The Five-Year Engagement: 124 long, excruciating minutes, 63% Fresh, according to Rotten Tomatoes.
Comedies these days (especially those in the great RomCom genre) suffer from a plethora of issues. First among them is that the stories aren’t strong enough to support a succinct, one hour and thirty minute movie that will entertain and allow the person to leave and be fulfilled. Now, we are forced to watch movies that have to be over two hours long due to a) the story being poorly written and unrealistic to the point that elongated scenes of “awkward comedy” have to be placed in the middle, and due to the movies not being funny at all, this awkwardness hipster movie makers call comedy today is shoved down our throats. I mean, over two hours? This thing needed an intermission. It’s hard enough for dramas to grasp their audiences for two hours, but it’s even harder for a comedy. Half of this movie should have been on the DVD special disc along with the other three hours of “deleted awkward scenes posing as comedy” that made it there.
Since I don’t do full out reviews of movies, I’ll give you the quick and dirty. This guy (I don’t remember his name) proposes to this girl (shit, I don’t remember her name). So they met at an awkward New Year’s Eve party (I think it was New Years’s Eve). Anyway, this movie goes on and tells us about his decision to leave his job, where he is a sous chef in trendy San Francisco, heaven for chefs and also leave a new opportunity to be an executive chef at a new restaurant to follow his girlfriend on some g-dang mission around the world getting what she refers to as a “teaching position” (being an academic as well, I didn’t realize till an hour into the movie that she was going after a post-doc position. I don’t understand why she applied to only two places, Berkeley and Michigan. With all of the effing colleges in California, why did she feel she needed this post-doc in Michigan at this moment in her life, I don’t know?) I know how important these positions can be in one’s academic life, but I also realize that the realities of life need to be balanced. So, if she wanted this post-doc badly enough, why didn’t she just go do it for a year or two then they get married after that? It seems harsh, but these are the lives people lead when they are with someone or if they themselves are in higher ed trying to achieve college/faculty positions. He was in the much better position at the time in his respective field, so it seems silly that he would have picked up and left for Michigan, but it happened.
Anyway, I’m getting sick of writing this already because of how much I hate this movie. Because Apatow/Rothman/Segal and company wanted to take part in the circle jerk as long as they could, the movie’s story, which could have been summed up in a classic one hours thirty minute framework goes on for over two hours. So, we are fed awkward best friend antics at awkward rehearsal dinners/engagement parties (singing some silly song that is, unfortunately, revisited in an awkward ending, a slideshow of past women the lead guy has been with), the engagement party itself was around ten minutes. Let’s see how else this awkward-fest continues? There’s some scene at the end where the lead chick and her sister have a conversation in Sesame Street voices for at least five minutes. There’s about five minutes devoted to the lead guy chasing the lead girl’s professor/love interest (because, yes, that always happens in real life. The female grad student ALWAYS leaves her fiancé for the professor) down the street for another awkward five minutes. I’m all about comedy, but when a movie is going already so long, you have to be diligent about trimming the fat. Especially when that fat doesn’t add any flavor to the movie. It only adds cholesterol and other bad shit that hardens and clogs your arteries.
And I HATE poorly written movies that put the lead characters in positions unrealistic to their character just to add to the story. I mean, no way this girl would have ever HAD AN AFFAIR with that professor? No way the lead guy would have gone into some sort of man of the wild, bearded, rustic phase of his life which involved meade and fur-covered mugs and tons and tons of venison. And once they separated and he went back to San Francisco, no way would he have hooked up with some twenty-three year old girl who he has nothing in common with. We are led to believe these characters are genuine, but we are also forced to deal with their fuck ups in order to progress a poorly-written movie. And boy, you want awkward comedy, check out the ten-minutes-that-seems-like-an-hour where they show us the lead guy and that new chick’s relationship. Ugh.
People laughed in this theater like this was the greatest comedy produced in decades. So maybe I’m wrong. But then again, maybe they were laughing because they were extremely uncomfortable and had no choice. Maybe, like my girlfriend said, they were laughing so hard because there was so little to laugh at that they wanted to get all of their laughs in. No matter. As you can tell from earlier posts, I’m no fan of awkward comedy. I’m no fan of people trying to make movies into more than they are. This script could have been tightened up, these ridiculous scenes which were uncharacteristic of the figures could have been trimmed, we could have deleted many of these hipster comedy scenes and I think we would have had a nice, cute comedy. Instead, we get the products of a hipster funny circle jerk that leaves us wanting to gouge our eyes out at the end. The great comedies of Hollywood’s past didn’t have to try so hard. They made us laugh. They did it in just over an hour. There’s a reason comedies these days don’t win Oscars.
Rerunguy’s rating: 1.5 out of 4 stars
So, recently I’ve become interested in the work of Martin Scorsese. Okay, really, I’ve been interested in his work for a long time. I mean, who doesn’t wish they were Henry Hill walking through the kitchen of the Copacabana in Good Fellas? I’ve already made plenty of references on this blog to Sam “Ace” Rothstein’s awesome shades in Casino. So yeah, he writes gangster movies. He writes movies with strong, violent, Italian characters who have to deal with issues of family, place in society, religion, etc.
Absurd Comedy vs Awkward Comedy: Sitcom Television as a Reflection of Society
Too awkward to be funny?
What about him?
A friend of mine and I have discussed at a few tailgates our thoughts on comedic television and what we find funny. One of my all-time favorite shows, Curb Your Enthusiasm, in my opinion at times is comedic genius, bringing viewers into the situations of one man’s life that would never, ever occur in our own lives. Well, not in my life, at least.
