plot from the finale of the first season. In the last episode of the first season, Cartman is on a quest to find out who his real dad is, and the episode plays on tropes from soap operas about who his dad in town could possibly be. They're just about to reveal who his dad is when they say it'll be concluded in 4 weeks when the next season returns. The joke is that in four weeks, the day the season came back was April Fool's Day, and so they recap what happened in the first season finale and then do a whole episode all about Terrance and Phillip that has nothing to do with the plot. Then 3 weeks later they bring back the second episode of the season which actually concludes the story, and it doesn't even make a whole lot of sense but they promised they'd answer it and they did.

Throughout this whole season there are still a multitude of solid episodes, from Conjoined Fetus Lady, Summer Sucks, Chef's Chocolate Salty Balls, Clubhouses, and my particular favorite, Chef Aid. Each one has some sort of actual message about our culture as it is and really brings home the point they're trying to get across while still being absolutely ridiculous and overblown. In my favorite episode of the season Chef Aid, Chef finds out that Alanis Morrisette has come out with a new hit song that it turns out Chef had written in the 70's and goes to a record company executive merely to have his name put on the credits on the song, not looking for any money or anything. In response, the comically evil Record Exec. sues Chef for harassment, hires Johnnie Cochran to win his case and Chef must pay the record executive 2 million dollars. Unable to come up with the money, the kids go around to all these music legends that knew Chef back in the day and ask for their help. In the end, everyone from Elton John to Meatloaf to Ozzy Osbourne show up in South Park to play a benefit show for Chef to raise the money, and in the end he wins. The great part of the episode is that all the musical characters who are there to help Chef are the actual people. Elton John, Rancid, Meatloaf, Joe Strummer, Ozzy, Rick James and others are all playing themselves in this 20 minute animated cartoon and they even sing the songs they're singing. As someone who is a big music fan and understands the fight artists have with record labels like this, it really connected with me on that level and then I was also just impressed with how many famous musicians they actually got to appear on the episode.

The episode I liked the least was definitely City on the Edge of Forever, which plays like a clip show episode. While some ideas in the episode were still funny, it just felt too forced overall, trying to make fun of a clip show while kind of being one limits the jokes you can do, and at the end of the day I was real tired of Ms. Crabtree's voice before halfway through the episode.

In the end, the season did a lot of try and expand the world of South Park. Bringing in all the parents more, as well as introducing more kids into the world of South Park and not relying on the same gags over again.

TV Rewatch - South Park - Season One

So I decided I would do an experiment for the blog, to review, season by season, South Park. South Park, the animated Comedy Central series by Trey Park and Matt Stone, has been running since 1997 and is currently at 17 seasons, with an 18th coming September 24th, a little under two months away. I want to watch and review all 17 seasons before September 24th and be completely caught up with South Park, from the very beginning to the most recent episode.

As a kid, I saw the first season and half of the second at a friend's house around 2003 or so. After that, I saw a handful of episodes, which I estimate to be from Season 4-5 and that's it. So this will be familiar, but mostly new territory for me. I've never undertaken a show marathoning of this much content, nor in this short of time. The last marathon I did similar is size was watching Scrubs from season 1 to season 8, and that even took me several months of watching. So I don't know if I'll make it by September24th, but I'll try.

So as of this writing I've finished season one and am just about to finish season two, so I'll do my write-up of season one and in the next day or so do my write-up of season 2.
So the basic premise of South Park, in case you don't know, is that we're following the lives of four 8 year old boys and their lives in the small, weird-ass town South Park, Colorado. Our boys are best friends and average 8 year olds Kyle and Stan, and then their poor redneck friend Kenny and their spoiled, overweight, conniving friend Cartman. Cartman usually has a scheme that gets them into trouble, and Kenny is always wearing a parka that muffles everything he says, leading to in-jokes where the audience can only imagine what Kenny is saying but in-universe characters understand exactly what he's saying.

