My Week In Media September 6th -13th
My Week In Media September 6th -13th
Slow(ish?) media week compared to last… sort of… Anyhow I thought I’d add this DISCLAIMER:
Typos and related blunders are a result of a learning disorder, not laziness or a lack of proof reading.
Biggest Impression of the Week:
Rick and Morty Season Five Finale (Adult Swim, I watched via ITunes)
Before I say anything else, it needs to be acknowledged that Rick and Morty is exhausting. And part of that exhaustion comes from the fact any time I say anything good about the show I need to clarify that I’m not one of “those” Rick and Morty fans.
If you don’t know what I mean, then you’re lucky, but if you do then you know the kind of fan I’m referring to is typically a young man (I’m not young anymore, so that helps me not be one of those), most likely cisgender, white, and straight, who much like the generation of TV watchers before them who missed the point of Walter White’s failings in Breaking Bad misses the entire point of the show they “love”.
There is an essay waiting here (and already written by… a million people probably?) about the failings of the anti-heroes and difficult men of the golden age of television, so I’ll skip that but for continuity (and contractual obligation when writing about TV) discuss Rick Sanchez as the animated, mad scientist version of the prestige television antihero.
And if I were more prepared, I’d drop a quote from the show by Morty, Ricky’s teenaged boy sidekick about how Rick’s “Not a hero, but he’s not really the villain either, he’s more like some ambivalent god”, but I’d actually look it up and get it right.
I’m not going to though, because like the show and the characters, I’m playing it fast and loose with this one… and it will all somehow come together into a powerful and pointed critique about storytelling in general.
You see, the reason he’s not even an antihero is because courtesy of being the smartest man in infinite universes, with the ability to travel dimensions via a portal gun, heroism, and in turn antiheroism (I know, I know, not a “word”) has no meaning to him, or so he says. This statement, that those things doesn’t matter because how could they if the engine that drives the show is a nihilist who has it all figured out, gives the idiots that give the show a bad name the catchphrase they cling to.
Now… twist!
Just like in the episode where Rick accidently mutates the whole planet because Morty wants a love potion, and since they can’t fix it, switch to a parallel universe that was almost exactly the same as theirs, replacing two versions of themselves that accidently blow themselves up who they in turn bury in the back yard, we’re going to take a jump to said twist.
You see, Rick knows logically that blah blah blah infinity, but everything he does is a messy emotional stew of hurt, hubris, and big feelings he can’t manage… which in turn makes him a lot like his worst fans, but those fans assume Rick is cool, or aspirational because he flits in and out of saving the day on his terms.
Rick Sanchez is a selfish, broken man who plays god, and he pulls his grandson Morty along on his various adventures because Morty’s brainwaves hide Rick’s, and thus all their bungling sci-fi adventures ensue… because past self-preservation, Rick’s soul crushing loneliness also requires Morty to block that misery out.
See, I told you this show was exhausting.
But past the toxic fan base that is generally just the worst (and has temper tantrums at McDonalds because they couldn’t participate in one of the show’s more inane jokes… remember that, that actually happened… and have done MUCH WORSE on social media attacking female writing staff members and doing all that other toxic nerd shit…), and who frequently tell people that don’t like the show it’s because “they’re not smart enough to get all the science and philosophy in the show”, and all of the show’s self-indulgent, metatextual Dan Harmon running back some shit he did on Community (oh don’t worry, we’ll talk about Community soon enough… not here in this article, not today… but soon…) bullshit, the show is worth it.
Rick and Morty (which has actually, mercilessly mocked and ridiculed its shittiest fans to their faces) has spent five season, and all the fallow years in between them coming out, weaving a fascinating and hilarious sci-fi story that is punctuated with heartbreaking moments of human frailty as blistering as its much more common, hyper violent set pieces.
Spoilers –As in I spoil the shit out of the entire show’s run up to this point-
In the finale to season 5 we find out that Ricky’s fake backstory about his wife and daughter being killed by another Rick from a parallel universe is actually true, and that the show’s Rick, after going on a fruitless revenge spree, did the same thing I mentioned before about jumping into another time line, taking the place of a Rick whose wife and child weren’t killed, and instead just left and never came back. And while Rick always talks about how there are infinite versions of his family, and while his taking the place of another Rick is revealed a few episodes earlier…
But the finale is when Rick breaks the fourth wall (which happens with some regularity, not quite Raphael in the original Ninja Turtles cartoons, but close) and tells us explicitly “that’s what happened, stop asking.”
Okay, see, the show is fucking exhausting. Even trying to explain its actual human elements and character beats is a fucking mess…
So back in season 1, the same season with the dimension hop reset button thing, we find out there’s a Citadel of Ricks, we find out that any Morty is replaceable, and that there’s a secrete Evil Morty.
