Owen's Eight Dollar Disappointment

TIM AND ERIC'S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE

In keeping with the precedent set by Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (trailer) continues the proud tradition of feature-length films based on Adult Swim shows that fail to live up to their pedigree. Now, I'm a fan of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim's often disgusting, usually hilarious, and always bizarre Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (as I am of Aqua Teen Hunger Force), but so many of the things that make the Tim-and-Eric schtick work at eleven-minute intervals on television demonstrate why it doesn't translate to an hour and a half on the silver screen.

For any out there who are unfamiliar, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! ran from 2007 to 2010 as part of Adult Swim, the Cartoon Network's broadcast segment of after-hours, "adult-oriented" animated and live-action comedy shorts, alongside the likes of the aforementioned Aqua Teen, Sealab 2021, Robot Chicken, Frisky Dingo, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, Metalocalypse, Childrens Hospital, and a metric assload of anime you couldn't pay me to watch. Each eleven-minute episode consisted of a hodgepodge of tenuously related (if that much) segments usually involving ugly people, disgusting food, and the awkward banality of Western late-capitalist existence, accomplished with all the low budgets, amateurish acting, and sloppy editing of public-access television or old VHS training videos. So obviously it was pretty great. With the help of a veritable cornucopia of regular collaborators (Zach Galifianakis, John C. Reilly, and Weird Al) and guest stars (ranging from Patton Oswalt, David Cross, and Fred Willard to Dave Navarro, Tom Skerritt, and the great Tommy Wiseau), Tim and Eric took pop-cultural tropes and narrative conventions and tore them apart by pushing them to the nth degree. They took the everyday and stretched it to the point of hilarious absurdity.

This was often a tought act to pull off even in its original format of eleven minutes' worth of skits, songs, and animation, so I can't say I'm that surprised that it didn't translate to the feature-length format. As anyone who's seen a representative selection of SNL-based films can tell you, characters and situations that work for a few minutes at a time often fall apart when transplanted into an hour-and-a-half-long, multi-act story. In this film's case, the story opens with the eponymous billion-dollar movie, Diamond Jim, which Tim and Eric have produced with the funding of the Schlaaang Corporation; it's a five-minute piece starring a Johnny Depp impersonator (Ronnie Rodriguez) wearing a diamond-encrusted suit who gives his true love a softball-sized diamond, and the money that didn't go into the film was spent on Tim and Eric's mansions, jewelry, douchey clothes and hair, orange tans, and personal guru, Jim Joe (Zack Galifianakis). The Schlaaang Corporation, represented by Tommy Schlaaang (Robert "shit from a duck's ass" Loggia) and Earle Swinter (William "dickless" Atherton), are understandably furious with their unmarketable product and demand the billion dollars returned or Tim's and Eric's heads on a silver platter. Our two "heroes" think they find a solution when they see an ad by shopping mall manager Damien Weebs (Will Farrell) offering a billion-dollar profit to anyone who can turn his decrepit mall around. They set out for the mall, which they find full of garbage, bizarre stores, equally bizarre denizens, and a man-eating wolf, but, in spite of these obstacles, Tim and Eric are determined to succeed.

This storyline offers a fair amount of potential for Tim and Eric's style of humor (especially the mall, of course, with the opportunity for lots of people and situations that could be funny for a few minutes without necessarily having to fit into a larger storyline). However, when the film got a laugh out of me it was almost never anything having to do with the plot, but rather isolated non-sequiturs of weirdness: the weird looks and terrible acting of their "Johnny Depp"; the announcement before Diamond Jim by "Chef Goldblum" (getting names wrong is a Tim-and-Eric staple going back to their first Adult Swim series, Tom Goes to the Mayor, which asked the question, "How many different ways can you misspell 'Tom Peters'?"); an ad for one of the mall's stores featuring Palmer "Sit on You" Scott; the weird appearances of Schlaaang's silent henchmen (Andy Spencer and Christopher Guckenberger), one of whom looks like God's botched attempt to replicate Mike Myers; and something as simple as the creepy, lingering smile of a delivery man (Harry Elmayan).

I wasn't surprised that Billion Dollar Movie could be funny in brief spurts, since that's exactly how Awesome Show operated, jumping briskly from one skit or interlude to the next and only needing to make them funny individually, without necessarily needing to make them cohere collectively. (Even the bits predicated on the ol' make-something-last-so-long-the-awkwardness-becomes-funny routine rarely overstayed their welcome.) However, the demands of feature-length storytelling, with a developing plot and defined characters, just don't gell with this style of comedy. One major flaw arising from this is the wide shifting from scene to scene of the roles that the Tim and Eric characters play: one minute Tim and Eric play the straight men against a crazy, comical character, the next they play the comical characters against a straight man, the next Tim plays it straight while Eric plays it crazy, the next vice versa. It makes sense to do this based on what each scene requires, but it doesn't based on what the story as a whole requires. Generally, the role of a straight man in a comedy is to be audience surrogate, the relatively normal "base line" through whom the humor is experienced. When the straight man changes unpredictably from scene to scene, it can disrupt how the audience absorbs what they're watching, as opposed to having a good idea where they stand with the characters when their roles are defined more consistently. In Billion Dollar Movie, we're constantly being asked to shift our perspective from Tim to Eric to third parties, and this weakens both the story and the overall humor.

In addition to such structural problems, Billion Dollar Movie also just isn't funny enough, even on a scene-by-scene basis. There are several scenes scattered throughout the film of Schlaaang and Swinter fuming at Tim and Eric's swindle and scheming to get back at them, scenes which seem to have been included less for humor than simply to remind the audience periodically of that element of the story. Awesome Show alums like John C. Reilly, Will Forte, and James Quall have roles of various sizes, but none of them are nearly as funny here as they were on that show. This is a particularly bitter disappointment in Reilly's case, whose Dr. Steve Brule was one of the highlights of Awesome Show; here he plays Taquito, a much put-upon mall denizen whose role is mostly limited to providing exposition and trying to milk a one-note gag of his being a sickly but kind-hearted Tiny Tim character. Perhaps the biggest unwelcome surprise was the difference in pace; while the show was brisk, sometimes to an almost manic degree, the film is often simply boring, with scenes dragging on with little comedic payoff. Having already established my Tim-and-Eric bona fides above as a fan of Awesome Show (and even of the drier, more story-based Tom Goes to the Mayor), I feel secure saying that Billion Dollar Movie just isn't that funny. It's not that I don't get the humor, because there just isn't all that much humor to get.

