Q2 Review Purge

Howdy, folks! You may have noticed that Popcorn Culture hasn’t updated in over a week. I’m very sorry for that, but I also have a very good reason. I’ve been in a midsummer frenzy, packing up my apartment, job hunting, prepping season 2 of Scream 101 (big announcements are on their way), And I just spent all of last weekend working on the set of All the Creatures Were Stirring, the feature film debut of my friend Rebekah McKendry, which I’m absolutely thrilled about. And then this weekend was my birthday and volunteering for Blumhouse at the ScareLA haunted house convention. All of these things, you may notice, are not formally considered “writing this blog.”

Popcorn Culture isn’t going anywhere, but in this scheduling melee, I’ve decided to once more unclog my backlog by releasing atypically brief reviews of films I’ve watched in previous weeks (and months, ugh that I haven’t had time to give my full attention to. It was either that or call a plumber. Let’s get started!

Pinocchio

Year: 1940

Supervising Directors: Hamilton Luske & Ben Sharpsteen

Cast: Dickie Jones, Christian Rub, Mel Blanc

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

A lonely woodcarver builds a marionette named Pinocchio that he wishes was his son. His wish is granted, breathing life into the puppet, but Pinocchio must prove his integrity before he becomes a Real Boy.

I know, I know. I should never have made that grand statement that I’d be marathoning every movie in the Disney canon. That was an incredibly foolish thing to so, given my track record for successfully completing marathons. But I did get a step or two further down the trail from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Pinocchio is a massive improvement on Snow White’s sometimes spotty animation, the beautiful backgrounds and consistent character designs holding up much better under modern scrutiny.

Unfortunately, the story isn’t quite there. This is a film filled with incident, but there’s not really any rhyme or reason to its plot. Pinocchio is launched through a series of visually compelling and frequently terrifying vignettes with absolutely no connective tissue. The film completely forgets the bit about his nose rowing when he lies after one scene, and Monstro devours Gepetto entirely offscreen. When you need to have other characters explain to one another what’s happening in the plot, you know there’s some deep structural damage there.

But in a nascent medium like feature animation, story is only half the battle. Pinocchio’s ridiculously advanced sense of camera mechanics and framing in a hand-drawn medium is at the height of the craft, so Pinocchio’s a must-see for artists of all kinds. Like they haven’t already seen it. Plus, it’s weirdly obsessed with butts, so there’s that.

Rating: 6/10

Fantasia

Year: 1940

Supervising Directors: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr., Norman Ferguson, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, & Ben Sharpsteen

Cast: Leopold Stokowski, Deems Taylor, Corey Burton 

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

A series of short form animation pieces set to classical music.

Talk about not having a plot! Fantasia takes Pinocchio’s slack script and completely demolishes it, replacing it with a flurry of pure visual mayhem. A mind-bending blend of animation live action, and symphonic music, Fantasia was like nothing that had ever been seen before or since, perhaps Walt Disney’s greatest artistic triumph. I, of course, am a heathen, so I’m bored silly by it.

I’m not well equipped to handle non-narrative film or non-lyrical music, though I do recognize that this is an excellent example of both. It’s a glorious burst of pure animation imagination, informing the look and feel of dozens of Disney features in the years to come with its vibrant colors, fantastical animal designs, and graceful sense of motion. The mythological sequences are a little too twee to hold my attention, though once again Disney doesn’t stray from full tilt horror, depicting ghastly creations like the Chernabog in “Night on Bald Mountain” or the surprisingly tense flood sequence facing poor Mickey in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

I definitely forgot there were dinosaur fights in Fantasia, so that part was cool, but by far my favorite segment is an early piece using abstract color and line work to depict the emotional movements of a composition. It’s a gloriously compelling segment that is the closest anyone has ever come to a visual depiction of sound. And then there’s fairies and hippos and crap for like two hours. Like any anthology, which is undoubtedly what this is, the sum is much less than certain parts of its whole.

Rating: 6/10

Not Another Teen Movie

Year: 2001

Director: Joel Gallen

Cast: Chyler Leigh, Jaime Pressly, Chris Evans 

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In a parody of 80’s and 90’s high school rom-coms, a popular jock is dared to make the indie rebel girl into prom queen material and falls in love with her along the way.

