Category Archives: Reviews

The Fatal Brilliance of ‘Community’

Community creator and cast reflect as cult sitcom arrives on ...

Admit it. You haven’t been doing the reading you should during The Great Thinning. Come oooooonnnn: You know the most serious consideration you’ve given to a book lately is whether it’s worth more as text or toilet paper.

Don’t feel guilty. We’ve been weaning off books since TV was invented in 1927. And the pandemic may mark the period historians note as the time we made Netflix the new American library system. Only $9.99 a month for a card, and all you need is a particular antenna for the boob tube. The Farmboy Who Invented Television | Smart News | Smithsonian ...

As our parents and grandparents discovered in the glory days of Dewey Decimals, libraries are really just a magnifying glass for the casual stroller. The browser can spend hours poring over volumes of stories, sample a few pages or snapshots, deep-dive into an artist, binge on a collection of works.

So, too, is the streaming world. Particularly now, a collection of videos is akin to inheriting a storage bin. Occasionally, you’ll find that dusty Picasso, that discarded diamond, that priceless baseball card.

Or, in the streamers’ case, that TV show you’ve been meaning to watch and never have (see The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, yaddy).How to Binge All The Shows You've Been Meaning to Watch | GQ

In my case, it was Community, the NBC sitcom that has developed a streaming cult following since moving to Netflix (as have their other Thursday prime-time shows, The Office, 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation). While I watched some or all of those shows, I never gave the sitcom about a community college a glance. Dan Harmon, the creator of the series, based the show on his time at Glendale Community College, where he took a Spanish class and bonded with the study group — just as in Community.

My mistake for not giving it a chance. Despite uneven writing and a collapse that made the final season unwatchable, Community feels a bit like discovering Infinite Jest or A Confederacy of Dunces. Both were masterworks whose young authors committed suicide. While Harmon never offed himself, he nearly committed career suicide when alcoholism and arguments on-set prompted his ouster by the fourth season. While Harmon ultimately returned, the show never fully recovered.

But what flashes of genius the show demonstrated in its prime. Like all entrants in the NBC Thursday comedy lineup, Community boasted a multi-cultural cast, largely unknown actors, and a double-dose of sardonic wit. NBC didn’t utilize sarcasm; it bathed in it.

Community, though, offered something additional, a component television rarely broaches: Earnestness. The exemplars were Donald Glover and Danni Pudi, who play students Troy Barnes and Abed Nadir, respectively. Community: The 10 Best Moments Of Troy and Abed's Friendship

Troy and Abed were the best TV duo since Starsky & Hutch. Theirs was a treehouse friendship, complete with secret handshakes, blanket forts and impossible cardboard carpentry. While both ostensibly pursued heterosexual relationships, Community made clear their first love was toward each other. I’d be hard-pressed to name another pair of male TV friends who are so outward in their love. Perhaps Bart & Milhouse?Cool Dude Pals by Mighty355 on DeviantArt | Bart simpson, Simpsons ...

Troy and Abed’s chemistry became apparent at the end of only the second episode, when they broke into a beatbox rap centered around their Spanish homework, as seen below. It’s brilliant wordplay, and the bit would become a touchstone throughout the series, underscoring Community‘s innate sweetness.

Not that Community didn’t have an edge. Chevy Chase, who was the biggest name on the cast, played a misogynistic, racist homophobe. And there hasn’t been as likable a scoundrel on screen since Royal Tennenbaum turned his family inside out in Wes Anderson’s sublime comedy film in 2001. It’s Chase’s best work in decades (though that may not be saying much, given his career arc of late).The Royal Tenenbaums – review – Eye of the Duck

Chase plays Pierce Hawthorne, an Archie Bunker with millions. The only thing he has more of on his hands than time is cash and boredom. He’s at his best — and Troy and Abed  their most innocent — in the near-perfect episode The Aerodynamics of Gender. Note the soft-gauze lens framing the trampoline, which takes religious symbolism here. The episode loosely assembles around a bouncy yard the students discover, but ends up being a skewering take on race, gender baiting and the limits of friendship, all while parodying Mean Girls and The Terminator.

The last two references are important, because Community was nothing if not meta. I hate that term, so popular among critics nowadays. But it would be hard to describe the show as anything but aware of itself, sometimes preciously. Community was so aware of the tropes and traps of the sitcom it couldn’t help but announce when it was employing either. If anything, the show was sometimes so keen on its devices the viewer couldn’t get past them to just enjoy the story.

Which, ultimately, marked the show’s demise. On-set patience grew thin. Chase and Harmon detested each other. Stars ascended. Regulars drifted to new projects.

At least we got to say goodbye. Unlike so many shows, the viewer can see  precisely where Community detached from the rails. In the fifth year, the brilliant episodes Cooperative Polygraphy and Geothermal Escapism, which aired back-to-back, officially bid adieu to Chase and Glover, respectively. And with them went the series’ bottled lightning.

