FUCK THAT CALF!
FUCK THAT CALF!
In which we slay the things others hold dear.
Family Guy
The fact that people still love this show baffles me. Sure, the first couple of seasons are good, but once it was cancelled and came back, FG was a shadow of itself- barley approaching the wit and humor it had originally succeeded in. Tired jokes and ridiculous premises without sufficient payoff are the name of the game these days. At least I’m not alone in this opinion, South Park famously tore this references-as-jokes machine apart perfectly revealing its flaws, yet it’s still lauded by the masses! I had a friend force me to watch a recent episode, and I couldn’t count more than 15 seconds without a “Remember the time when something retarded and unrelated happened?†and I swear one of those flashbacks had it’s own ‘Remember the timeâ€! The defense I hear most often is “every episode has at least one or two good laughsâ€. Seriously? In a comedy show that’s 22 minutes long that’s 98% of no laughter- we call that failing. I value my time more than that, Boy Meets World season 3 ain’t gonna watch itself. If you need ADD style Comedy try Robot Chicken or 30 Rock, or just fucking watch Youtube. If you still like Family Guy, we just shouldn’t talk about anything ever.-MG
I should start off by saying that, on paper, I should love this movie. It comes from Edgar Wright, whose previous two films are some of my all-time favorites. The romantic interest is played by the drop dead gorgeous Mary Elizabeth Winstead. In addition, the entire film is directed at nerds like me with video game references galore. Even with all of that behind it, I still can’t get behind this film. Believe me I wanted to love it when I first saw it. Unfortunately, what I was treated to was the biggest heaping pile of “meh†I’ve ever experienced. Even so, I understood that all the right elements were there and I couldn’t believe that I wasn’t seeing what everyone else was seeing. So I watched it again. Same result, except slightly more animosity towards it this time. Still, I persisted and watched it a third time. This time I finally recognized what it was that set me off: the structure. Most of you know that this flick was adapted from a series of six graphic novels. It shows as everything is crammed together and there’s no breathing room to give anything any sort of emotional weight. This could have been avoided if Edgar Wright had simply done what many before him had done and alter the source material for his film. Perhaps eliminate exes 4-6 who don’t really have much at all to do with the overall story arc of the film? I understand that he wanted to keep the fans of the books happy but clearly from the initial box office returns those fans were few and far between. At the very least it should have been divided into two movies with the first one ending with the Brandon Routh fight and the second continuing from there. Up until the Routh fight the entire film is hinged on Scott trying to move on from his ex. The scene in which he does that and annihilates the man she left him for should carry a ton of weight with it, climactic weight even. Instead the movie just moves on to a lesbian fight, with the lesbian played by Mae Whitman to make the Arrested Development fans feel clever. If the film cared less about fan service and more about being an actual film then it would probably have been awesome. I mean we don’t even meet the main villain until about 20 minutes before his death scene. How are we supposed to wish for this guy’s demise when we haven’t seen him until the third act? Overall the film just comes across as a rushed mess. But a mess drowned in hipness so that everyone will love it unconditionally and forget the piss poor pacing and lackluster storytelling.-AS