Comedy

A Tale Of TV

Yeah, Another Blogger166 Comments

When I sat down to compose this piece about television, I was of the opinion that I’m a casual TV-viewer rather than a TV-viewing addict, seeing that I engage with the boob tube for an average of one and a half hours per day. That’s a fairly modest amount of time. As has happened frequently before, however, working on stories for Yeah, Another Blogger has led me, as if by magic, to discern the truth about things. Meaning, I now realize I’d go half-mad were my TV-watching privileges ever to be revoked. Anyway, what would I replace those hours with? Learning to crochet erotic hand puppets? Attempting to become one of the world’s best tiddlywinks players? Hell, I don’t even want to think about life without television, because I absolutely need TV. I’m addicted!

An ace dial-flipper, I regularly tune in to bits and pieces of news, sports, nature, cooking and late-night talk shows. I’m all by my lonesome when viewing the majority of those bits and pieces. What I catch the most of, by far, though, are scripted drama and comedy series. And I always watch them — in their entireties, unless we ditch them because we decide they suck — with my spouse Sandy. It’s one of our favorite things to do, for we have similar tastes in series fare. Let’s take a look at two shows that entertained Sandy and me recently.

Have you seen Adolescence, a British miniseries? It is a huge Netflix hit and has garnered a lot of media attention. Justifiably so. I place it in the pantheon of series, up there with The Queen’s Gambit, Anxious People, The Investigation and Call My Agent, to name but a few. Adolescence is really, really good.

Foremost among its explorations, Adolescence delves into the mind of Jamie Miller, a seemingly normal 13-year-old lad who, his insecurities enflamed by the taunts of a female classmate, loses all control and murders that young lady after meeting up with her one evening. The foul deed turns his life upside down and deeply damages the lives of the people who love him the most: his parents and older sister.

The show probes its subject matters with precision and honesty. The third episode hits especially hard. Set in the youth detention center where Jamie is being held, nearly all of its 52 minutes are devoted to a talk between Jamie and a court-appointed psychologist. The episode left Sandy and me shaken, so powerful and disturbing are Jamie’s words and actions as the session progresses. In my opinion, Adolescence is not to be missed. Its scripts are as tight as square knots, and each main member of the cast performs magnificently. First-time actor Owen Cooper, for example, is incredible as Jamie. Equally splendid is Stephen Graham, who not only plays Jamie’s father Eddie Miller, but co-created and co-wrote the production. What a talent he is. Adolescence, I believe, will stay in my mind for quite a while.

And then there’s the frothy Loot, a series that tips heavily into the wacky–as–hell category. Your life won’t be incomplete if you skip Loot, whose two seasons are available on Apple TV+. If you decide to tune in, however, you might end up digging it as much as Sandy and I did. It’s light, but it’s also refreshing.

Maya Rudolph shines in Loot, her comedic and dramatic talents fully on display. The show centers around her character, Molly Wells, who goes ballistic when she discovers her husband John has been cheating on her. She loses no time in divorcing him. The dissolution sends Molly reeling. She’s in pain. She’s also unimaginably wealthy, to the tune of over 100 billion American dollars, her share of the assets she and John, a tech industry genius, had jointly owned.

What to do with all that dough? Well, Molly, spoiled but possessing a heart of gold, doesn’t go for the usual approach of attempting to become even richer. Instead, she opts to give it all away, to groups and social causes that will better the human condition. The conduit for her generosity becomes the Wells Foundation, a do-good organization Molly founded while married but then totally forgot about until after the divorce came through.

I’m going to leave it at that, except to note that crazy situations have no trouble finding and enveloping Molly and her Wells Foundation employees, and that I laughed my ass off at some of the lines tossed out by the actors.

Till next time, boys and girls! If you have any series recommendations, please let me know. Sandy and I always are on the prowl for viewing options.

Everybody Wants Some!! (A Look At Linklater’s Latest)

Yeah, Another Blogger19 Comments

They keep their noses to the grindstone, often think outside the box, avoid publicity most of the time, and write and direct movies right and left. Not being a film scholar, I’m unable to say how many of our fellow humans currently fit that description. But I’ll offer the two names that pop into my mind: Woody Allen. Richard Linklater.

