I'm struck with a sense Harmon is coming terms with Justin's dis-involvement with the show itself.
The kind of movie that gets played on provincial buses in countries in South America.
You can watch it without the sound up and still follow the plot.
Best to consider this movie as really an elaborate video game. The main character basically meets, beats, and levels up in a series of fights with Bosses, each with unique kill points.
The Princess is an avatar in a video game, that's what makes the physics work. You aren't watching a movie, it is Twitch with a big budget.
This is one of those comedies that had to have been watched in the theater with a big audience, with people laughing out loud at the visual jokes, guffawing at Paul Rudd's brilliant mirror performance, and even react laughing at others' shock at the full frontal nudity. Otherwise watching this movie alone at home, it just isn't as funny.
This happens to comedies all the time. People would see a comedy in the theater with a group laughing at it and have such a good time, that good feeling would make them tell their friends to go watch it at the theater or go with them to see it again. However, renting the same movie for a night at home, rewatching it with one other person, the jokes simply don't land as well. They don't, as they say, hold up.
I saw this at a packed theater originally and laughed to the point of tears with others, but watching it later at home, it was like I couldn't remember what I laughed at, it just seemed different.
I respect everyone's work on the overall production, but watch it with a group that is down with this kind of humor or else it will not hold up on its own.
I think Annie's sustained scream during Jeff's wrap up story is the greatest. That look on her face while she sceams makes me lol for real every time.
Bronson Pinchot walked out after his introduction and immediately lost the audience support by starting off by correcting the great Don Pardo's pronunciation of his name. The rest of the show suffered a pall of silence during his monologue and subsequent sketches.
Dennis Miller's Weekend Update ended with two production assistants taking a human-sized condom out and rolling it over Miller's body this making him into a huge cock. Ultimately a cheap visual gag to promote the new-at-the-time support of general condom use to fight the spread of AIDS.
The final sketch featuring the great Jan Hooks as her Sunday school teacher character makes sitting through the rest worth it.
OMG! I'm dying at-- Annie: "Not accidentally. Accidents don't just happen over and over and over again, okay? This isn't budget day-care." -- THAT IS SO DARK!!! LOL!!! And the more you think about it, the deeper and darker it gets!
This show is better on second viewing. This episode has some excellent moments with superb performances.
The scene between Eva and Durant is the standout of the episode. Each line of dialogue rich with subtext and multiple interpretations. Really good writing.
Ahh the space movie homage! I love this episode more than paintball and wish this one would have been franchised into sequels like the paintball episodes were.
The capturing of of every space movie trope from The Right Stuff to Armageddon right down to the musical score is absolutely the most sublime satire that has ever aired on prime time network television.
Bravo Dan Harmon and the entire writers room on this one. This episode is the top gem of the entire treasured series.
I love how, even though Rich Fulcher is an American, his accent is all over the place.
As told by Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon on the legendary Harmontown Podcast, they were going to be with producers for a pitch meeting,, at the last second Schrab just said the words, "monster...house" as a throw-away idea.
And despite the 10 other developed pitches, the producers were only interested in Monster House.
THEN, Harmon and Schrab had to reverse engineer the plot and figure out how the heck does a house become a monster?
Overall, I think they did pretty well despite the obvious problems with some of the plot holes.
If "The Office" had met "Community" and dated, got married, and then had a baby while, meanwhile, "Star Trek" and "Freaks and Geeks" had dated, got married, and had a baby....and THEN....by some miracle, those two babies had met, fell in love, and then had had a three-way with "Mystery Science Theater 3000.... "Other Space" would be the show that they would have birthed.
The fact that they use Spanish subtitles elevates the satire to sublime level. But the final voiceover in Spanish advertising what's up next on the channel makes this excellent, brilliant satire.
Watching this in 2024, 90 seconds in and this might be the most brilliantly prescient piece of satire I've ever seen.
