Summer TV Binge: COMMUNITY

I was a big fan of Community from the start, and I watched every single episode religiously, even as NBC moved it around and constantly threatened cancellation and fired Dan Harmon then brought him back and the show suffered huge bouts of inconsistency. I stuck by it. I loved it anyway. I mean, I didn’t love the G.I. Joe episode. That was terrible. And I was never a huge fan of Chang (Ken Jeong), if only because it was far too easy and too tempting to overuse him. And I’ve missed Troy (Donald Glover) terribly since he left a few seasons ago. But I still stuck with it because the stuff it was great at was SO GREAT. I could not, however, follow it to weekly viewing on Yahoo! Screen, because I didn’t even know Yahoo! Screen was a thing.

It turns out, Yahoo! Screen is a thing, and not just an alternate timeline thing. It really exists, and Community season six really did air on it — weekly, even, instead of all being released at once like Netflix and Amazon do. I chose to watch it in two big chunks, half at mid-season and half a few weeks back, well after the final episode dropped. And I’m glad I did, even if it wasn’t the same.

Season six of Community sees the cocky Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) still leading the rag-tag study group, though now only three other original members still remain — still students, apparently, though Jeff is now faculty. It’s also no longer a study group, but a Save Greendale committee. (Their community college has long been on the brink of disaster, much like the show itself.) To round out the table, Chang has been given a permanent seat (though he’s still somewhat a group outcast, which I appreciate), and two new faces have joined the gang in Elroy (Keith David), an old programming whiz who lost touch with the advances in his field and has enrolled in classes, and Frankie (Paget Brewster), a buy-the-book straight face (with her own quirkiness) administrator there to balance the books — and to offset the absurdity of everyone else. The hilariously bizarre Dean Pelton (Jim Rash) is around more too — both more and less frivolous than he’s been in the past.

As for the other returning regulars, in many ways they too are drastically different from who they were originally, yet somehow without seeming to have advanced much in their lives. Annie (Alison Brie) is no less neurotic and driven, really, even if she acts more as a mother of the group now. And Abed (Danny Pudi) is still completely obsessed with framing everything like a movie or a TV episode, despite being slightly more human in his interactions. Only Britta (Gillian Jacobs) is more of a mess than she was at the start of the show, but that’s an evolution the show has engineered for many seasons, not just this one. But even as in many ways the characters have become caricatures and the show has become a gimmicky shell of its former, whip-smart and clever self, I still really appreciated this final season send-off.

The show was still funny in its sixth season, mind you; it hadn’t lost that. And at the end they declared that Greendale had indeed been saved, again using the school as a metaphor for the show and going out the way they wanted. There was a sense of closure with this season that definitely felt lacking for me in all the previous ones. Nothing they did will ever live up to the original “Modern Warfare” or Annie’s Boobs or “Troy and Abed in the Morning” or the built-specifically-for-me alternate timelines episode “Remedial Chaos Theory,” but season six was still a bunch of goofy fun. And at the end Annie took an FBI internship and she and Jeff kissed goodbye in a way that wasn’t creepy despite them being portrayed as having a drastic age gap at the beginning of the series, and I sighed a happy sigh of satisfaction, which not many series finales accomplish. So I guess I have Yahoo! Screen to thank for that.

Community season six is available to watch on Yahoo! Screen, which I promise is a real thing. All previous seasons are available on Hulu.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Hangover

 

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 84 Days to go: 57

Movie #356:  The Hangover

Largely touted as the funniest movie of the century when it was released, The Hangover was never really as laugh-out-loud funny to me as it was to other people. (That is not to say I didn’t laugh. It’s a funny movie; I laughed. I just didn’t laugh until I cried and/or peed or whatever. It’s not that funny.) However, it does hold up exceptionally well to multiple viewings.

The strength of The Hangover, for me, is not that it’s this groundbreaking new comedy of never-before-seen levels of hilarity — we’ve all seen jokes about wild, drunken nights before — it’s that the film is excellently structured, thus presenting jokes about a wild, drunken night in a new way. (This only works one time, though, which is why both sequels are essentially the exact same film, shot for shot, and why neither one of them is anywhere near as good.)

The movie starts out with your typical bachelor party preparations. You have your good-natured groom Doug (Justin Bartha), being taken to Vegas for the night by his two best friends — irresponsible teacher and posturing asshole complaining about the evils of marriage and bitchy women, Phil (Bradley Cooper) and completely hen-pecked, ball-less, snooty Stu (Ed Helms) — plus the bride’s misfit weirdo brother Alan (Zach Galifianakis). There is male-bonding over the great times to be had, there are predictions of how drunk everyone is going to get, and there is a celebratory toast to get them started. It’s all pretty run-of-the-mill, actually. And then that typical structure gets turned around completely.

“We lost Doug.” The jokes are pretty much in the same vein as countless others: Drunk guys do crazy shit! But the crazy shit is presented as a puzzle. Nobody remembers the stuff they did, because they were drugged and blacked out early in the evening. Not only that, but they have to remember, because they lost Doug and need to find him. So then the audience gets to take the ride with the trio of friends on their search for Doug, reconstructing the timeline as they go. And the movie really does up the ante on crazy shit drunk guys do, too. Some of it is expected in a Vegas movie (hospital visit, impromptu marriage to a stripper/hooker, being arrested, huge amounts of money won and lost), but a lot of it is taken to new extremes (the hooker’s baby, the dentist’s missing tooth, the tiger in the bathroom, the stolen police car, getting tased by schoolchildren, everything about Mike Tyson, and a tiny naked man with a crowbar jumping out of the trunk). Every chance it gets, it turns up the volume on how wild and out of control their night got, and then as a bonus, the movie bombards you with a bunch of pictures over the end credits to fill in the rest of the rowdy, raunchy details. It’s pretty freakin’ funny.

Of course, the end of the film reverts to your typical bachelor party gone wild story, as there’s a mad rush to Doug’s wedding, but The Hangover still offers up a few surprises. Like gigantic d-bag Phil actually being thoroughly, completely in love with his wife and son. Or the wildly inappropriate wedding singer (Dan Finnerty). And not for nothing, but it takes a tremendous amount of commitment and nerve to play the absolutely thankless, ball-busting role of Melissa that Rachel Harris embodies so fully. She is incredibly game, and I appreciate the hell out of her comedic guts.

I also want to shout out to a couple of the smaller roles in the film. Ken Jeong gets all the credit (and the stupid sequels) because he’s so fearless and batshit insane, but Heather Graham is awesome as Jade. I’ve always really liked her goofiness, and I think it’s a big strength of hers, not just a quirk. Her wedding photos with Stu, and the way she interacts with him, as well as the totally spastic way she falls out of her chair at the blackjack table are perfect examples of that and some of my favorite parts of the film. Another underrated performer is Cleo King, the partner of Rob Riggle’s Officer Franklin. Again, he’s paid all the attention, but her belly laughs and stern lectures are opposite ends of the same stick of pure joy she brings to the table. I could watch her for hours.

I actually have watched her for hours, in the aggregate, considering how many times I’ve seen The Hangover at this point. I mean, it’s on TV all the time. It holds up really well, though, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. Just skip the sequels.