In season 3, after the Citadel is rebuilt after… no, never mind, that’s not important… Evil Morty becomes president, and figures out how to destroy the “central finite curve” which is the cosmic structure that links all the “Rick is the smartest person in infinite universes”, and destroys those universes and kills… well, we don’t know if it’s all the other Ricks that aren’t the main character Rick, but it’s a series of whole universes being wiped out… but all the other Ricks?
Anyhow, a thousand words into this entry and it’s not the sci-fi doomsday scenario and the character reveal that make this so good (those really help), it’s that in typical Rick and Morty meta fashion, it’s the fact that the show’s slow, steady drumming up that everything actual does matter, and there are always consequences, has led to the erasure of Rick’s in-character premise that nothing matters.
The show jumped emotional dimensions… and it will jump again, because it’s a vulgar action comedy about foul mouthed sci-fi shenanigans… but the continuity of the show, and these changes will continue to matter, because while it created structures to allow it to have a Simpsons-esq rubber band continuity where only some things matter when they matter to a joke or an emotional beat, Rick and Morty is a show that screams out the existential truth that since nothing we do matters, that’s the only reason anything and everything does matter.
What we do matters because when the infinite is stripped away we are left only with the reality of ourselves.
Movies:
I didn’t watch anything new this week (I think…). I re-watched some stuff, including:
Leviathan:
Peter Weller, Ernie Hudson, and a handful of other 80s stalwarts star in an ALIEN knockoff set in an undersea mining station… No, not Underwater with Kristen Stewart, that’s an –redacted for spoilers- story, totally different and like 30 years apart.
In Leviathan Daniel Stern’s character, yes he’s in it too as the funny jerk-ass, bumbles into a scuttled Soviet sub and finds a flask that’s infected with a biological weapon that turns him, and another crew member into monsters… monsters that look like budget creatures from The Thing and that also infect and contaminate other people they touch.
Weller is great, Hudson gets to do some work (and has one of the worst movie deaths… not as in gruesome, but as in “why the fuck did they kill him then?” …of all time) and it may be a banal, budget version of better movies, but is still has tons of charm, pace, and fun.
I also re-watched:
Universal Soldier: Universal Solider is an early 90s Van Damme movie where he and Dolph Lundgren play Vietnam soldiers who killed each other in single combat when Dolph’s character went berserker war criminal, had their bodies frozen, and then brought back to life with science to become unstoppable fighting machines… only they both start remembering their memories, which leads to an absurd, endless, high octane game of cat an mouse.
Universal Soldier has A LOT going on in it. It’s part Reanimator meets Apocalypse Now, and part typical Van Damme fair, and while the mixture doesn’t really work, it makes for an interesting and generally fun disaster of a movie.
The worst thing about the movie isn’t its messiness, it’s the fact the fight scenes are generally pretty flat. In fairness to the movie in that regard, it was made at a time where America action movies tended to lack any real creative dynamism, but both leads are skilled and capable physical performers who could have put together fight scenes that would have been ahead of their time.
As a quick aside, one of the first times I saw Universal Soldier was when we rented it for my 11th birthday. I think I’d seen it once before, but this viewing was special mainly because one of my friends at the party wasn’t allowed to see R-rated movies, so the violence and vulgarity were an eye-opening experience for him.
His glee at seeing Dolph get kicked into a wood chipper is a memory that has endured more favorably than the movie itself.
Broadcast TV:
All the same stuff from last week.
Last night’s (Sunday’s) episode of Reservation Dogs was heartbreaking, and off-set by Bill Burr guest starting as a high school basketball coach turned DMV employee, who takes one of the leads on a misadventure with a minor shootout while she tries to get her driver’s license.
Streaming TV:
AP BIO Season 4 (Peacock) is Max’s Under the Radar Recommendation of the Week!
AP BIO was originally a broadcast television sitcom than ran for two seasons on NBC was cancelled then resurrected for the network/massive media conglomerate’s streaming service, and the world is better for it.
But before we talk about AP BIO by itself, we first need to discuss It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia referred to heretofore as Sunny. Sunny is a manically dark sitcom about five narcissists who own a bar, exist largely due Danny DeVito’s character being wealthy, and constantly ruin the lives of anyone and everything that enters into their orbit.
The show is a comedic achievement of darkness, jokes by volume, and recognition of the vulnerability inherent in damaged and toxic people. And of those terrible people, Glen Howerton plays Dennis Reynolds, the worst of the characters on the show.
(Okay, this might not be technically true as his father Frank, played by Danny Devito, is a real piece of shit who has had real power over people, whereas Denis is a monster on a smaller scale…)
The power and longevity of Glen’s performance on Sunny means that him playing any kind of unhinged comedic figure has shades of Denis, and he is not the only Sunny cast member to suffer this association.