The real conceit of the show is that the age of characters doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, Parker and Stone use the show as a platform to get across ideas in popular culture in a way that no one else would convey them in. The perfect example of course is the classic season one episode, Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride, an episode where Stan gets a new dog and discovers the dog is gay. Throughout the episode, Stan and all the neighborhood kids ostracize Sparky the gay dog throughout the episode until Sparky runs away to the gayest character in the show Big Gay Al's gay animal sanctuary. When Stan realizes his dog has run away, he discovers the sanctuary and Big Gay Al gives Stan a lesson on homosexual understanding and equality. At the end of the episode, Stan comes to understand that Sparky is just like any other dog, except he likes males instead of females.

In a 20 minute episode of a crudely made cartoon, Parker and Stone at once made an incredibly rude but incredibly simple and eloquent point about how being gay doesn't make someone any different than anyone else except for what gender they're interested in. And that's the heart of the show and what has kept it going this long. With an animation style that is slightly better than an 8 year old's drawings, Parker and Stone largely make content that is both unafraid to tackle any subject as well as effortlessly simplify down real world problems and break them down to how they could effect a young kid, or how it might look to a young kid. Another perfect example is the episode Death, in which Stan's grandfather turn's 102 and he spends the episode following Stan around in a wheelchair demanding that Stan kill him. The whole plotline revolves around the topic of assisted suicide and when and if it is ever okay, told through the eyes of 8 year old boys.

These season one episodes are pretty much all classics. I was surprised with how well I knew the majority of the episodes, considering I had seen them only once about 11 years ago. An incredibly enjoyable 13 episodes, where I got to reaquaint myself with the community of South Park and all the quirks and odds and ends to it. I can't wait to see what happens in the 14-ish seasons I haven't seen.

Movie Review - August:Osage County

So last week I saw the movie August:Osage County, a film adaptation of a play by the same name by Tracy Letts, which opened in 2007. My friend and I went primarily because Benedict Cumberbatch was listed in it, but the rest of the cast also drew me in.

I was very surprised by this movie, because I went in knowing nothing about it, and the trailers did not know what to do with the movie. Every trailer I saw, in the theater or on tv, just used one scene with the majority of the cast all smiling and laughing around a dinner table with some lines from Meryl Streep and highlighted that certain actors were in it. Judging from the looks of that dinner scene and Streep's dialogue I thought it might be a play, and lo and behold, the credit "Based on the play by Tracy Letts" came up within about 2-3 minutes of the start, if I remember correct.

August:Osage County was...interesting. All the info I could find on the play and the movie say it's a Dark Comedy, which generally means there is humor in dark or depressing subjects. While I admit there were humorous points within the film, enough to garner a chuckle now and then, it overall felt bleak and depressing. You watch a family disintegrate in three acts. By the end of this movie I just felt sad.

The basic plot of the movie is that the head of the Weston family, played by Sam Shepard, goes missing. So his drug addled and cancer ridden wife played by Meryl Streep calls her sister and three estranged daughters for support. They all convene on the old family home and have to deal with the high dysfunction between each member of the family.

In the end, I didn't feel like August:Osage County was a good movie. I thought it was a great play in movie form. As a movie, I don't think it worked as well as it could have, with an ending I could tell from a mile away was added because the kind of closure needed in a play is not the same as a movie. I thought every actor did a great job, no matter how big or small the part was. Meryl Streep did some of the best work I've ever seen her do, and that's saying something. I was definitely colored by my expectations for the movie however. All the trailers I saw just showed the introductions of characters and them laughing and smiling around the dinner table. I thought it was going to be some sort of comedy. But if you go into this movie thinking it's going to be a barrel of laughs you're mistaken. In fact, the majority of that dinner table scene they use so prominently in the trailer is Meryl Streep's drug addled character systematically delivering cruel insults or opinions to everyone at the table. The most laughs my friend and I had actually came from one character's music choice in his douchey car as he would speed past people. I'm pretty sure I'll actually never watch the film again, though I do think it was good. It's just not something I'd revisit. Though if I had a chance to see the play I'd go and see it, but as a movie I think it's worth seeing once.