Trying to translate a piece of entertainment from one format to another is always a dicey proposition; that's especially the case when the new format is almost an order of magnitude longer than the original. Maybe the only way to translate the Tim-and-Eric magic into feature length was to follow the formula of the Jackass franchise and simply show one short skit or segment after another, like an hour-and-a-half-long episode of the show. I'm not saying that it was never possible for Billion Dollar Movie to have worked as a single, coherent narrative rather than a series of segments, I'm just saying that, given the film we got, I would rather have just watched an hour and a half of Awesome Show.

Phil Connors, Zen Sage

GROUNDHOG DAY

— THE GROUNDHOG SEES SPOILERS (though if you haven't already seen it, do yourself a big favor, crawl out from under that rock, and correct that oversight) —

After watching this exemplary product of the Murray-Ramis factory last night, I got to thinking, and I came to the conclusion that Bill Murray's character, Phil Connors, not only becomes a much better person by the end of the film (hardly a tough job, though, considering how he starts out), but in fact becomes, literally, the best person, a feat only possible thanks to the cosmic phenomenon trapping him for most of the story.

Once Phil finds himself cursed to relive February 2 over and over and over and over again, he passes through a number of psychological and emotional phases: he doesn't believe it; upon accepting it, he takes advantage of it for personal gain (robbing the armored car, seducing Nancy, etc.); growing bored of this, he acts dangerously and destructively; later, despair overtakes him, and he commits suicide countless times in hopes of escape, but never ceases waking up at 6 a.m. to Sonny and Cher on the radio. After having gotten everything he possibly could for himself out of this phenomenon, he starts using it for others. At first, of course, this manifests itself rather selfishly as well, in his attempts to win Rita's heart by learning everything he can about her to become her ideal man. (It's also possible that he senses that she might somehow be the key to lifting his curse.) Over time, he learns to say all the right things and make all the right moves, but even after getting her to fall for him his life is always still reset back to the previous morning.

Eventually, Phil begins using his virtually infinite knowledge of that February 2 genuinely to help and better the good people of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. He assists those in need and strives to brighten their day. Not only does he do this, but he does it knowing that any good he does will be undone, forgotten, and in need of doing once again the next time he wakes up: the boy will fall out of the tree again, the old women in the car will need their tire changed again, he'll have to buy all those insurance policies from Ned Ryerson again, he'll have to deliver his touching speech for the newscast again (while never coming across like he's saying it for the umpteenth time), his brother will need to be saved from choking again, the homeless man will need a good last meal and a warm place to die again. He knows what he's done—and how many times he's had to do it—but as far as the rest of the world is concerned, it's like it never happened.

It's estimated that Phil spends years, decades, possibly even millennia, reliving that same day, with nothing he does ever letting him see another day or letting any of this actions have any consequence for more than a matter of hours. After that long without change, and without any sign that will anything ever will change, I can't help but feel that Phil eventually just gave up trying to get out of his Groundhog Day time loop and accepted that he would live on eternally, stuck on the same day in the same town with the same people, without end. Nevertheless, despite the unimaginable frustration of knowing nothing he did, no matter how good, how selfless, would have any consequence, he continues to do good. The good he does is good in the purest sense: done not to benefit himself, or even to benefit others, but entirely and absolutely for its own sake, because it's good.

Of course, this level of benevolence is possible only because, unlike the rest of us, Phil's actions have been stripped of all but a few hours' consequence. Eventually, his life becomes a working embodiment of that ideal of many of the Indian philosophies, of acting without any desire or expectation, without any thought of outcome. Thus, he has achieved naturally, thanks to his unique circumstances, what the greatest sages could achieve only through the greatest effort and determination, the extinction of all desire and the willingness to do good—and moreover, to do it endlessly—with no consideration other than the good itself. When he finally wakes up beside Rita at the end, he hasn't just reached February 3; he's reached nirvana.

Gettin' Hitched

THE 39 STEPS

I've been trying the past couple years to broaden my acquaintance with the filmography of Alfred Hitchcock beyond just watching Psycho over and over again. I've seen Vertigo, Rear Window, The Birds, and Notorious, and they, along with Psycho, are some of the best films I've ever seen in every respect: storytelling, technique, performances, suspense, and, let's not forget, humor. There's always some kind of comic aspect to be found somewhere in his films, from the matronly patron fretting over humane pesticide in Psycho to the rarely seen newlyweds in Rear Window. Not only does it provide some much-needed lightening of the mood and balancing of the tone, but it goes a long way toward humanizing the characters, making us care about them more, and thus fear for them more. But no film of his that I've seen has showcased Hitchcock's comedic side as much as The 39 Steps.

We're introduced to our dashing young Canadian hero, Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), in a London music hall where patrons test the encyclopedic knowledge of "Mr. Memory" with often absurd questions (including the old man who keeps trying to ask his question even after shots are fired and the audience stampedes). He finds himself with a beautiful spy calling herself "Annabella Smith" (Lucie Mannheim), who claims to be trying to keep aeronautical secrets from being passed to a foreign power. (Structurally the film mirrors itself, beginning with a music hall followed by Hannay in the company of a woman, and ending with Hanny in the company of a woman followed by a music hall.) Annabella is soon murdered, but not before telling Hannay cryptically of "the Thirty-nine Steps" (perhaps the MacGuffiniest of all MacGuffins) and a man whom she was supposed to meet in Scotland. Now wanted for Annabella's murder, Hannay travels to Scotland to try to get to the bottom of the conspiracy and thereby clear his own name.

One great way that Hitchcock maintains the suspense is by constantly shifting Hannay's environment and whom he's with: from the music hall to his apartment, to the train to Scotland, to the cottage of the pious crofter (definitely a Calvinist, he) and his long-suffering young Glaswegian wife—and sorry to nitpick, but it would take a wee bit more than an afternoon's hike to get from the Forth Bridge to what's clearly supposed to be the Highlands—to Ard-na-Shelloch, and so on. He—and the audience with him—remains uncertain where he'll find himself next, and who he can trust there. I also liked how Hitch upset expectations; the foreign-accented femme fatale who freely admits her mercenary outlook is trustworthy, while plenty of respectable-seeming natives turn out to be traitorous foreign agents or their unsuspecting pawns.