Remember the massive run of “____ Movie” parody flicks made up of pop culture offal and shattered dreams that ran in bulk from the early to mid-2000’s? Yeah, I try to forget about them too. But now we live in a world where those movies have been diverted from theaters and are pumped directly into Netflix (Tooken, anyone?), so we can look back on America’s unhealthy obsession with some degree of clarity and moral high ground. Let’s just pretend we didn’t give A Haunted House enough money to earn a sequel.

This is a low bar here, but among the Scary Movies and Date Movies and Meet the Spartanses, one movie actually stands out as being not quire so terrible as all that: Not Another Teen Movie. Perhaps it’s due to the presence of latent superstar Chris Evans, who brings a delightful blend of steely overconfidence and goofy charisma to the role. Perhaps it’s the soundtrack, which cherry picks the most instantly likeable 80’s hits from Brennan’s Bin of Beloved Pop Classics. Or perhaps it’s because the film actually has a damns sense of focus, parodying the teen movie genre as a coherent whole rather than winging off in random directions in pursuit of hot topics and trends from the millisecond it was released.

The obvious pitfalls are still present (whole scenes are lifted from other movies almost untouched, ands some of the humor is just too random to make heads or tails of) but Not Another Teen Movie is striving to be an actual parody, using elements of its genre, and it’s intermittently successful. That makes it infinitely better than even its closest competition. The fact that there are a few laugh-out-loud jokes that don’t cop from other movies and a handful of trenchant, actually analytical observations on the genre means that this movie is the Citizen Kane of its cycle. Even if it sports a totally random, ill-conceived musical number and a deeply boring football scene. Although, to be fair, pretty much every high school movie has a boring football scene, so they got that right too.

Rating: 6/10

Mean Girls

Year: 2004

Director: Mark Waters

Cast: Lindsay Lohan, Jonathan Bennett, Rachel McAdams

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A new girl at school is coerced into infiltrating the evil popular clique to take them down, but she unwittingly becomes one herself.

Reviewing Mean Girls is a challenging undertaking as a millennial. The film is such a zeitgeisty hit that it barely reads as a movie anymore. It’s just a carousel of Tumblr gifs, Twitter bios, and whispered quotes in the back of classrooms. But it has gotten that way for a reason. It’s a damn good movie. Well, it’s a damn good comedy.

The script is witty and sharp, with a plot loose enough to allow the characters to flourish yet still keep track of the throughline. The punchlines show off that then-undiscovered Tina Fey pop, and the characters watch Friday the 13th Part 2 on Halloween, so they clearly have their heads screwed on straight. With a gratuitously fantastic ensemble and a Lindsay Lohan in her prime to give voice to the sharp screenplay, Mean Girls can’t help but be a winner.

The actual filmmaking is totally cardboard and anonymous, but who the hell cares? Mean Girls is the last great teen movie (well, Easy A gives it a run for its money, but still), and its clever premise is both a generation-defining clash of the high school classes and a sweetly powerful movie about the damage teen girls can cause to one another and why.

Rating: 9/10

The Last Five Years

Year: 2014

Director: Richard LaGravenese

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Jeremy Jordan, Tamara Mintz 

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A relationship is shown out of order in a series of musical numbers depicting its inception, triumphs, pitfalls, and eventual destruction.

Sometimes a movie is all about performances. It’s a good thing, too, because without Jeremy Jordan and out-of-left-field musical prodigy Anna Kendrick, The Last Five Years would crumple like a bouncy castle in a power outage. The movie is essentially (500) Days of Summer cross-pollinated with an opera, and though its tone management is ferociously askew (Kendrick is saddled with an Adele album’s worth of ballads, with Jordan receiving all the poppy, high energy stuff), it’s a small-scale love story that lives and dies on the actors’ ability to apply human emotion to a battery of arbitrary musical numbers, which they do with aplomb.