It all might have been a bittersweet farewell ride, but Netflix has become something of a TV defibrillator. The Office and Parks and Recreation, for instance, have seen a ratings spike, especially under lockdown. Breaking Bad was such a streaming mainstay Netflix gave it its own movie, El Camino.

And last week, Harmon told reporters that “conversations are happening that people would want to be happening” about a Community movie, and that he’s “very, very excited about the coming months.”

In Community‘s case, there’s no reason to think that excitement is not sincere.

 

 

The Day The Movies Died

The 100 Greatest Movies of All-Time - George Carmi - Medium

It’s hard to say specifically which day the movies died. It’s not like music, which could say Feb. 3, 1959 — the day Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” J. P. Richardson died in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.  i1.wp.com/freestampmagazine.com/wp-content/uplo...

We don’t have a dramatic departure for the movie hero, no ride into the sunset, no plane ascending a Casablanca night sky. But make no mistake: There was a sad farewell.

Maybe it was Oct. 27, 2018, the day Roma was released on Netflix and considered a legitimate contender for Best Picture. Or maybe it was Sept. 27, 2019, when The Irishman was released (again, on Netflix) and considered the early Oscar favorite. Perhaps April 28 of this year, when the Academy permitted streaming films to compete for the industry’s granddaddy prize.A Few Minutes Ago, in a Galaxy Down the Street | The HollywoodBowles

Regardless, COVID-19 has guaranteed that films, at least as we know them, are dead.

Not dead and gone. People, particularly young people, still like movies. There will be a market for them when lockdowns lift, vaccines bubble and our herd feels comfortable becoming a community again.

But when it does, will theater chains still be there? Already, the theaters business — battling the Internet, gaming and streaming hysteria — were operating on razor-thin margins. When COVID hit, Tinseltown was already wheezing.

And now? The National Association of Theater Owners reported that 89% of the nation’s movie screens went black with the virus. The association requested — and will receive, if Trump is to be believed — billions of dollars to keep theaters running and its 150,000 employees paid.

But will that do? AMC Theaters announced it will raise $500 million in debt just to stay afloat during the pandemic. Cinemark, the third-largest movie theater chain in the US, has laid off half of its corporate staff and furloughed 17,500 hourly workers due to coronavirus pandemic restrictions.Cinemas close nationwide, Disney postpones 'Black Widow'

And how exactly will social distancing work when you’re gathering a few hundred people to sit for a couple hours in the dark? Limiting seating and rows is one strategy. But we’ve got about 40,000 theaters in the country, all of which depend on shoulder-to-shoulder seating.

It doesn’t help that Hollywood has lived off an embarrassment of riches for decades. Last year’s biggest movie, Avengers: Endgame, had a budget of $400 million. Who would drop that amount on a movie now?

In 2018, the average movie ticket was $9.11, the first time movies eclipsed $9 a pop. Theater owners rightly say that $9 is far cheaper than a concert or a sporting event. Of course, that $9 has to be multiplied by the size of your family, and does not include the cost of food, drink, parking and the aggravation of sitting next to assholes.22 Types of Highly Annoying People You See in Movie Theaters ...

And, as is its tendency, Hollywood’s reality was blissfully unwavering in its ways. Studio chiefs note that ticket revenues eclipsed $11 billion last year, and film remains one of the country’s most potent exports (internationally, Hollywood has never done better).

But once you’ve adjusted for inflation, about 240 million Americans see a movie every year, a stat that has remained relatively flat for two decades. And steady business is a failed formula when worker salaries balloon to eight figures, their product, nine.

The theater association is fond of saying that it’s faced threats before — television, cable, video, streaming — and emerged victorious every time.

But cinema’s decline will be marked not by a decapitation, but a death from a thousand cuts. True, we did not stop going to movies when TV became, essentially, a superior medium. Same when Netflix arrived; salaries and budgets never stopped ballooning.

But, little by little over the years, rust began to discolor Hollywood’s gleaming 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT Fastback from Bullitt.1968 Mustang from Bullitt.

 

Studios may have collectively already surrendered to the virus. In March, Universal Pictures announced that its theatrical films would be made available at home on opening day, a first for the industry (normally films had to three months in theaters before heading to home viewing). It wasn’t long after competing studios followed suit, and now the industry  charged around $30-$50 per new release (a good bargain if several people are watching together).

I’m certain that much calculation went on into “at home” tickets. Surely, studio heads factored in how many Americans watch a movie together, with families, in pairs, etc. The statistics are there.

The conditions, however, never have been. Until now. Regardless of the accuracy of studios’ predicted prices, this is a shot in the dark, plain and simple. When have we ever considered a pandemic in our economic forecasts? What happens, for instance, if studios discover the break-even price is $129 a film? Will audiences accept a doubling?

In my 30 years of reporting (!), I never had to go on strike for my newspaper, though I worked for several papers that did strike — and my father was a lifelong member of the Newspaper Guild, a division of the Teamsters. What I learned was that, regardless of the might of either side in a strike, nobody wins, because circulation inevitably falls off permanently.