There are also some great little filmmaking techniques and tricks sprinkled throughout, like the first shots of Hannay at the music hall where we don't see his face, the scream of the woman discovering Annabella's body blended with the whistle of the train Hannay's riding as he makes his escape, or the camera going from looking in the window of a moving car to suddenly stopping and watching the car drive off. They don't necessarily make the film more suspenseful, but they definitely make it more interesting and fun to watch.

As I mentioned before, The 39 Steps is shot through with humor; in fact, it's easily as much a comedy as a thriller. In that respect, I have to say the film it reminds me of the most is Pineapple Express; Dale and Saul are similarly on the run from a murderous conspiracy, but there are so many laughs that you almost forget the mortal danger they're in. In The 39 Steps, there's the aforementioned scene at the music hall, then Hannay's interaction with the milk man, the "unmentionables" salesmen and the old vicar on the train, and the (comedically ingenious) scene at the election rally. Then, when Hannay meets up (again) with the bizarrely appareled Pamela (Madeleine Carroll), the film becomes a quasi-screwball comedy, with much sexual-tension-infused witty bickering between an attractive young man and woman who can't help but find themselves in one zany situation after another. Though humor and romantic relationships are staples of Hitchcock's thrillers, The 39 Steps is the only one I've seen in which they're so central (except maybe the romantic aspects of Vertigo and Notorious, but there isn't nearly as much comedy in those).

I'm reminded of a story someone (I don't remember who) told about sharing an elevator with Hitchcock. The two of them were alone in the elevator; then, when more people started getting on, Hitchcock started into the middle of describing a gruesome murder scene with great detail and relish. Soon the elevator stopped, the doors opened, and the eavesdropping fellow-passengers hesitated a moment before leaving, not wanting to miss the end of his lurid tale. When Hitchcock and the storyteller were again alone in the elevator, the latter anxiously asked what happened next; but, as Hitch explained, nothing happened next, he just made it up on the spot to amuse himself with everyone else's reactions. Hitchcock clearly saw a natural link between humor and fear, between comedy and tragedy, and so was never afraid to infuse some humor into his thrillers, which only improved them. That's nowhere more evident than in The 39 Steps.

Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Awesome

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD

This has been kind of a weak summer movie season. That's not to say it's been a complete disappointment—Toy Story 3, MacGruber, I Am Love, and The Other Guys were all good (for very different reasons), Iron Man 2 and Predators were fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing The Expendables in the very near future—but going in there were really only two films I could honestly say I was really excited about: I've already seen one of them three times, and I just saw the other for the first time less than an hour ago. I can now say with complete confidence that those two definitely make the rest of the summer worth it.

Having just finished (as of last night) the sixth and final volume of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim saga, "Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour," and watched the great Edgar Wright's adaptation, I'm just astounded at what a perfect match these two artists, the graphic novelist and the filmmaker, are for each other. Both the Scott Pilgrim comics and Wright's work—Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz—combine a high-energy, cartoony aesthetic with interesting, realistic, full-bodied characters and genuine, honest stories about those characters' search for meaning and connection in life. Scott Pilgrim, a goofy, well-meaning but immature young man clumsily, painfully feeling his way into adulthood, fits right in with Tim, Daisy, Shaun, and Danny. However, despite the similarities, Wright isn't just reciting O'Malley's story but telling his own, and isn't afraid to make the characters his own. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is just as much an Edgar Wright film as it is a Bryan Lee O'Malley story.

— SCOTT PILGRIM'S PRECIOUS LITTLE SPOILERS (for both the comics and the film) —

That said, the film borrows very heavily from the comics, especially for its first two-thirds or so (covering roughly the first four volumes). During that part of the film, virtually every change Wright made was merely taking things out rather than adding his own material—though what's there, while originating with O'Malley, still bears Wright's distinct stamp. Despite how much from the comics Wright was able to cram into the film (without overdoing it or slowing down the pace), there are a number of elements that didn't make the cut: Ramona's glowing head, Knives Chau's father and Scott's old friend Lisa from vol. 4, most of the details about Scott's history with Kim and Envy (to which the film merely alludes), the trip to Honest Ed's in vol. 3, the recording of Sex Bob-omb's album, and Scott's battles with various robots in vol. 5. As the film progresses, though, it differs increasingly from the comics: Scott's battles against Roxy, the Katayanagi twins, and Gideon are very different, Envy's "weak point" behind her knees is transferred to Roxy, and Ramona's battle with Knives is moved from vol. 2 to the film's climax. I'm not really complaining or anything, it's just interesting to see the degree of faithfulness to the source material change over the course of the film.

Speaking (some more) of faithfulness to the source material, it's worth mentioning that the film was already in production before O'Malley finished the final volume (which was only released last month), so the two versions of the Scott Pilgrim saga's finale differ greatly. — ÜBER-SPOILAGE TO FOLLOW, OBVIOUSLY — What's interesting are the elements that the two versions share (but utilize in different ways): the NegaScott, the final showdown at the Chaos Theatre, Scott's death, his resurrection thanks to his 1-up. So there must have been some collaboration between O'Malley and Wright regarding these details. However, the overall "message" with which the story concludes differs significantly between O'Malley's version and Wright's. In vol. 6 of the comic, Scott comes to realize that the source of his immaturity is his unwillingness to address his past actions truthfully and learn from them; instead, he's always remembered his past in such a way that he's always the good guy and those he's hurt either were evil or weren't really hurt at all. Though alluded to throughout the series, it doesn't become explicit until Scott visits Kim in vol. 6, when she contrasts the reality of Simon Lee, her harmless high-school boyfriend Scott beat up to date her, with Scott's fantasized memory of a "villain" from whom he had to rescue her in vol. 2. By perpetually lionizing himself and demonizing or ignoring those he's hurt, he never had to change or improve; as Kim tells him, "if you keep forgetting your mistakes, you'll just keep making them again." That puts the entire premise of the series—"Scott Pilgrim vs. the World," the good guy forced to battle bad guys and win the day—into an entirely different light, as an expression of Scott's childish, selfish view of himself and the world. It's only when he owns up to his own failings that he's able finally to overcome Gideon and get another chance with Ramona. The film doesn't include this thematic element other than several references to Scott's being an irresponsible "heartbreaker" and his incredulity at this; instead, the lesson he learns is "self-respect," which involves his admitting to cheating on Knives with Ramona (and vice versa) but has more to do with his fighting his battles for his own reasons rather than just to win the girl. That's fine in itself, but it doesn't fit especially well with the failings we've seen Scott exhibit previously or with how he plans to go forward at the film's end; if anything, doing things for himself rather than others seemed to have been much the problem in his life, and in the end he still ends up winning the girl anyway. This doesn't really take away from the film, but it does make its conclusion a bit less meaningful and "earned" than the comic's. — BACK TO REGULAR SPOILAGE —