There are some intensely memorable longform musical sequences at play here, but The Last Five Years is crippled by a devastating problem: It’s pointless. The out-of-order gimmick is but a lark, and we leave this couple having gained no particular insight into why their story is worth telling. The only reason it’s not told in chronological order is that no musical could have been so mismanaged as to backload so many weepers. This is a vehicle for two delightful young performers, not a necessary entry into the cinematic canon of doomed relationships.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1684

Snorty Forties

Year: 2015

Director: Jason Moore

Cast: Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Hey, remember Sisters? It’s that movie that you haven’t seen yet because it came out the same day as Star Wars. Well, it happened, and the triumphant reunion of comedy soul sisters Amy Poehler and Tina Fey has commenced. Throw in newly minted comedy star John Cena, the director of Pitch Perfect, and a massive quantity of cast members hemorrhaged from Saturday Night Live, and you have a movie that couldn’t help but be funny in spit of itself. Unfortunately, it’s almost exclusively funny in spite of itself, but this is 2016. We takes what we gets.

I mean, between this and, say, Ride Along 2, it’s not exactly Sophie’s Choice.

Sisters tells the story of the Ellis sisters, Maura (Amy Poehler) and Kate (Tina Fey). Maura is a nurse who has her life together, except for the fact that she’s still reeling from a messy divorce. Kate is an abrasive screw-up with no home, no job, and a teen daughter (Madison Davenport) who gets fed up with her and has been living away from home for several months, not telling her mom where she is. Which Kate gets angsty about rather than calling the cops, because this movie was written by somebody who clearly doesn’t have children, or possibly is only vaguely aware that people tend to care about the smaller humans that grow inside them.

Anyway, the sisters find out that their parents (James Brolin and Dianne West in what might not be the laziest performances of their careers, but certainly the drunkest) are selling their childhood home and decide to throw one last house party to relive the glory days of high school. Maura hopes to let her tightly wound hair down and get with hunky neighbor James (Ike Barinholtz) while Kate is looking to forget her troubles before she has to face her sad, 30 Rock-less reality once more.

Blerg.

As a story, Sisters is pretty routine. Two different people learn to accept one another’s realities and face the challenges of growing up. It’s not Shakespeare. Actually… Come to think of it, it’s kind of like Taming of the Shrew. There’s nothing new under the sun, man. It gets points for going with a climax far different than the course of the movie was suggesting, but it loses those points immediately because that climax is idiotic and raises the stakes ludicrously high for a party comedy. Plus, it’s mighty embarrassing when the predictable ending you don’t go with is actually better.

As a scripted comedy, Sisters is pretty routine. There are a series of gross-out gags, somebody accidentally ingests way too much of a certain nasal narcotic, and hijinks ensue. Comedy thrives on the unexpected, and there’s a crippling drought of surprise to be found in the film’s comedic structure. And while I’m thinking about it, the denouement is as idiotic as the climax, so there’s that.

Don’t you just love movies where you can fall asleep for the final half hour and not miss anything?

As a string of gags, Sisters is not pretty routine. Betcha you weren’t expecting that. While the structure is unambitious swill, the moments where it lets the cast breathe and be themselves produce a bevy of bite-sized gags that are invariably the best thing about the movie. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are comic sweethearts for a reason, and when they can break from the script and scrounge up loose laughs, it absolutely works. Sparkling improvisations and clever line readings pepper Sisters, rendering it funnier than it really ought to be.

A lot of the film’s best comedy comes from the juxtaposition of men and women in their 40’s in a typically high school-based narrative style. You’d think those would be the entire point of the movie, but you would be wrong. Luckily, converting what should have been front and center into a sort of stunted B-story concentrates those moments into fewer but stronger nuggets. It’s like an Easter egg hunt for laughs. There might be long segments of searching, but when one appears, it’s always received with a burst of elation. Also, it is way the hell too long.

Without its cast (especially Bobby Moynihan, Maya Rudolph, and John Cena), Sisters would be lost in the dark. But it just goes to show how much the right group of people can elevate flat material. Unfortunately, that material is, necessarily, still wholly present in the film, which is why Sisters is charming but mostly a dud. Have it on in the background while you’re folding laundry or something. It’s amusing but it doesn’t demand your full attention.

