Category: comedy

TV Review – Arrested Development Season 5 (Part 1)

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Arrested Development Season 5 (Part 1) (Netflix)
Written by Mitch Hurwitz & James Vallely, Richard Day, Evan Mann & Gareth Reynolds, Maggie Rowe
Directed by Troy Miller

arrested development s5

Michael Bluth wakes up, after being forced to take a Forget Me Now pill by his brother Gob and has no idea that days have passed. He ends up spilling the beans to his son George Michael that they’ve been dating the same person, actress, and daughter of Ron Howard Rebel Alley. A rift forms between them and Michael ends up ditching his family to work for Google. Months pass and Michael returns only to find his sister Lindsay is now running for a congressional seat against Lucille Austero, who has been MIA since the night of Cinco de Quatro. In the meantime, youngest Bluth Buster went to the Orange County PD where he was locked for suspicion of involvement in Lucille Austero’s disappearance and possible death. Just another typical year in the life of the Bluth family.

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Movie Review – Back to the Future

I hope you are enjoying the content I publish on my blog. If you feel compelled and are financially able to, I would greatly appreciate anything you could contribute to my Patreon. I will take it as your way of saying thanks and put that money towards growing the site in a slight manner.

Back to the Future (1985)
Written by Bob Gale & Robert Zemeckis
Directed by Robert Zemeckis

back to the future

Marty McFly is your average high school student. He lives in Hill Valley, California. He has a girlfriend. He has lame parents. He’s friends with an elderly disgraced nuclear physicist. You know as regular teenagers do. Things get heavy when Marty meets Doc Brown in a mall parking lot in the middle of the night. Doc shows off his modified Delorean, transformed into a mobile time machine. The experiment is cut short when the Libyan terrorists Doc stole plutonium from show up and kill the elderly scientist. Marty escapes in the Delorean and is tossed back to 1955 without the needed fuel to get time machine running again. To make matters worse, he interrupts his parents’ first meeting so that his future mother is now in love with him! The clock is ticking before Marty destroys his timeline and he needs the Doc Brown of 1955’s help to undo the damage.

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Movie Review – While We’re Young

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While We’re Young (2015)
Written & Directed by Noam Baumbach

while we're young

Josh is documentary filmmaker stuck on the same project for the last ten years. His wife, Cornelia, is a producer whom he won’t work with, and his father in law is a famous documentarian whom he also won’t work with. During a lecture at a college where Josh works, he meets Jamie and Darby, a young couple who are full of the sense of life he is missing. Josh and Cornelia become fast friends with the couple and learn Jamie is also a filmmaker seeking out an excellent topic for his own documentary. Josh finally breaks his taboo of never collaborating and decides to help Jamie out with a Facebook-centered doc idea he has. As the two couples become more closely intertwined more tension bubbles to the surface until Josh’s personal life begins to crumble around himself.

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Movie Review – Thoroughbreds

I hope you are enjoying the content I publish on my blog. If you feel compelled and are financially able to, I would greatly appreciate anything you could contribute to my Patreon. I will take it as your way of saying thanks and put that money towards growing the site in a slight manner.

Thoroughbreds (2018)
Written & Directed by Cory Finley

throughbreds

Amanda arrives at the home of her estranged friend Lily for a surprise invitation to “hang out.” Amanda quickly realizes this is a tutoring session set up by her mother, worried about Amanda’s borderline personality disorder getting in the way of meaningful friendships and her ability to do well in school. We learn that the two drifted apart after Lily’s father died and her mother remarried Mark, an incredibly wealthy man who demands the two women in his house comply with his rules. Amanda remarks that if Lily’s stepfather is causing her such grief, she should just kill him. At first, Lily shies away from this idea but the more she lingers on it, the more she wants to work to make it happen.

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TV Review – Atlanta: Robbin’ Season

Atlanta: Robbin’ Season (2018, FX)
Written by Donald Glover, Jamal Olori, Ibra Ake, Taofik Kolade, Stephen Glover, Taofik Kolade, and Stefani Robinson
Directed by Hiro Murai, Amy Seimetz, and Donald Glover

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There are shows I forget are amazing because the delay between seasons can be so long and so many other shows and films fill up my brain in between. Louie was one of those shows, The Leftovers was another. Atlanta is the current show that I fail to remember the greatness of. I wasn’t hyper-excited for season two because the first season felt like a distant memory, excellent but hazy. I have to say I enjoyed this second run of episodes immensely, even more so than its first season. Creator and showrunner Donald Glover isn’t even working at the height of his game in my opinion, he’s on the path to getting there, which is exciting because I expect something even better than what we have seen to date. We also shouldn’t ignore director Hiro Murai who set the plate so to speak of how Atlanta looks and feels. The aesthetic of the show feels so dreamlike, hazy blues filtered over the screen. When characters are outside it often has an early morning, dew-drenched misty quality, reminding me of nights where you stay up late and greet the morning. Glover cited Twin Peaks as an influence in the feel of the show, and I would agree that in its best episodes Atlanta finds that particular style.