At about the same time AP BIO hit the air on NBC, The Mick staring Howerton’s Sunny co-star Kaitlin Olsen debuted on FOX, and both shows felt like a toned down, or nicer version of their respective Sunny characters staring in alternate universe versions of their lives. While Olsen’s show was also cancelled after two seasons (you can watch both on Hulu and it’s fantastic), it was not resurrected to pad out a streaming library somewhere, and in turn didn’t give Olsen a chance to let her character and her characterization grow in the same was that Howerton has been able to.
So, what makes AP BIO so good, and what made it worth saving?
Getting past the obvious fact that NBC believed the show could bring people to its streaming platform (I’ve paid for the premium no commercials version a few times just to watch the show when it dropped), the show has an absurd and relentless heart of gold that is neither cloying nor saccharine.
It is, first and foremost a comedy about a man living in his dead mother’s home, who is unqualified to teach the Advanced Placement Biology class he is assigned to teach (the AP test lets you earn college credits while you are in high school), and who refuses to teach the over-achievers in his class. Instead of teaching or being a positive influence (at first…), he deploys them in schemes and nonsense to wreck petty revenge on people who have crossed him.
This doesn’t change, Howerton’s character doesn’t relent on refusing to teach, but slowly he develops a symbiotic bond with the kids in his class, helping them, usually in the worst way possible, to engage in schemes and acts of petty revenge of their own
And yes, while he denies it, Howeton’s Jack (if I were better at this, I’d have mentioned his character’s name is Dr. Jack Griffen and that he is a disgraced Harvard professor in the first paragraph…) does end up opening his heart to them, and opening his heart to the world of his home town (Toledo Ohio), and while the show is often kind and sweet, it is not particularly nice…
Starting in season 3 when the show moved to streaming, the comedy and the emotion of the show escalated. This escalation comes from a sense of daring that underlines the show now. It’s not that the show’s edgy, more that the show’s daring comes from its dedication to emotional honesty, creativity, and pure jackass-ery.
(Update: I started re-watching from season one, and mid way through season 2 I can say that even when it was on broadcast TV the humor was sharper than you would expect.)
Howerton is a genuine star on the show, and is frequently outshined by the dynamic, hilarious performances of the kids (mostly early 20-something actors) he teaches, and is also supported by a cast that includes comedy juggernauts Patton Oswalt and Paula Pell, the principle and office secretary/administrator respectively. The show also spends a fair amount of time with three female teachers/best friends whose various B-plots vary in how much they interact with the main plot, but the show is always funny, always lively, and it always tries.
Not every episode is perfect, but the show as a whole is honest and it works for its laughs.
The Thing I Watched That No One Else Will Care About At All (Nor Should They)
Area 88 (Peacock)
This is a 3 part anime series adapted from a manga of the same name that I am mainly familiar with due to its Super Nintendo videogame adaptation UN Squadron. In the videogame you fly from the left side of the screen to the right, shooting down bad guys, getting money to buy better planes so you can have an easier time defeating the big bad guys at the end of the game…. And saving democracy… maybe… it’s unclear…
It’s a fun, well done game, especially for its time and hardware limitations, that I still play on occasion, and that I spent a lot of time playing, most memorably when I got my wisdom teeth taken out.
The anime and the manga in turn, are the story of an airline pilot, Shin Kazama, who is kidnapped into a foreign legion and is forced to be a combat pilot, rewarded bounties for shooting down enemies/killing people. Shin must either serve a three year tour or pay a 1.5 million dollar early release penalty, and since he’s trying to get back to Japan to be with his finance he aggressively shoots down everything he can, while also struggling with the morality of killing people for profit.
I was initially drawn to UN Squadron due to the fact the movie Top Gun is a formative text for me, and that movie instilled a love of fighter jets in me from an early age. It was interesting seeing how the game took certain elements of the story and style, it was also interesting that elements of the story had also influenced another video game franchise, Ace Combat, which is another perennial favorite of mine that features aerial combat.
Area 88 is your typical anime fare, steeped in pensive melodrama that to an American/uninitiated audience stands out as tonally incongruous to the fantastic visual action. Mercifully, to me at least, this anime was free of giant exaggerated facial expressions, giant sweat drops, and other elements of visual language originating from some styles of anime.
As someone with only a passing familiarity and a limited appetite for the medium, even while watching this serious, straight forward war story I found myself thinking what I usually do, “Man, anime is weird.”
I say that, not because it is (I mean, relatively it is…) but because while I understand that it is a diverse and wide sweeping medium with its own cultural narratives, tools, tropes, shorthand, and other cultural elements, I only ever got into the most western-friendly anime content… in part because even when I was younger I always thought the same thing, “Man, anime is weird.”