But what, you may be asking, about the film as its own beast, independent of O'Malley's comic? Pretty darn great. I'm already a substantial fan of Wright's work, and Scott Pilgrim fits right in: energetic, imaginative, hilarious, with real characters dealing with real issues. Though Scott isn't dramatically different from the kinds of characters Michael Cera generally plays, he isn't just channeling George Michael Bluth for the umpteenth time; Scott's much more of a spazzy slacker than the uptight, rather nebbish Bluth boy. Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Ramona is exactly the right melding of sexy, sympathethic, and cold, coming across, like O'Malley's Ramona, as multifaceted rather than schizophrenic. The rest of the cast is great too, especially Kieran Culkin as Wallace, Scott's gay room- and bed-mate. Strangely enough, while Sex Bob-omb frontman Stephen Stills mostly hangs in the background in the comics, I really liked him in the film (played by one Mark Webber). Each of the evil exes gets his (or her) moment to shine, except for the Katayanagi twins, though, to be fair, they don't make much of an impression in the comic either. My socks were thoroughly knocked off when the Vegan Police who showed up to exact vegan justice on Todd for his vegan transgressions were played by Tom Jane (who just wants his kids back!) and Clifton Collins (who just wants his testicle back!). (Funny, Jane appeared in an episode of Arrested Development with Cera, while Collins appeared in Mike Judge's Extract with AD alum Jason Bateman, so feel free to use that info the next time you're playing six degrees.) Since music is a pretty significant part of the story, it's a good thing that the original music composed for the film (by Beck, among others) happens to rock. And no mention of the film's music would be complete without saying how much it warmed my geeky little heart to hear samples from The Legend of Zelda, like mother's milk to one raised in bygone days on the NES.

Indeed, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is awesome, surprising no-one.

Awesome

'ô-sem

adjective

Origin: awe, from the Old Norse agi, "fright," + the suffix -some, from the Old English suffix -sum, related to sama, "same."

1. extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear.

2. extremely good; excellent.

3.

The one with the Jews, not the gays

A SERIOUS MAN. I am not the only one to get these titles mixed up! When they first announced the Oscar nominations, I saw a couple of blogs accidentally mention that Tom Ford's movie (more to come on that) was nominated for best picture. Ha! Anyhow, I come roaring back into the movie commenting with this response to your post on the Coen brothers' most recent film and as the first step in catching up. I've got a lot of work to do so this will be one of many short posts on this year's movies.

It has been months since I saw this movie, so my memories are admittedly a bit more rusty than I would prefer. You wrote in your post (which you have conveniently already done months ago so I will link to that should a reader need at least a bit more plot synopsis) about perspective and while I think that is possibly one way to approach it, that was not as much what I took from the movie. It seems to me with the prologue and the main story, it was about the Jewish experience as a whole and the inevitability of the struggles the people face. No matter how much things seem to come together, you might enter a house and get stabbed. Or that test might come back positive. Or a tornado might be just off in the distance (the most literal example). For the Jewish people -- and the movie quite clearly makes the heritage of its characters the most defining part of their lives -- that danger is an inevitable outcome. But perhaps I have been watching too much Lost.

Seeing as how I'm trying to keep this short, I will say not too much other than that I think this movie fits in well with other movies in the Joel and Ethan's canon that finds humor in the mundane and, in many ways, the painful. This movie, as with many of theirs, never seem like heavy experiences yet delve into some of the gravest situations, be they murder followed by wood chipper or, in this case, more death, public shame, and the ending of a marriage. It feel right in the middle for me of their two most recent films, which present the more extreme of their serious and comic -- the latter being Burn After Reading, which I found to be a bit too overplayed and not nearly humorous enough to excuse it. If found this movie to be more genuinely funny and although it might not have been quite as much of an achievement as No Country for Old Men (and watching Unforgiven a few nights ago had me itching to rewatch No Country), but it was another example of the Coen brothers' ability to make a movie -- Fargo comes to mind -- that can have enough integrity for its subject matter and respect for its audience to include a seemingly unrelated prologue and a, shall we say, non-crowd-pleasing ending yet still make a movie that is highly entertaining. That ability to find humor where one would never think of finding it is one of their greatest gifts.

The second-coming-of-age movie

ADVENTURELAND. THE GRADUATE. No this is not a post about a new coming-of-age movie about a 16-year-old boy who just wants to be a normal kid, but in addition to having an overworked single mother and absent father, he know has to come to terms with saving the world from sin. Although now I am imaging the second-coming involved in all sorts of roles, like the obvious Saved! in a from a few years ago in a gender-reversal situation, or possibly just J.C. himself singing "Somebody to Love (eternally)" with the kids from Glee.

But I digress. One of the most common storytelling archetypes is the coming-of-age story and the trend continues in film -- including in very two different way in a couple of this year's most discussed offerings, An Education and Precious (I would suggest staying tuned to this station for more on these in the coming days). My topic here is a less common, younger sibling that I'm calling the second coming of age. If the first occurrence comes with a young person realizing he/she is struggling to become an adult, the second occurs generally when the protagonist realizes -- generally post-college -- the reverse, that the grown-up world is not all its cracked up to be and perhaps he/she is not prepared for the world of adulthood. Having been through that time, and having less-than-fulfilling work in the immediate years after school, the topic has a certain resonance and I think I would say I'm a pretty good judge of their accuracy. Perhaps you are the same way. I would argue that this phenomenon itself has been growing for our generation as a whole, which is why I find it surprising that not just the best movie, but the most relevant movie was made in the 1960s: The Graduate (trailer).