TL;DR: Sisters is an unambitious comedy saved by a strong cast.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 801

I See You Shiva With Anticipation

Year: 2014

Director: Shawn Levy

Cast: Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Jane Fonda

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

There are three types of indie movies. 1) Films which showcase a brilliant artist who is given short shrift in Hollywood for no good reason. 2) Films which showcase a dreadful artist who is given short shrift in Hollywood for a very good reason. And 3) Films that attempt to be indie and meaningful because they know that's cool now, but they're directed by the guy who did Real Steel and Cheaper by the Dozen.

Guess which category This Is Where I Leave You falls under. 

Now I'm not saying that director Shawn Levy is a terrible artist. No way no how. I'm just saying that his pedigree (which also includes The Internship and all three Night at the Museum films) in no way prepares him to treat this film's material with the delicacy that its demanding tonal shifts deserve. It would take a lot of skill to finesse the low key dramedy of Jonathan Tropper's source novel into even mildly diverting cinema, and Levy just doesn't have the practice.

Well, I guess Ben Stiller and his museum buddies are KIND of like a dysfunctional Jewish family.

This Is Where I Leave You tells the story of the Altman family, which is brought together by the death of a patriarch. His last wish was his wife and kids to sit shiva, forcing them to remain in proximity with one another for the first time in years. 

The most important member of this family (in terms of screen time, not interest) is Judd Altman (Jason Bateman), a bitter man who just discovered that his wife was cheating on him with his boss. This causes some super indie problems for him, because he has exactly followed his plan for how his life should be, but it isn't bringing him happiness. A chance encounter with Penny (Rose Byrne), an old flame, reminds him that sometimes love can be messy, especially if you're in a movie that premiered at TIFF.

The rest of his family includes Wendy (Tina Fey), who has a kid and is married to a neglectful businessman despite the fact that she's in love with a brain-damaged neighbor inexplicably named Horry (Timothy Olyphant); Paul (Corey Stoll), who is a straight-laced square failing to have a baby with his wife Annie (Kathryn Hahn); Phillip (Adam Driver), who is the baby of the family, a hopeless lothario, and a perennial screwup who somehow convinced a beautiful psychiatrist named Tracy (Connie Britton) to fall in love with him; and their mother Hillary (Jane Fonda), who just got a boob job. 

Yay! Isn't it gross when old people show interest in sex? Judd certainly seems to think so, according to the immense amount of screentime spent on him staring at his mother's chest in revulsion.

Them old broads be crazy, amirite?

It's certainly exciting to see a depiction of the interactions and customs of a Jewish family in the modern, secular world. But it would be more exciting if most of them were actually Jewish or gave half a flying Pop-Tart about the implications of their minority faith on the subtext. 

There's a smattering of funny, charming moments, largely thanks to the abundance of funny, charming actors. And the drama is handily handled (to coin a nifty phrase), especially by Fey and Bateman, who have the heaviest of burdens on their shoulders. But despite the best efforts of the cast (all of whom are genuinely enjoyable save for Driver's perplexing emphasis on shouting his lines and Byrne's hard swallowing of her natural Australian accent), This Is Where I Leave You falls flat as a pancake.

In all fairness to Rose Byrne, who I love, her character is so indie vanilla that I can't imagine what else there would be to do other than babble lines in half-cocked American. You gotta make things enjoyable for yourself.

The biggest problem with the film is that it has no idea what to do with its prodigious cast. The performers are all proven talents with mid-level star power just dripping off of them, but the plot only has the attention span for at most three protagonists. The sprawling number of celebrities in the background steals focus from the characters that we're supposed to care about, and the imbalanced plot threads prevent us from caring about them in the first place. It's a lose-lose situation. 

Basically, this film is what would have happened if, instead of Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, The Skeleton Twins had cast the entire line-up of Saturday Night Live. There are so many balls being juggled here that some of them just roll away without anybody noticing.

Characters twirl in and out of existence, vanishing from this dimension until they're needed for the next forced plot point. Several of the siblings' significant others are banished to purgatory early on, only to be trotted out on special occasions. And I'm pretty sure Connie Britton's character died of neglect, locked in an upstairs closet. The only consistent presence is a potty-training toddler, who is incidentally the most compelling of the bunch.