The lesson: Don’t push people to see how much they can do without. They’ll surprise you.

The virus may ultimately be a blessing to the industry. Studios leery of bankrolling quarter-billion gambles may put their money on cheaper experimenters, as in the 70’s. Television has already gone through a remarkable transition, morphing into cinematic entertainment like The Wire and Breaking Bad. The pandemic need not be an end to one of our tribe’s favorite rituals.70's presentation

Perhaps instead movies will go the route of Broadway: Something to attend when the event is extraordinary. Or baseball games, where you get the full immersive experience.

And there’s already an upside: The 300-some odd drive-in theaters across the country are reporting a pronounced uptick in business. Some theaters are selling out Friday and Saturday night shows, and others are reporting a spike in business of more than 300%

And doesn’t a drive-in on a cool summer evening sound dreamy?

The change is coming. We simply have to accept it, channel our reboot resources, and realize that many of our impressive cardboard forts are no match for rain.

 

 

Hollywood’s Trickiest Stunt

This image provided by Netflix shows actors David Harbour, from left, and Chris Hemsworth being directed by Sam Hargrave for a scene in the action film "Extraction." Hargrave, who was Chris Evans' stunt double on “Captain America” and Hugh Jackman's doubl

If Hollywood were still around, stuntmen would be the talk of it.

In March, Brad Pitt won an Oscar playing an aging stunt double in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. His real-life stunt double, David Leitch, went from the landing mat to the director’s chair to direct Deadpool 2 and Atomic Blonde. Keanu Reeve’s stunt double, Chad Stahelski, went on to direct the monster John Wick trilogy.

Add now Sam Hargrave, Chris Evans’ stuntman for the Captain America franchise, enters the fray with Extraction, Netflix’s latest original.

If there’s a common theme to the tone of stunt-double-films, it’s this. No stunt is too daring, no storyline too outlandish, including Extraction.

Consider its protagonist. Tyler Rake sounds like a Mad-Libs action hero name. When you add to the mix that this character actually, literally kills someone with a rake, it starts to veer into parody territory. That’s why it’s somewhat surprising that the film built around that wonderfully silly name, Extraction, is entirely sincere and also pretty fun.

Extraction  is a straightforward shoot-em-up about a jaded mercenary, Mr. Rake, played by Chris Hemsworth, who’s hired to save the 14-year-old son of a drug lord from another drug lord in Bangladesh. It doesn’t do anything to push the genre forward, but it’s better than you might think, existing comfortably somewhere on the action flick spectrum between Tony Scott and Peter Berg.

Much of that rests on Hemsworth’s (very large) shoulders. The Australian actor hasn’t had the easiest job finding solid roles outside of Thor. He’s always good even when the movie isn’t, and obviously has some tricks up his sleeves that belie his action-hero physique. But many of his leading man roles that don’t have anything to do with the God of Thunder have come and gone without much fanfare. So it makes a certain amount of sense that Extraction is Marvel-adjacent. It’s written by Joe Russo (one half of the Russo brothers who have directed a handful of Marvel movies, including Avengers: Endgame), directed by Marvel stunt coordinator  Hargrave in his debut and based on a graphic novel (Ciudad).Did Tyler Rake Survive For A Netflix 'Extraction' Sequel?

The graphic novel origins help explain “Tyler Rake,” but that name is about the extent of the comic book elements in the actual film. And, to be fair, Extraction even knows it’s ridiculous, hence the rake and the fact that the 14-year-old asset Ovi (Rudhraksh Jaiswal) walks up to the line of making fun of it at one point.

The film begins at the end, showing Tyler Rake (it just feels more right to say his full name) bloodied, battered and near-death on a bridge, having blurry flashbacks to some feet in the sand before cutting to two days earlier in Mumbai. (Don’t hate Extraction for its cliches, they’re just part of the fun).

It won’t shock you to learn that Tyler Rake is a bit of a loner who keeps his living quarters in shambles, but you get the sense that he always knows where the bottle of Oxy is. A woman (Golshifteh Farahani) comes to him with the job to save the kid, whose father is in prison, and Tyler Rake sets off to Dhaka to track him down. There, the criminal underworld plays out in broad daylight, with crime bosses, child soldiers, corrupt police and an overall vibe of instability populating the streets. Tyler Rake finds the kid easily enough, but then things start to get more complicated when he discovers that he’s not the only one looking for Ovi (and ready to kill to get him).

But don’t despair, Tyler Rake has about two hours of non-stop fight in him before he gets to that bridge and the blurry flashbacks. He’ll fight, and win, against anyone who comes in his way — even a group of kids. He doesn’t kill any of them, though. He just kind of injures and disables the “Goonies from hell.”

The word distraction has started to lose all meaning this deep into our home lockdowns, but there is a certain comfort in curling up with a big, silly action pic like Extraction. It reminds you of something you might have spent money on to see in an ice-cold theater on a hot summer day.