Honestly the point of this movie is to write about how great that movie is an how miserable I am that no film since has captured that topic as well. Granted it is probably unfair to compare other movies to Mike Nichol's classic. Although most famous for its Mrs. Robinson plotline, a career-making performance by Dustin Hoffman, and a memorable soundtrack, what elevates the film from being simply a well-made, clever film to a cultural touchstone is how accurately it captures the theme. Nichol astutely chose to cast Hoffman instead of a WASPish actor as the novel depicts and crafts the story of a young man discovering he is out of place in his own community, his own family, and his own life. He finds himself in the situation he does because he is so lost and although I was neither alive in the 1960s nor dated one of my parents' friends, I can feel a great sense of empathy for Benjamin. Without quality filmmaking, it could have crossed over that dangerous line from honest and engaging to earnest. The Graduate triumphs because it never wallows in Benjamin's situation -- instead of hearing him whine about feeling out of place, we get to see him jump into a swimming pool in a diving pool surrounded by his parents' friends on his birthday. There is an actual story that exposes the themes of the movie instead of allowing the setup of a struggling post-college man dictate the events. That's what makes the movie timeless and after seeing it for the first time a few years ago, I could have been sworn it was written about my generation, not one older than my parents'.

Which brings me to the recent film, Adventureland (trailer), that prompted this post. It focuses on the same time in a young man's life but otherwise shares little more than the protagonist's nearly crippling awkwardness. Like Benjamin, James (Jesse Eisenberg -- or as I have heard him described, the guy they get when they can't afford Michael Cera) has just graduated from college but instead of departing on an engaging storyline, we simply have him dumped in an amusement park with mildly amusing characters as he whines about his predicament and looks to possibly lose his virginity with that fang-banger girl, Kristen Stewart. Benjamin is a character lost because he doesn't know how to fit in once he has left college, whereas I found myself watching James' interactions and wondering how he was functional enough to survive college socially. What 22-year-old does not think it is going to be a problem to go out on a date with a girl from work while trying to date another coworker? Or tell a girl in the first 10 minutes of a date about his (lack of) sexual experience? Sure this movie might be functionally a comedy (one could say the same about The Graduate, though), but there are too many scenes -- especially the last -- where it unsuccessfully walks that Apatowian line of funny movie with an emotional core to fully discount its attempts to be something more meaningful.

If Adventureland moves too much toward comedy, perhaps a closer relative is Garden State (trailer), a more serious movie that was commonly compared to The Graduate following its 2004 release. I personally remember it most for being a lot better than I expected, although in all honesty I thought it was going to be McAwful. Essentially it is the same setup as the aforementioned films except that the main character has taken a longer hiatus from home -- a good portion of high school and then a mostly failed attempt at acting that puts him at his mid-20s, I think -- and touches on the contemporary issues of psychology and overmedication, not to mention grief. Zach Braff, who wrote, directed and starred, does an affable job at building a mood and a good collection of scenes, but so much of it is too convenient and comes across as a film-school attempt. Although in many ways not as outlandish as Benjamin's affair with Mrs. Robinson, so much of the movie seems much less believe and built around making us see Andrew's isolation. This comes to a head in the final scene as well that swerves way too far into melodrama.

Which brings me around to my final conclusion about The Graduate is that by being more detached emotionally from what happens to its main character, it tells a much better story. The final scene of that movie is one of the more memorable of its decade, unlike the other two movies that left me wondering if even the good parts of the movie were supposed to be a build-up to an overly emotional crescendo. Contemporary film -- both in the large-scale action movies and especially the smaller, independent movies -- have been marked this decade by an emphasis on realism, frequently by borrowing aspects of documentary films. This often results in a detachment of the morality or the emotion from the plotline and allows the viewers to make judgments instead of the dialogue and the triumphant music doing it for them. Right now would be a perfect time for The Graduate to have been made (originally -- I am not advocating a remake!) and perhaps that is why it feels much more contemporary than either of those more recent films.

"A Serious Man": First Thoughts

A SERIOUS MAN

This won't be a full-blown review, analysis, or treatise, but just an initial thought or two about A Serious Man (trailer) while it's fresh on my mind.

Maybe the "first rabbi," Rabbi Scott (Simon Helberg), is right. Maybe it is all about perspective after all. That's my impression, at least right now, about what the film's abrupt, Sopranos-esque ending. Young Danny Gopnik (Aaron Wolff) spends the whole film worrying about preparing for his bar mitzvah, evading a beating from Mike Fagle (Jon Kaminski), and getting his head set back. In the end, however, he's left staring at a tornado a couple of blocks away and getting closer, as the Hebrew school teacher struggles to unlock the door to the basement. At the same moment, his father Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg) finds out the results, unspoken but undoubtedly bad, of the medical tests he took at the beginning of the film. In the face of serious illness or even of death, everything we've seen him enduring over the course of the film—divorce, Sy Ableman, tenure, Uncle Arthur's cyst, the Jolly Roger, "culture clash" with Clive Park, the neighbor's mowing habits, unwanted mail-order records, Mrs. Samsky, the goy's teeth, and F Troop—pales in comparison. Both father and son have worried about a multitude of problems that, in those final moments, suddenly shrink to insignificance in the face of impending death. Now that's perspective.

White Hat, Black Hat

THE INFORMANT!

Steven Soderbergh is an interesting filmmaker. Though I can't say he's one I particularly "follow" the way I do, say, the Coen Brothers, Aronofsky, or Nolan, I've seen a good deal of his filmography: sex, lies, and videotape, Kafka, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Ocean's Eleven (and probably one of the sequels too, I don't remember; I can't really tell them apart, honestly), Full Frontal, Solaris, Che. I don't actively seek him out, but I like most of what I've seen from him. His filmography is one that's hard to pin down; it seems all over the map not only in its subject matter, but more generally in a roughly even divide between the mainstream (not meant as a criticism) and the art-house. It seems strange to me that the director of sex, lies, and videotape, Solaris, and Che is the same as the director of Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich, and the Ocean's series. Though he can't exactly write his own meal ticket in Hollywood, I have a hard time believing it's just a matter of making multiplex fare in order to finance his more off-beat passion projects. Or maybe I'm completely wrong. I'll have to ask him the next time we hang out.

This isn't just an example of stream-of-consciousness blog-posting, the above paragraph does have a point. The point is that his most recent film, The Informant! (trailer), seems to have one foot in each of the two halves of Soderbergh's filmography. On the one hand, it's a general-release comedy with one of the biggest stars in Hollywood; on the other, it goes in some rather unexpected places and offers some interesting insights into the human condition.

