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.

Music Review - Kimbra - The Golden Echo

Kimbra made big impressions in the last few years, with her first album Vows originally coming out in 2011, being spotted on Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know in 2012, and then having a re-working of Vows come out in 2012, it seemed like she could do anything, so..she did a little of everything on her follow-up The Golden Echo.

The album is a mixture of genres that are unified by a few key ideas, the main one being that Kimbra can pretty much do anything she puts her mind to. While comfortably sitting in a modern Soul/R&B positon, Kimbra also takes on some more Rock-Pop numbers and even the weird genre-bending pop hit 90's Music, a song that's as much of a homage in it's lyrics as it is in style. Kimbra's musical style jumps all over the place, and it's a good thing. You can never peg her down as being just one kind of style, even when she excels at it. The Golden Echo is a collage of styles that do nothing but good things for the young, but very talented Kimbra.

Songs like 90's Music and Miracle sound poised to take the pop charts, while others like As You Are and Love In High Places are like the modern comeback of Soul, like Amy Winehouse or even Adele. While still others like Teen Heat and Madhouse sound like the Funk-induced R&B of the likes of Prince. It's a kaleidoscope of genres flavors that all combine to give you an authentic sense of what Kimbra is capable of, and that you at the same time don't know where she'll go next, whether it's the low-key trap-based Goldmine or the Soul of Waltz Me To The Grave. There are no sour notes on The Golden Echo, there are just different flavors rotating through.

The instrumentation is absolutely delightful. Besides Kimbra's magnificent voice that can hit the lows as well as the highs, you have multiple appearances from accomplished bassist Thundercat, Michael Jackson's drummer John Robinson, and Morris Hayes, a keyboardist for the NPG-era Prince. On 90's Music, Muse's Matt Bellamy plays guitar, Mark Foster from Foster the people makes an appearance, John Legend is on a track, the album really is just a collage of all the things Kimbra likes and wants to incorporate into her work, and it shows. Though instead of being a Hodge-podge mess of styles, The Golden Echo holds together as it's own standalone piece of work, a reflection of who Kimbra is and what she wants to bring to music, and I'm on-board for wherever she wants to take me. 

I will mention that while the vinyl lacks all the bonus songs of the deluxe version, it not only sounds fantastic, but the digital download they include also has the bonus tracks.

Spotify

iTunes

Amazon

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.