Sitcoms, like every other TV genre, start off with something Buzzy and Conceptual to grab audience attention, before jettisoning it, to some extent, to get down to the business of what the show is actually about. Which, more often than not in sitcom-land, is the dating misadventures of a group of friends in a large …
In A World… Written and directed by Lake Bell USA, 2013 In A World… tells the story of Carol Solomon (Lake Bell), a struggling young voice coach who lives in the shadows of her acknowledged “king of voiceovers” father, Sam Soto (Fred Melamed). Sam kicks Carol out of his house so he can live alone …
Few shows have mastered the contradiction of feeling empathy for terrible individuals: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad – these shows reveled in their ability to make us relate to monsters in human skin. It takes a careful balance of the admirable and the grotesque, a balance Eastbound and Down made its bread and butter over the first three seasons. In what’s turning out to be a final season that stands head and shoulders above the rest, “Chapter 27” gives us the absolute worst of Kenny Powers – and still manages to make us feel for him as he continues losing the two “wars” he’s spent most of the season fighting.
In an episode of Community, Britta (played by Gillian Jacobs) once said that an analogy is “a thought with another thought’s hat on.” It may be laboured, clumsy, and teetering on the gobbledygook, but what she said was not altogether incorrect. In fact, that’s pretty much the reason why the scene was funny. Jacob Vaughan’s Bad Milo, in which Jacobs co-stars, deals with a metaphor that, in its execution, feels very much the same way: laboured and ridiculous, but not altogether unfunny.
Milo Directed by Jacob Vaughan Written by Benjamin Hayes, Jacob Vaughan People usually know what they are getting into when they enter certain movies at SXSW. There are the big headliners ; there are the obscure international films; there are the intimate indie flicks and mumblecore movies; then there are the kind of films like …