The Informant! tells the true story—more or less—of Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), a mild-mannered senior executive at the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland. (The film tells us that we've probably never heard of ADM, but of course I have, as a viewer since childhood of The NewsHour, whose corporate sponsor is none other than the "supermarket to the world.") For reasons that remain ambiguous even by the film's end, in 1992 he tells the FBI about his company's illegal price-fixing schemes with competitors overseas and spends years gathering and reporting information to bring his colleagues down. Eventually, however, the tangled webs Whitacre's woven while trying to play both sides of the fence begin tripping him up more and more catastrophically.

The film's got a great mixture of intelligence and a rather goofy sense of humor. Though Whitacre's the chief source of the humor, Damon plays him with enough humanity to keep him from being a cartoon simpleton; he's often ridiculous, but also too much of an everyman for us not to see real people we know (and maybe a little of ourselves) in him. We're privy to Whitacre's thoughts—really a series of largely irrelevant stream-of-consciousness non-sequiturs—thanks to a voiceover, one of the best uses of voiceover outside of Woody Allen's body of work. It's got a breezy, light-hearted tone, reinforced by a wonderful, whimsical score by Broadway and film composer Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line, The Sting, Sophie's Choice); when Whitacre's voiceover mentions a Mexican restaurant, I could swear I heard the score go a little mariachi-esque for a second.

I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't say a few words about the cast. Wow. Scott "Quantum Leap" Bakula, Joel "The Soup" McHale, Tony "Buster Bluth" Hale, Melanie "sexy/heartbreaking stripper-dance in Away We Go (or, going further back, adolescent friendship with Kate Winslet ending in tragedy in Heavenly Creatures)" Lynskey, Paul F. "Mr. Show" Tompkins, Patton "Comedian of Comedy" Oswalt, Clancy "the Kurgan, Cpt. Hadley, Sgt. Zim, Kelvin Inman, really, take your pick" Brown, Tom "Biff Tannen" Wilson, Andrew "Eastbound and Down" Daly, and, last but not least, Tommy and Dick "the Smothers Brothers" Smothers. I think that speaks for itself.

— CORN GOES IN ONE END AND SPOILERS COME OUT THE OTHER —

Where The Informant! manages not just to be "Abbott and Costello Meet The Insider" is its examination of human psychology. Beneath the superficial layer of wholesome, middle-American, "awe shucks and golly gee" simplicity, Whitacre is a whirlwind of mixed motivations, slimy underhandedness, and self-deception of Shakespearean proportions. About halfway through, Whitacre admits to his FBI handlers that he's been embezzling millions of dollars from ADM through fraud, forgeries, and kickbacks; the film then largely shifts gears from ADM's wrongdoing to Whitacre's and its repercussions on the ADM case and Whitacre's life. His status as a government witness becomes compromised, and he becomes the subject of an investigation of his own.

This, of course, goes completely against Whitacre's own idealized conception of himself, according to which he's the good guy—0014, "twice as smart as 007"—battling the corporate thieves straight out of the Grisham and Crichton novels he mentions. He says at one point that there are "white hats" and "black hats" in the world, good guys and bad guys. This stark dichotomy is obviously belied by his own behavior, claiming to act solely out of a sense of decency while raking in ill-gotten gains and expecting to take over ADM once his colleagues are gone. We eventually see that telling lies comes just as naturally as telling the truth when it coincides with his flattering self-image, from arranging FBI stings to setting up off-shore accounts, falsely accusing an FBI agent of battery, and even telling people that he was an orphan (which he had heard made people more sympathetic). The almost childlike naïveté he projects disguises a savvy that no doubt largely accounts for his meteoric rise at ADM. (The way he deftly handles an unexpected crisis during a sting, when someone wants to move the meeting from the bugged suite to a larger one, by pretending to call the hotel front desk and casually carrying on half a conversation definitely raised a red flag for me that this guy wasn't what he seemed.)

Instead of just giving us a comedic version of the boilerplate whistleblower drama, Soderbergh crafted a film that examines the lies we tell others and, perhaps even more importantly, ourselves. Mark Whitacre may be an extreme example, but as I said above, the Whitacre type is quite recognizable. The fact that a pathological liar and guilt-free swindler rose to senior management in a respected "Fortune 500" company may be the film's most damning indictment of corporate culture, even more so than the ADM price-fixing around which it ostensibly centers.

OK, I get it. That doesn't make your movie good

BRUNO. If there’s one thing Sacha Baron Cohen has contributed to our culture, it is most definitely grossing out audiences more than any other mainstream filmmaker around. With Borat and now Bruno (trailer), he has shown no, how should I say, modesty. If there's another contribution he has made, the next most significant would be to challenge his audience in a more subversive manner than just about any other comedian around today. If Bruno fails to live up to Borat, and it does, it is because in an attempt to be yet more exclusive in his comedy, he seems to have limited the “joke” more to his own entertainment than ours.

What made Borat so good was that, first of all, it was hilarious. The shocking humor, however, certainly ran much deeper than gags and was aimed at confronting people’s issues with Muslims and foreigners in general. It made us both laugh at the regular people we saw on the screen and at the same time question our own right to judge them as they judged the Borat character. He spent more time exposing people’s prejudice than ours, however, and so for that reason it was just inclusive enough to be a enjoyable movie experience for a certain segment of the population (meaning those not in a rural or southern area of the country for starters). That and it focused more on religion and ethnicity, which Americans are generally more comfortable talking about than sexual orientation, which he tackles in Bruno.

Again Baron Cohen recycles a character from "Da Ali G Show," which aired on HBO here in the States. Unlike that show and his previous film, he seems more interested in challenging his audience than his uninformed "cast." There are a few times when he confronts people’s issues with homosexuality -- notably a hunting trip with some rednecks and a visit with a couple of pastors who aim to turn gay people straight -- but he didn’t seem to really outsmart these people at all but instead made them just uncomfortable for our amusement. His most effective scene was a rather out-of-place set of interviews with stage parents trying to get their babies into a photo shoot and offering them up to do all sorts of inappropriate and dangerous behavior. This part worked well because he got the people to say outrageous and reprehensible things instead of making them squirm while he said them. The rest of his standard confrontational-style setups seemed, well, either too set-up (as in fake) or unmemorable. The much talked about scene with Rep. Ron Paul seemed to be included more just because he could than to achieve any sort of story-telling purpose.