This isn't even a third of the cast of this tiny tiny film.

Overall, This Is Where I Leave You is just too generic to be worth the hassle. There's endless heavy-handed exposition laced conversations, routine characterizations, and nothing new to say about the state of the American family. Been there, done that. There is one great sequence where the siblings repeat a series of cordial platitudes to guests at a funeral that highlights the repetitive dullness and constant lying that these types of polite gatherings require.

But beyond that, the film doesn't attempt to do anything more than exist as a piece of disposable cinema. Miss this film, and don't bother calling it on its birthday.

TL;DR: This Is Where I Leave You is dull and generic, but has a decently sized slate of charming actors.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1005

Gee, It's Good To Be Together Again

Year: 2014

Director: James Bobin

Cast: Rickey Gervais, Ty Burrell, Tina Fey

Run Time: 1 hour 52 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

A quick word about the Monsters University tie-in short that opens the film - it is hilarious. Presumably more so than the entire film that spawned it. But that's neither here nor there. The Muppets are back!

Ever since their smash comeback in 2011's The Muppets (to which I gave a rave review that appeared on my original blog which has unfortunately vanished into the ether), The Muppets have had clout in the 21st century like never before and it was only a matter of time before the sequel hit. And while it's certainly not quite the sparkling gemstone that made its predecessor an instant classic, it really is a tremendous followup.

And let's face it, it's physically impossible for a Muppets film to be actively bad.

Sure, it doesn't quite tie together under a coherent theme. Sure, many of the Muppets (both old and new, and especially Walter) are given short shrift in favor of a new character, Constantine, the evil Kermit lookalike with an accent straight from Tommy Wiseau's Twelve Step Program to Speaking American. Sure, some of the meta gags make inter-film continuity endlessly confusing.

But this is children's entertainment! It's got great songs, laugh a minute gags, and plenty of Muppet mayhem. Sometimes it's hard to be a Grumpy Gus in the face of such delightfully clever and effervescent family entertainment.

The story goes like this - to capitalize on their newfound success, Kermit and the Muppets book  Dominic "It's Pronounced Bajy" Badguy (Rickey Gervais) to manage their European comeback tour. Little do they know that Dominic works for the world's number one criminal, Constantine the Frog, who makes short work of framing Kermit for his crimes and sending him to the Siberian Gulag while he tours with the Muppets as a front for a series of heists leading up to the theft of London's Crown Jewels.

Also featuring Ty Burrell as an Interpol Officer about half a millimeter away from actually being Inspector Clouseau and Tina Fey as a Russian prison warden, Muppets Most Wanted has a lot of fun with its multinational setting, politely poking fun at things like European vacation days and funny names for German towns without resorting to crude stereotypes (coughcoughDespicableMe2cough).

Also Tina Fey gets to sing a song in a Russian accent and it is 100% flawless.

As always the Muppets aren't afraid to sacrifice wit just because they're for children. My inner film major was tickled by an out-of-nowhere reference to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and some of my favorite jokes veer dangerously close to existential horror, wringing peals of laughter from the incongruous presence of Kermit and pals in such situations. Trust me, it's hard to explain, but it totally works. 

Speaking of fun and incongruous, cameos include Tom Hiddleston, James McAvoy, and an anthropomorphic ARTPOP advertisement. The surprise celebrity appearances are always part of the fun of the Muppets films so I won't spoil anything more, but some of the best jokes come from them as they get to pop onscreen and play with Kermit and Co. for 20 seconds or so.

All in all, Muppets Most Wanted is an enchanting musical comedy that is enjoyable for every second of its run time. Even I, reigning champion of grousing about movie lengths, had no complaints about the nearly two hour run time because every moment maximizes its comedic potential. So maybe it's not The Muppets 2011. But it's Muppets Most Wanted and that's a fantastic thing to be.

TL;DR: Muppets Most Wanted is silly to the core and there's never a dull moment, although it's not quite up to snuff with the 2011 masterpiece.

Rating: 8/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Yes! It's March! What else is out? Treat yourself.