Airing in 1998, the conceit of the show is it is a documentary airing in 2028, and it is established in the intro that the only technical advancements in 30 years has been hover scooters and worldwide access to digital TV allowing people to access porn from anywhere anytime. The other notable change in 30 years is the language spoken in the US is now called "Noramericano" and we get to see actors portraying Hillary and Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky speaking what sounds like a mix of crazy slang, weird idioms, and ebonics which is then translated into English by voiceover.
It's fascinating watching pre-9/11/01 political satire, not so much for the humor but for the tastelessness of a lot of the humor. After 9/11/01, this kind of satire would not have been aired, and one has to imagine these kind of jokes at the president's expense would not be tolerated by illiberal leftists.
Other prescient statements:
"Perjury is not counted as lying when lying is the only sensible option available to get you out of trouble."
"Oh the lies. We had so many laughs about that...because everyone can say whatever they want!"
Very funny stuff.
Conan proved himself to be a legend.
Andy is super humanly hilarious.
But that guy who played the drums was a robot, right? Some sort of CG character, not a real guy, right? No real human could be so stiff and awkward on camera like that guy was for 16 years.
During the scene about Abraham Lincoln, when she asked the expert about Lincoln's stomach tattoo.... she specifically references a snowman and a robin.... what is she referencing there?
It seems too specific for her to be making it up and we've come to love the way Philomena mixes up up concepts, such as referencing Lenin leaving "the band" (John/Beatles) while actually talking about Lenin of the Soviet "Onion".....therefore I can't help but think she's mixed up Abraham Lincoln with someone else with the tattoo she's referencing, who perhaps also has a name she's confused with his.
After googling, I frustratingly only found other threads with people looking for the answer and a lot of speculation, but no definite answers....therefore, please reply if you can explain it!
It's not just because of Phil Hartman.... it's not just because of Dave Foley.... This show is great because of the ENSEMBLE CAST and GREAT WRITING backed by the legendary comedy super-producers Brillstein-Gray.
Even if it did take a huge hit with the death of Phil, the cast and crew overcame their grief and created a last season that has very funny concepts, great episodes, and wonderful performances from the entire cast.
Lovitz shouldn't be put down or compared to Phil, he literally appeared in only 22 episodes of the 97 episode run! The character was not meant to, nor could ever replace Bill McNeil, and it is disingenuous to the rest of the characters, the cast and crew, and the writers to dismiss their good work in the last season.
Would you believe audiences booed this movie when it came out? It is true, let me tell you why.
While BTTF has now gone down in history as one of the best "trilogies" of all time, at the time when part TWO came out, the fact they had also shot part THREE at the same time had been kept a complete secret.
Most of you who read this may not have been alive at the time, so you have to imagine that after "Back to the Future" was a literal sensation when it came out, people were pretty skeptical about a sequel coming out four years after the first could be nearly as good as the original. I only went to see it opening weekend with friends because we'd actually gone to see the first one when it came out in 1985 and had decided to go judge the sequel under the same circumstances.
Overall, the audience had a great time that night watching the movie; that is, until the last few moments. To reiterate, no one knew that Back to the Future part TWO was going to be the middle chapter of a TRILOGY. Despite how positive the audience reaction had been throughout the rest of the movie, as soon as the words, "To Be Continued..." appeared on the screen, the audience turned and started booing! I swear it is true! My friends and I were caught up as well, we booed along with everyone else and walked out bitching about feeling cheated.
In conclusion, despite being the best of three movies, at the time, audiences BOOED this movie the opening weekend because movies rarely IF EVER had "TO BE CONTINUED..." at the end of them! The cultural grudge during the time between the release of TWO and THREE has lost to history after the trilogy as whole became accepted.
On my second viewing of this series and maintain the opinion that this show is much better the second time.
The character of The Swede continues to morph into new forms and the actor playing him keeps his place as the best, consistent performer of the show.
I have to say, the replacement of Siobhan Williams as Bohannon's apple cheeked, innocent-yet-unchaste shotgun wife cannot go unnoticed and is rather jarring. I can't even remember if she originated the part when she got with Bohannon before her brother was hung, but Williams was really perfect in the part during the season 3 finale. Checking Williams' IMDB, it looks like she was cast on another series, so that explains why she was replaced.