The other attempts at humor revolved around him trying to gross out the audience and hope they find it funny. Like the exercise bike with a dildo attached, the choreographed demonstration of his favorite sex positions, and a shot of his penis flapping around and then eventually talking. And comments that made one cringe more than laugh. Most of these weren’t particularly funny, but I imagine to him they are because what he was really doing was using the audience watching his film as the people he exposes. He wants us to be grossed out by these comments and site gags and therefore expose our own homophobia in the literal sense of the word -- being afraid, not discriminatory, toward gay men. In a way this is more subversive than Borat and he is challenging his audience even more so in a way that ensures even fewer people get the joke. Perhaps that's his way of not imitating himself.

In a way I think it has worked and exposed how unprepared our culture is to deal with gay men (I exclude lesbians here because so does the movie) in a mature way -- even more so than foreigners. A number of gay-rights groups have come out hard against it calling it a minstrel show and it much a guarantee that conservatives would not approve of the movie. Even a number of reviewers have said that a movie cannot be a satire because it really just exploits stereotypes instead of commenting on them. Both these gay-rights advocates and reviewers don't get it. By accusing it of using stereotypes that are playing into his game and allowing him to make his point: they think there is something wrong with the character because at heart they are not really all that comfortable seeing flamboyantly gay actions on screen whether it be because of inherent homophobia or a movement of many "mainstream" gay-rights groups to promote assimilation instead of acceptance of "gay" culture to the point that they would object to what is obviously a hyperbolic representation. I could imagine a character that is unrealistically masculine or heterosexual (as even more respected action heroes, like Bond, usually are) would not get the same treatment by reviewers, audiences, or advocacy groups.

In the end, though, I think I got his point but I don’t know that it necessarily made the movie a success. Borat was a genuinely funny movie that I can enjoy on repeat viewings. The scene where he brings the woman the shit in a bag, for instance, was downright brilliant from the minute he walked into those people’s home. I’m sure he’s laughing his ass off seeing people’s reaction to his more recent movie. And perhaps if I watched people watch the movie, I could have the same experience of laughing at their reaction. But I can’t. So as a thought experiment it was great, but as a movie -- especially one whose aim is to be funny -- it just doesn’t pull it off. The reason Borat worked was because the humor and the social commentary were top notch. In Bruno he may have raised his social commentary a step higher, but he did so without making a quality movie to make this point.

The Day the Clown Cried 2

FUNNY PEOPLE

I don't want the post title to give the wrong impression. Funny People isn't "so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy . . . so wildly misplaced," as Harry Shearer described Jerry Lewis's never-released Holocaust comedy The Day the Clown Cried. It's actually quite a good movie, if not Apatow's best then certainly his most mature. (I mean "mature" in the artistic sense; don't worry, the dialogue is just as scatalogical as in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.) However, the Apatovian balance between humor and drama is tilted markedly toward drama in Funny People. Whether that makes it a better movie or a worse one will probably be much debated among Apatow fans. In my opinion, it merely makes it a different animal from what we've seen from Apatow before, and so should be judged on its own terms, not on The 40-Year-Old Virgin's or Knocked Up's. And according to those terms, it's a very touching, heart-felt film, but one that also happens to be really funny when it wants to be.

Ira (Seth Rogan) is a struggling LA stand-up comedian (so struggling that his actual income comes from a job at a supermarket deli), living with two other comedians (Jason Schwartzman and Jonah Hill) whose careers seem to be going somewhere, unlike Ira's. This begins to change when he meets movie-star comedian George Simmons (Adam Sandler, in many respects playing a thinly veiled version of himself), who hires him to write stand-up material for him, act as his personal assistant, and generally do whatever the spoiled celebrity wants him to do (including sitting beside his bed and talking to him to help him to fall asleep). Ira soon discovers that his comic idol isn't just past his prime creatively (George's filmography (examples) is eerily similar to Sandler's in its dubious quality) and suffering from a serious case of middle-aged-celebrity ennui, but also dying from a rare blood disease. However, the just-might-work treatment his doctors have him on ends up working—they explicitly show this in the trailers, so there's no way that's a spoiler—and George uses his new lease on life to reconnect with Laura (Leslie Mann), the love of his life who left him and is now married to an often absent, questionably faithful husband (Eric Bana). Ira, however, comes to feel torn between his loyalty to his idol/employer/friend and his moral qualms about breaking up a family for self-centered, undependable George's sake.

As I said above, while all of Apatow's movies mix comedy and drama, Funny People leans much more heavily toward the dramatic side; not only that, but for much of the movie the drama is fairly dark, dealing with George's illness and what he expects to be his last months of life. That doesn't make Funny People a black comedy, because it doesn't derive its humor from its dark subject matter; rather, the stand-up-comedian humor and the approaching-death drama simply exist side by side. This could have made the movie schizophrenic, with disastrously wide shifts of tone between funny and sad, but Apatow wisely gives primacy of place to the drama and allows the humor to supplement it naturally and organically. There aren't really comedy set-ups, like the speed-dating or drive-home-with-Leslie-Mann scenes in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, just funny dialogue and interactions (in addition to the actual stand-up, of course). Lest this be read as not giving the movie's humor its due, let me emphasize that the humor is really, really good; everybody's funny, from Rogan, Sandler, and Hill to more surprising comedic quarters like Bana (I knew he started out in comedy back in Australia, but I've never seen that material; I may have to rectify that now).

Though the movie's drama ostensibly comes from George's illness and how he and those around him deal with it, much of its poignancy actually comes from its depiction of professional comedy, in which Sandler, Rogen, Mann, and Apatow himself have all participated. Sandler and Apatow lived together in the late '80s while both were struggling stand-ups—the movie opens with a video of their actual prank-calling hijinks together—before Sandler landed SNL and Apatow devoted himself to behind-the-camera work. They, and others they knew and worked with, spent years working on their material and honing their delivery, struggling to make ends meet (by, for instance, living with other comedians, like Ira and his roommates), dreaming of making it one day. While Ira lives at one end of the stand-up way of life, George lives at the other; a decade or more after hitting the big time, he has little to look back on except a series of high-concept movies he's half-embarrassed by, a big empty house, no real friendships (despite all the fellow-celebrities he socializes with; this is one cameo-heavy movie), and memories of how alive he felt climbing up to where he is now. When I called this movie Apatow's most mature movie, I meant it both in its mechanics—its confidence in not needing to bombard the audience with humor and giving center stage to the dramatic aspects—and in its subject matter—nostalgia, regret, appreciation for the little things in life. It should surprise no one who watches this that it was made by a man entering his 40s.