My friend, however, always said that he hates Curb. He has issues with what one might call “awkward” comedy. Laughing at situations that are just so uncomfortable and awkward is not real comedy, in my friends’ opinion. I don’t know if I see his point fully, but I can relate to shows that ARE in fact so awkward that I don’t like them that much. For instance, the US version of The Office (I clarify this because I’ve only watched the first season of the UK variety, which was a carbon copy in many ways of the first US season) has a character that we all love or hate, Dundler-Mifflin manager Michael Scott. The one thing about Michael Scott that I hate is his awkwardness.
I, for one, don’t like being in these weird uncomfortable situations. But if this is a form of awkward comedy, why would I not like that element of The Office but enjoy it in Curb? I believe it has something to do with the characters of Michael Scott and Larry David. We should almost feel sorry for Michael Scott because, well, somewhere deep inside of him there’s a heart. And he cares inside. He’s just not so adept at communicating it in a non-offensive way. So, we’re supposed to excuse his awkwardness and relish in his comedic life. Right? I’m not the most avid fan of The Office, so maybe I’m getting this wrong. I’m just pointing out that does awkward comedy might work in some areas and not in others.
Now, my anti-awkward comedy friend also dislikes The Office. But let’s get back to Curb. I love Curb. I believe it’s because Larry David’s character doesn’t have a heart. Is that what makes it me more accepting of his awkwardness? Is it the fact that he’s just being who he is. There’s no deeper level to his psyche. Or is there? I tell myself, Michael Scott should know better. He’s just an idiot. But I look at Larry David, and I say “haha. That’s just Larry being Larry.” I dunno. But let’s finally get to the larger point I was trying to make with this post.
Have we reached a point in sitcom history where only the absurd and the awkward make us laugh?
Too absurd to be funny?
Speaking of absurd, my girlfriend and I have been having many discussions of the sit-com It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I believe it is a gem of comic absurdity and is probably (no, it is) the best comedy sit-com on television today. I think it’s funny due to its absurdity. Yet again, we are watching characters that we might never, ever be. We might never, ever share in the experiences of Mac, Charlie, Dee, Dennis, or Frank. But I think the difference here is that we WANT to share in them. At least I do. We want to be a part of their clique.
My girlfriend says that the problem she has with it is that it’s so unrealistic. What are these jabronis doing running a bar anyway? It just makes no sense. One of the things I love about my girlfriend is that we share many of the same loves and hates when it comes to pop culture, but she just doesn’t like it. I, personally, can’t see why she doesn’t. She can’t stand it (she made that apparent on Facebook as well).
So, what do we have here? A friend who hates Curb because it’s comedy based solely on awkwardness, focusing on a shallow character that we aren’t supposed to like in the first place. Second, I tend to get irritated by The Office because most of it’s comedy is based on Michael Scott’s “awkwardness with a heart” (now, granted, The Office bugs me in other ways as well, in my opinion being a classic example of a show trying to do to much, but that’s for another post). And finally, my girlfriend hates Sunny because it reaches a level of absurdity that she just can’t relate to because she finds it so unbelievable (but she did at least admit to chuckling at some parts last night). What can be gleaned from this?
We could always compare these shows to other giant sitcoms in television history, such as Cheers, and wonder how a show like that had so much staying power while being as unawkward and unabsurd as a comedy about a retired, ex-Red Sox relief pitcher and recovering alcoholic bar owner could be. But such a comparison would be unfair. I think the thrust of society from the tech slingshot of the 90s into the 21st century has changed the landscape of just what makes us laugh.
Awkward and absurd are now becoming a way of life. They are far more apparent in our lives than they were say ten year ago. Back in the day, something awkward or absurd happening to us meant that the moment would be hidden deep in our minds and not shared by many. Now, either by choice or not, it might be filmed with our mobile phones and put on You Tube within seconds for millions to enjoy.
Maybe inside we WANT to be awkward or absurd to entertain, to get some sort of feedback.
Because I think at the foundation that’s what society is all about in 2011. We want feedback. We put posts on our Facebook walls sometimes just to get a response. We want the world to know that we’ve been slaving away at finals studying for the past twenty-four hours on little or no sleep. And we know that there are others out there who have been slaving away in their own way, working fifteen hour shifts to pay bills or working on a few hours of sleep because of a sick baby.
But the new Facebook generation of the 2010s is all about ME. Our lives are now so interesting that we HAVE to share things with everyone. Before (and by before, I mean “back in the day”) one would think twice about posting some aspect of their life: expecting a new baby, maybe getting a new job, passing a final exam. We used to worry about the ramifications of these actions. We knew that there were risks; consequences might later have to be dealt with. So we never shared these aspects of our lives with others until we knew more solidly what was going to happen in the situation. But now, we’re posting shit about our lives before the events even unfold. Most of the time, we accept the risk of these actions for the reward. So we are availing ourselves to whatever happens in life for the reward of other people sharing in our delights, our joys, and our sorrows.
Comedy today is simply reflecting that new mindset.
Would arguably the greatest sit-com of all time have made it on network TV today?
Today we find Cheers to be wholesome. A fond, warm memory of our television past. But by today’s standards, it’s tame. Would Cheers have worked today? Sadly, I can’t imagine the pilot even making it past the network executives’ desks. “Too campy.” “Not edgy enough.”
Maybe we have problems with today’s comedies because we have problems with larger issues in society today. Television just reflects and amplifies those issues. So, we just accept them for what they are and we enjoy television for what it is. Whether it’s reality or fantasy, I’m sure there’s something on the TV that suits your entertainment needs. Isn’t television great?
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Posted by The Rerun Guy on December 10, 2011 in Television Commentary, Uncategorized and tagged absurd, awkward, Cheers, comedy, Curb Your Enthusiasm, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Larry David, rant, sit-com, television.
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