Viewing Diary
1. Hot Fuzz
I've watched and re-watched Shaun Of The Dead on cable more times in the past couple years than any comedy except Anchorman and maybe 40 Year Old Virgin, so I had high hopes for this, and it really lived up to them. And I like that both of these movies managed to do all these cop movie cliche gags within the constraints of some pretty good storytelling and character development. As much as I like a lot of movies from the Mel Brooks/Zucker Bros. school of joke-a-minute genre parodies, that whole approach has really been done to death lately by the Scary Movie franchise and all the other similiar offshoots, so it's good to see something that functions more as a narrative while still being extremely referential and ridiculous. And when Hot Fuzz goes into ridiculously overblown Bad Boys II mode, it works because there's already been an hour and a half of restraint that makes the over the top violence funnier than if they'd just come out with guns blazing from the start. I'm still cracking up about lines like "crusty jugglers" and "a great big bushy beard!" It was a little bit uneasy to watch such a celebratory satire of shoot-em-up violence less than a week after the Virginia Tech shootings, though. Really bad timing.
2. "The Venture Bros."
This was my 3rd favorite TV show of 2006, but I didn't totally appreciate the scope of its brilliance until I got the DVD sets, first of Season 1 as a Christmas gift from J.G., and then when I bought the new Season 2 discs last week and we ended up running through every episode in one weekend. I'd say that it's torture that I'm going to have to wait nearly a year for Season 3 to start, but I still have the commentary tracks and DVD extras to go through, and the show is just so densely packed with gags and asides that I think they're gonna have a lot of replay value, which is why it's one of the only shows I've gone out of my way to buy the DVD set of instead of merely renting.
3. Sour Grapes
I watched this on TV a while back, mainly because I'm the only person in the world who would think "hey, awesome, a Steven Weber/Craig Bierko vehicle," and it turned out to be excruciatingly lame, albeit in a way where you could tell that it probably could've been good but just fell flat. I didn't even realize until late that it was Larry David's directorial debut, which isn't so surprising, really, since as much credit as he deserves for Seinfeld, I've really never gotten into Curb Your Enthusiasm and I'm not sure he's capable of doing anything really great without the right collaborators.
4. 28 Days Later...
Somehow I hadn't seen this even though J.G. owns it, so I decided to finally catch up and watch it before the sequel with Stringer Bell comes out. I liked the way the story was framed just after a giant epidemic wipes out most of the population, and the first half captured what that kind of situation would be like to live through really convincingly. But where the movie started off by tweaking the expectations one might have (that there'd be an optimistic ending, that the male and female leads would end up hooking up), the second half fell right into that crap, which I found a little disappointing. The alternate ending that appears in storyboard form on the DVD would've satisfied me more, I think, if they'd figured out a way to do it well. Also, the IMDb page for this is hilarious: "Plot Keywords: Vomiting / Teenage Boy / Dress / Zombie / Soft Drink" etc.
I've watched and re-watched Shaun Of The Dead on cable more times in the past couple years than any comedy except Anchorman and maybe 40 Year Old Virgin, so I had high hopes for this, and it really lived up to them. And I like that both of these movies managed to do all these cop movie cliche gags within the constraints of some pretty good storytelling and character development. As much as I like a lot of movies from the Mel Brooks/Zucker Bros. school of joke-a-minute genre parodies, that whole approach has really been done to death lately by the Scary Movie franchise and all the other similiar offshoots, so it's good to see something that functions more as a narrative while still being extremely referential and ridiculous. And when Hot Fuzz goes into ridiculously overblown Bad Boys II mode, it works because there's already been an hour and a half of restraint that makes the over the top violence funnier than if they'd just come out with guns blazing from the start. I'm still cracking up about lines like "crusty jugglers" and "a great big bushy beard!" It was a little bit uneasy to watch such a celebratory satire of shoot-em-up violence less than a week after the Virginia Tech shootings, though. Really bad timing.
2. "The Venture Bros."
This was my 3rd favorite TV show of 2006, but I didn't totally appreciate the scope of its brilliance until I got the DVD sets, first of Season 1 as a Christmas gift from J.G., and then when I bought the new Season 2 discs last week and we ended up running through every episode in one weekend. I'd say that it's torture that I'm going to have to wait nearly a year for Season 3 to start, but I still have the commentary tracks and DVD extras to go through, and the show is just so densely packed with gags and asides that I think they're gonna have a lot of replay value, which is why it's one of the only shows I've gone out of my way to buy the DVD set of instead of merely renting.
3. Sour Grapes
I watched this on TV a while back, mainly because I'm the only person in the world who would think "hey, awesome, a Steven Weber/Craig Bierko vehicle," and it turned out to be excruciatingly lame, albeit in a way where you could tell that it probably could've been good but just fell flat. I didn't even realize until late that it was Larry David's directorial debut, which isn't so surprising, really, since as much credit as he deserves for Seinfeld, I've really never gotten into Curb Your Enthusiasm and I'm not sure he's capable of doing anything really great without the right collaborators.
4. 28 Days Later...
Somehow I hadn't seen this even though J.G. owns it, so I decided to finally catch up and watch it before the sequel with Stringer Bell comes out. I liked the way the story was framed just after a giant epidemic wipes out most of the population, and the first half captured what that kind of situation would be like to live through really convincingly. But where the movie started off by tweaking the expectations one might have (that there'd be an optimistic ending, that the male and female leads would end up hooking up), the second half fell right into that crap, which I found a little disappointing. The alternate ending that appears in storyboard form on the DVD would've satisfied me more, I think, if they'd figured out a way to do it well. Also, the IMDb page for this is hilarious: "Plot Keywords: Vomiting / Teenage Boy / Dress / Zombie / Soft Drink" etc.
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on Thursday, May 03, 2007 at 8:20 PM.
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