I don't know how fans of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, or of the myriad other projects with which Apatow has been involved to one degree or another, will react to Funny People. The humor's still there, and it's very good, but it's there to augment a dramatic story, instead of the drama being there to tie the comedic elements together. And the drama succeeds just as the humor does, in large part due to how deeply personal it comes across, for both Apatow and Sandler. (Maybe I'm just projecting my views of most of Sandler's movies, but I can't help but see scenes like George watching videos of his old '80s stand-up autobiographically as Sandler saying, "I used to be good, I used to experiment and really put myself out there. When did I get content with collecting paychecks?") Those looking for a duplicate of Apatow's prior movies might be disappointed, but those looking for a heart-felt, poignant, bittersweet film that also happens to be funny as all get out should be well-pleased.

P.S. — One respect in which Funny People stands out is the amount, and quality, of pre-release viral marketing they produced. In addition to the George Simmons movies linked above, there's a website dedicated to Ira's more successful roommate, said roommate's crappy sitcom, and the stand-up of one of Ira's particularly untalented (and so, of course, very popular) fellow-comedians, played by the great Aziz Ansari. Enjoy.

Refighting the Revolutionary War

TRAFFIC

THE OFFICE

Or the War of 1812. Or the Trent Affair.

As I have seen neither State of Play, the British TV miniseries nor the American film, I obviously don't have much to say about them. I will make a couple comments. First, I'll probably see the miniseries at some point (it probably won't be that soon, though, considering how long my Netflix queue is already), if for no other reason than what looks like an incredible cast: Bill Nighy, Kelly Macdonald, James McAvoy, Polly Walker. (Afraid I don't recognize David Morrissey or John Simm.)

Also, I can't say I share your feelings about Russell Crowe. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that you find him "irritating." I agree that a lot of his films—A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, A Good Year—are too sentimental and, as you said, "earnest," but I guess I just avoid those ones for the most part and go to his less Oscar-baiting films—L.A. Confidential, Master and Commander, 3:10 to Yuma, American Gangster. I'm not saying he's my favorite actor and I have pictures of him all over my room or anything, I'm just curious why you don't like him much.

The main thing I wanted to talk about, though, as you may have been able to tell from this post's title, is looking at the different ways that the same material is approached in British and American productions. There are innumerable examples of this phenomenon, going back to the first American production of Shakespeare; for every positive example, there have been more than a few negative examples, like Life on Mars, The Ladykillers, or McG's abortive remake of Spaced. Rather than dwell on those, I'll take a look at a couple relative successes, Traffic and The Office.

I haven't seen Traffik, the five-episode 1989 British miniseries on which Soderbergh's 2000 film Traffic is based, but, based on your description of the two versions of State of Play, it sounds like something similar took place with this British-to-American adaptation as well. Don't get me wrong, I think Traffic was a good film, I just see it falling into the "Big Issues" problem you mentioned. (Of course, for all I know the British miniseries did too.) While it does a good job of showing the complexity and interconnectedness involved in the drug-trafficking and drug-control systems, it also depicts some elements—especially in the Michael Douglas parts—in overly straightforward, message- or dilemma-driven terms. Douglas's character comes to believe that drug addiction needs to be dealt with through understanding rather than crack-downs; Benicio del Toro's character discovers the extent of the corruption in the Mexican war on drugs; Don Cheadle's character gets his man in the end, despite the murders of his partner and the prosecution's chief witness. While it makes for some entertaining storytelling, it presents things so straightforwardly that, like what you said about the American State of Play, it doesn't leave you with a lot to think about (other than, maybe, "Did she do the right thing?" with regard to Catherine Zeta-Jones's character).

Turning to another British-to-American adaptation, the American version of The Office is obviously very different from the British original. (I say "obviously" because I assume you've seen it, Matt. If you haven't, drop what you're doing and rectify that immediately.) Despite its superficial similarities to the original—the setting, the main characters, the faux-reality-show documentarian style—it takes a much simpler, sitcom-y approach. The clearest example of this is the shows' respective bosses, David Brent (Ricky Gervais) and Michael Scott (Steve Carell). Michael Scott is dorky, clueless, and generally incompetent, but his heart's usually in the right place, and the American series often gives him opportunties to demonstrate this. David Brent, on the other hand, has virtually no redeeming qualities, is almost uniformly selfish and inconsiderate, and when he's fired at the end of the second series I had a hard time not thinking "good riddance" (even though he was the funniest character, and his departure meant the end of the show). (He only redeems himself, slightly, at the end of the Christmas special.) As with Traffic, I don't mean to sound like I dislike the American version, it's actually one of my favorite shows; it's just that while it's a great sitcom, the original's a work of sheer genius, largely because of the harder edge the latter is willing to take with its boss character.

I can't help but think that a great deal of the difference between British television and American television—as can be seen most clearly in examples of direct adaptation like The Office—is due to structural differences as well as creative ones. A great number of British TV series aren't what we would think of as series, but as miniseries with only a limited number of episodes. Whereas American shows are usually open-ended stories of often two dozen or so episodes per season, made with the expectation of renewal for addition seasons, British shows (or at least the one's I'm familiar with) are made one series (i.e., season) at a time without expectation of renewal. (Even when they do get another series, it isn't always immediately; for example, there was a year-long hiatus between the first series (1999) and the second series (2001) of Spaced.) And each series is much shorter as well—six-episode series for The Office, seven- for Spaced—requiring much greater concision and economy of storytelling. This ends up meaning that British shows tend to have a lot less unnecessary fat than their American counterparts. Given the amount of story, characterization, and humor in the British Office, it still amazes me that it was all done in only twelve episodes and the two-part Christmas special. So, in comparison to American television, British television (at least the examples I've seen) tends to be much leaner and more carefully structured, since they can't afford to waste a single episode.

But in the end, I think we can all agree that Russell Crowe is too old to play Ben Affleck's college roommate, and that Ben Affleck is too Ben-Affleck-y to play a member of Congress.