MacKenzie Porter, playing the part now, is adequate in that she checks the boxes for being a blond female, but I don't think the casting director hired a replacement that really has the look of an innocent farm girl who'd never even seen civilization outside of her family's compound which Siobhan Williams embodied in her brief scenes of S3 finale. MacKenzie Porter may have grew up on a ranch in Alberta, but her look basically a SoCal surfer girl playing pretend as her impression of a frontier morman girl. I hope the replacement's presence in future episodes don't take me out of the narrative because of the stark differences in her look and approach to the character.
Other than that, pretty good start to the season.
The whore Max is a terrible character and adds tedious distraction from what should be a better constructed narrative.
All the utopian pirate paradise political stuff is unwieldy and needlessly overwrought with melodramatic overacting spiced up with a lot of sweaty fucking, full frontal nudity, and petulant whining about everything.
I'm finding myself exclusively interested in the John Silver character and at best tune out for the scenes at the port, at worse outwardly despising characters like the whore when she's on screen.
As I've stated in other reviews, my standard for well-written characters is that I find myself imagining them outside of their narrative arc and wonder about their feelings.
Even though this is an education course, it is brilliantly presented as a telenovela with developed characters that are so well performed, they engender genuine care from viewers.
I find myself thinking about Raquel's life in Los Angeles before the story began. I often reflect on the tragic events that instigate the story. This is all due to how committed everyone is to their performances, it is simply easy to believe the characters are real people.
I came to learn Spanish, but stayed for Arturo and Raquel's love story.
Finding out that neo-marxist idiots hate this particular episode only makes me enjoy it more out of spite.
A sweet and very loving look back at one of the most important comedy institutions of the last century.
While I appreciate the profiles of the comics that were successful and the token look at some of the casualties of the Store, I would have liked to have seen more about Brody Stevens in his final years.
There are actually some parallels between the journey of Eugene and Computerman and YA drama that was on the CW called "The 100."
Not only does this contain several segments of Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts a full 5 years before they started appearing on Saturday Night Live in 1991, it also features Whoopi Goldberg doing the characters showcased in her one woman show that aired on HBO the same year.
Overall, it was an interesting collection of a Cheeseball sketches and music videos from Jimmy Buffet and others.
"Education is the sleeping pill that makes dreams happen. -Peggy Hill" --Peggy Hill
I don't know. Perhaps it's just me, but this show strikes me as less Blackadder and more Hogan's Heroes. I guess I can see where it's a good idea, and there are some somewhat funny situations and setups, and jokes. But the style is so much more like 60s sitcoms were in america.
I'd never heard of it until seeing it on a list of most loved TV shows of all time, and it was compared to blackadder. I suppose I can see why it didn't really hold up over time.
The images of Dr. Bruel holding Baby Roy in the park are going to haunt me for years to come.
This is the kind of show Abed Nadir from Community made that was never actually shown, but aluded to in several episodes of Community.
A brilliant and faithful parody of the Dick Wolf-iverse by a young and unpolished Dan Harmon.
The Harmonian attention to detail of the subtle absurdity common to tropes of the genre is all there, albeit more crude than how his style would evolve through Community and Rick and Morty.
Unfortunately, almost all the episodes have been removed from YouTube. Please reply if you know how I can get a copy of the series.
This show is definitely not for everyone and probably would offend people with so-called "modern sensibilities." The humor is pretty sophomoric and basic, but I still had some laugh-out-loud moments in between the cringe. Besides Ricky Lake making a cameo, there's also cameos from the red-headed kid from the later seasons of Diff'rent Strokes and Flea; oh, and one of the regular cast members is the guy who called Jerry a phoney on Seinfeld years later.
What is remarkable about it, though, is the fact that it was the kind of original sketch comedy MTV put on the air on a Thursday night a full 3 years before The State's tenure began.