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Movie Review – Laggies

Laggies (2014)
Written by Andrea Siegel
Directed by Lynn Shelton

laggies

Megan is nearing her thirties, in a committed relationship with her high school sweetheart, and helping her lifelong best friend out with her wedding. However, she has no direction in life and seemingly no desire to follow any particular path. She does have a master’s in family counseling but seems frozen when it comes to pursuing that career. After running out on her boyfriend’s proposal, Megan meets Annika, a teenage girl looking for someone to buy her and her friends beer. Megan goes along and then hangs out with the group. Days later she is faking going out of town for a conference and decides to bunk with Annika. They are discovered by Annika’s father, Craig, a lawyer who is raising her daughter by himself. Over the course of the week, Megan reevaluates what is essential to her and the indecision that led her to this point in her life.

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Movie Review – Tusk

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Tusk (2014)
Written & Directed by Kevin Smith

tusk film

Wallace Bryton is a cruel man. He co-hosts a podcast, The Not-See Party where he and his partner Teddy mock whatever viral videos are currently fresh in the collective psyche. His most recent acquisition, The Kill Bill Kid (an allusion to The Star Wars Kid) brings him to Manitoba in search of an interview. That opportunity goes bust, and he scrambles for a replacement, a touch of the strange to return to his listeners. A posting in the men’s room at a bar leads Wallace to the large manor home of Howard Howe, a reclusive man with stories to tell. Howe was a sailor for many years who regales Wallace with meeting Hemingway days before D-Day and his own eventually shipwreck in the waters of the North Atlantic. It was in those waters he befriended a walrus, nicknaming him Mr. Tusk. This friendship is the motivation behind Howe’s twisted plans for Wallace.

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Movie Review – Suburbicon

Suburbicon (2017)
Written by Joel & Ethan Coen
Directed by George Clooney

suburbicon

It’s 1959 in the city of Suburbicon, USA, and the first black family has moved in. This event is causing quite the stir, and the “well-meaning” people of the town just don’t that black people are ready to live in their neighborhood yet. When The Mayers don’t seem to get the message the citizenry begin to escalate matters. Meanwhile, the next block over Nicky Lodge’s life is turned upside down when two strange men barge into the house in the middle of the night. They end up killing Nicky’s mother leaving his father, Gardner, a widow. Thankfully, Nicky’s aunt and his late mother’s sister Margaret is there to help.

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Movie Review – Life After Beth

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Life After Beth (2014)
Written & Directed by Jeff Baena

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Beth has died and her grieving boyfriend, Zach is stuck in a permanent depression. He is hanging out with her parents, Maury and Geenie trying to revive what it felt like for his late love to be alive. And then out of nowhere, Beth’s parents box out Zach, refusing to answer the door or his phone calls. He eventually busts in and finds Beth, alive and well, but a little confused about where she has been. Zach wants to start their relationship back up, but Maury and Geenie would prefer to keep her locked up in the house. As time goes on, Zach learns that the Beth that came back may not be precisely in the best of shape.

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Movie Review – Obvious Child

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Obvious Child (2014)
Written by Anna Bean, Karen Maine, & Gillian Robespierre
Directed by Gillian Robespierre

obvious child

Donna Stern is an amateur stand-up comedian in New York City whose life, while not the greatest of successes, is comfortable and stable. Then her boyfriend breaks up with her admitting he was cheating with one of her friends. The bookstore that provides her primary source of income announces it is closing. And then she meets Max, a young businessman who happens to stop by the bar/club where she performs stand up. After a night of drunken fun, she parts ways with Max and begins to move on with her life. The bombshell that hits Donna is that she is pregnant. Right away she knows she has to have an abortion, her life is in no way prepared for a child. However, Max keeps walking into her life, and Donna feels like she has to break this news to him.

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