Word Count: 646

Reviews In This Series

The Muppet Movie (Frawley, 1979)

The Great Muppet Caper (Henson, 1981)

The Muppets Take Manhattan (Oz, 1984)

The Muppet Christmas Carol (Henson, 1992)

Muppet Treasure Island (Henson, 1996)

Muppets from Space (Hill, 1999)

The Muppets (Bobin, 2011)

Muppets Most Wanted (Bobin, 2014)

C (S) U Later

It is with heavy heart (and backpack) that I inform you of the beginning of CSULB's fall 2013 semester, meaning that I will be unable to post daily on this site, and most likely not very frequently at all. I'm taking five classes, TAing a sixth, on the board for the GSA, and working so I'll barely have time to watch movies, let alone write about them.

I'm gonna do my best though, and I know this is hard on you so I've made you a little back-to-school present,

10 TV Shows to Watch on Netflix Instead of Doing Homework

30 Rock (2006 - 2013)

Seasons: 7

Time Wasted: 2 days 2 hours 36 minutes

OK, so the seventh season technically isn't on Netflix yet but it will be soon! If they answer my prayers.

30 Rock is a witty behind-the-scenes comedy that is a not-so-veiled look at Tina Fey's life as the head writer of SNL. She plays socially inept Liz Lemon, a woman on a quest to balance work, love, and having it all. And eat as many sandwiches as she possibly can.

With Alec Baldwin as her boss (a man as conservative as he is wealthy) and mentor, providing 30 Rock's core, the show survived way more seasons than the ratings should have allowed by always remaining as sharp and clever as the very first episode.

Also featuring Jack McBrayer, Tracy Morgan, and Jane Krakowski.

Scrubs (2001-2010)

Seasons: 9

Time Wasted: 2 days 18 hours 44 minutes

A screwball comedy set in Sacred Heart Hospital, Zach Braff plays J.D., a young intern on his way to becoming a doctor. Chock full of fast-paced gags, creative fantasy sequences, and a surprising amount of heart, Scrubs is so good that you won't even notice that the last two seasons mostly suck. 

Also featuring Donald Faison, John C. McGinley, and Sarah Chalke.

Arrested Development (2003-2013)

Seasons: 4
Time Wasted: 1 day 3 hours 35 minutes

Quite simply one of the funniest sitcoms ever. The story of a wealthy family who lost everything and the one son (Jason Bateman) who had no choice but to keep them all together, it's... Arrested Development.

Full of structural humor, bizarre in-jokes, and zippy punch lines that keep you on your toes, this show bombed in initial ratings, leading Fox to cancel it after three increasingly short seasons. Netflix picked it up for a fourth. Reviews were mixed, but the new season returns to the characters with as much zeal and wild experimentation as ever.

Also featuring Will Arnett, Portia de Rossi, and Michael Cera.

How I Met Your Mother (2005 - Present)

Seasons: 8

Time Wasted: 2 days 19 hours 28 minutes

With one season not yet on Netflix and another (its last) in production, HIMYM still has some crackle in it yet. Although the main premise, Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) telling his kids the tale of... how he met their mother has long since worn thin, the show is kept alive with a brilliant ensemble cast - the first show since Friends to truly succeed with the "twentysomethings hang out in a place" formula.

Also featuring Alyson Hannigan, Jason Segel, and Neil Patrick Harris.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005 - Present)

Seasons: 8 (with a ninth on the way)

Time Wasted: 1 day 10 hours 28 minutes

The simple story of a bunch of self-centered lunkheads who own a bar in South Philadelphia is a pitch black comedy starring Charlie Day. Mostly improvised and never tame, It's Always Sunny panders in filthy humor, shrill arguments, and the hilarious antics of truly awful people.

In the second season, Danny DeVito joined the cast as the disgusting Frank Reynolds, a role he was clearly born for.

Also featuring Rob McElhenny, Glenn Howerton, and Kaitlin Olson.