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Maybe I’ll pen an essay about Woody one of these days. But today not being that day, I’ll proceed with some thoughts about Richard Linklater and about his latest movie. It’s called Everybody Wants Some!!, and it’s a really raunchy comedy. If you’re uncomfortable with fu*ks and sh*ts filling the air like swarming gnats, then you’re gonna wanna sit this one out. I saw Everybody recently with my wife Sandy, who doesn’t always go for raunchy comedies. She liked this one, though. And so did I. It’s cruder than crude, but it’s also kind of sweet and nutty and charming.

You know, Linklater’s newest ain’t no masterpiece. But who cares? It’s a romp. A blast. And Linklater undoubtedly needed a breather of sorts after finishing production on Everybody’s predecessor, Boyhood, in 2014. Boyhood had to have been a challenge and a half. It followed the life and times of a lad over a 13 year period, up to the start of his freshman year at college. And it did this in real time. Linklater filmed Boyhood for a few days every year from 2002 through 2014. Same cast each year, and pretty much the same crew. It’s hard to imagine the patience and discipline required to devise and orchestrate a project of such magnitude.

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Boyhood aimed high, examining life’s nuances and complexities. Everybody Wants Some!! aims a lot lower. Its focus is on the cravings of the gonadal regions of a group of collegiate male student-athletes gathered together a few days before the start of classes, in 1980 Texas. The boys comprise the college’s baseball team, and have been allowed, and assigned, to live together in a big old house off-campus for the upcoming school year. The college’s administrative geniuses who made that decision never saw Animal House, for sure.

Boys being boys, and testosterone being testosterone, the baseball tribe’s upperclassmen lead the newbies from bacchanalia to bacchanalia all over town for several days, including the blowouts in their big old house. Vast numbers of college girls are ogled and flirted with. And some, certainly not as many as the boys would have hoped for, are bedded. Actually, though, Everybody details the high life too. Amazing quantities of beer are drunk during the movie. And so much cannabis smoke is inhaled, I left the theater with a contact high. Thanks, Linklater, I needed that . . . and I’m not joking.

Not every scene in Everybody plays out as wackily as intended, and not all the dialogue slips easily off the actors’ tongues. But the pursuit of wild fun rarely slows. Where else are you going to see guys and girls, gleefully drunk, riding a mattress down a flight of stairs? Or watch a team’s veteran players duct-tape its new guys to an outfield wall, and then launch balls at them during batting practice?

Everbody Wants Some!! is drawn from Linklater’s collegiate life, and is a follow-up, in spirit, to his 1993 movie Dazed And Confused, which emerged from his high school experiences. High school, for Linklater, was a time of frustration and confinement. College? Hey, kind of the opposite. Goodbye to parental restraints, hello to freedom and experimentation. Linklater’s quasi-alter ego in Everybody, freshman Jake (smoothly played by Blake Jenner), is the eyes and gonads through which the movie unfolds.

As part of my attempt at research for this article, I read an interview that Linklater gave not long ago to help promote Everybody. He said: “That’s what the [new] movie’s about, navigating that transitional period and the notion of identity. Who are you? Who do you want to be?”

Huh? Richard, I disagree. Only a smattering of screen time is assigned to analyses of the big concepts that you mentioned. Yeah, the guys (and the one girl who has more than five lines during the flick) are possibly semi-consciously on a quest for self-discovery, but who isn’t? To me, what Everybody Wants Some!! is about is grabbing hold of good times while you can. Because they don’t necessarily last forever.

And something very basic dawned on me in the midst of my research. Namely, without having realized it before, I’m a Linklater fan. He has directed 18 feature films over the years, and I’ve seen (and liked) eight of them. That’s 44%, which isn’t bad. But his five most recent movies, a string that began with 2008’s Me And Orson Welles, are a different story. I’ve caught them all, which was news to me. The quintet includes Bernie, a delightful movie from 2011 starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine that I urge all to see.

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