Undeclared (2001 - 2002)

Seasons: 1

Time Wasted: 6 hours 14 minutes

Judd Apatow's college comedy and spirit sequel to his cult classic Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared is the story of Steven Karp (Jay Baruchel), a nerdy kid trying to reinvent himself in his first year of college. Perfectly capturing the drama and the magic of freshman year, Undeclared will have you looking back fondly on your first college friends, overbearing RAs, and the time when Adam Sandler was still relevant.

Also featuring Seth Rogen, Charlie Hunnam, and Monica Keena.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 - 2003)

Seasons: 7

Time Wasted: 4 days 12 hours

Buffy is Joss Whedon's ultimate cult classic. Taking the horror trope of the Final Girl and turning it on its head, Buffy stars a butt-kicking Sarah Michelle Gellar as the Chosen One of Sunnydale High, defending the world from vampires, demons, and creatures that go bump in the night.

Also featuring my lover David Boreanaz, Alyson Hannigan, and Nicholas Brendon.

Twin Peaks (1990 - 1991)

Seasons: 2

Time Wasted: 23 hours 18 minutes

Twin Peaks is David Lynch's surreal masterpiece of small town intrigue. Kyle MacLachlan stars as Special Agent Dale Cooper as he searches for the answer to the question on everybody's lips: Who killed Laura Palmer?

Also featuring Michael Ontkean, Mädchen Amick, and Dana Ashbrook.

Portlandia (2011 - Present)

Seasons: 3 (so far)

Time Wasted: 9 hours 54 minutes

Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein's sharp satire skewers Portland, the hipster capital of the world. As with most sketch comedy, it's sometimes a mixed bag, but it is always insightful, hilarious, and full of weird celebrity cameos.

Also featuring Kyle MacLachlan, Chloë Sevigny, and Aubrey Plaza.

The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret (2010 - 2012)

Seasons: 2

Time Wasted: 4 hours 24 minutes

Simultaneously uproariously funny and oppressively dark, Todd Margaret is an acquired taste. Starring David Cross as a bumbling corporate employee sent across the pond to sell a putrid energy drink, this BBC comedy is crass, sophisticated, wry, and exceedingly British.

Also featuring Will Arnett, Sharon Hogan, and Blake Harrison.

And because I have my super anticipated horror class today, I would be remiss if I didn't include

BONUS: Five Horror Films to Watch on Netflix Instead of Writing Your Essay

Dead Snow (Død Snø) (2009)

Time Wasted: 1 hour 32 minutes

A bitingly fun Norwegian zombie comedy that pays magnificent homage to the gore pictures of yore.

Featuring Jeppe Beck Laursen, Vegar Hoel, and Charlotte Frogner.

Read my full review here.

The Evil Dead (1981)

Time Wasted: 1 hour 25 minutes

Essentially the movie Dead Snow pays homage to in the highest, The Evil Dead is Sam Raimi's gleefully gory, somewhat campy (the outrageously slapstick humor of its sequel is not present, although the film does have some comedic elements) zombie flick that isn't really about zombies.

Candarian demons are released by an accidental reading of a passage from the Book of the Dead and attack five unwitting college students spending their break in a secluded cabin in the woods.

Featuring Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, and Richard Demanincor.

Re-Animator (1985)

Time Wasted: 1 hour 26 minutes

What can I say? Netflix is really on top of zombie movies. Re-Animator is the tale of med student Herbert West, whose experiments with a serum to bring the dead back to life go terribly awry.

Read my full review here.

Featuring Bruce Abbott, Jeffrey Combs, and Barbara Crampton.

The Host (Goemul) (2006)

Time Wasted: 1 hour 59 minutes

This Korean monster movie has it all. Monster kidnappings, shoreline mayhem, and a surprising vein of  good humor and family satire.

Featuring Kang-ho Song, Hie-bong Byeon, and Hae-il Park.

The Initiation (1984)

Time Wasted: 1 hour 36 minutes

How could I not include a slasher movie? The Initiation is the story of a sorority hazing gone very wrong. I'll cover this one on Census Bloodbath before you know it, but I'll call it now. It's one of the top 5 films of the year.

Featuring Daphne Zuniga, Hunter Tylo, and Vera Miles.

Have a good day at school, everyone! (And screw you, UC people!)

Word Count: 1323