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Friends with Benefits: 2011 TV

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Paul

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Impossibly rich and attractive twenty-somethings spend time in front of the mirror in NBC’s summer comedy, Friends with Benefits.

Impossibly rich and attractive thirty-somethings spend time in front of the mirror in NBC’s soon-to-be-cancelled programme, Friends with Benefits.

One of these is not like the other, which is odd, given that Friends With Benefits is exactly like a lot of other shows – Mad Love and Perfect Couples, for instance; Happy Endings over on ABC is practically identical. Although that one has yet to join the others in the great TV departure lounge, they all share a theme of attractive mannequins hitting up interchangeable city bars, lamenting their perpetual singledom over drinks and one-night stands with [vulnerable/psychotic/stranger/ex], capped by a pledge never to do it again.

They also share two problems: one, they’re not funny. Two, their characters aren’t characters at all.

Billed as comedies, you can imagine why the first might seem a rather insurmountable flaw. Well, here’s a secret: a whole bunch of terminally unfunny shows get by just fine on the basis of otherwise likable characters: CBS’ How I Met Your Mother is one, now coming on for seven years of laugh-track, four camera comedy. What you can’t do, however, is pair those kinds of scripts with leaden placeholders. That kind of thinking leads to shows like Friends With Benefits, in which struggling models are plucked from waitressing gigs in the valley to appear in front of the camera in the hopes they’ll fly.

Unsurprisingly, they do not. Casting the vacuous and the nondescript is rarely a recipe for memorable television, and after four episodes I began to realise not only could I not pick a single one of the cast from a line-up, but that I didn’t even know their names. Whatever failings you might ascribe to How I Met Your Mother, it at least has characters who resemble people you might have encountered, or even know. A certain level of attractiveness is a given – you don’t get very far in TV without it – but they still give off an air of attainability, somehow; we relate to the minutiae. Beneath an inherent glamour lies a group who call a dusty tavern home, in the same way the cast of Friends once did Central Perk. To cite that once lamented symbol of America’s failed democracy, they’re people I’d want to have a beer with. That’s an important quality in choosing a sitcom to commit to.

If it recognises such a truism, then Benefits chooses to ignore it. Consider that one of the leads, Aaron, is a self-made millionaire who lives in a luxurious penthouse. One of his friends is a chiselled jock we faintly remember as the second-worst part of Veronica Mars. His friends come in the more pedestrian guise of nurses and bartenders, and even they’re so distanced from the realities of their profession that they may as well occupy a different trade entirely. Even more telling is the realisation that when these people come together, they do so with no sense of community or bond. For all their supposed in-jokes that hint to shared experiences, there wasn’t a single moment in which I truly believed any of them could be friends.

The pilot submits to its creaking formula by assigning roles early on. Ben and Sara are established as the titular friends in the very first scene. Aaron is the hopeless optimist, and Riley and Julian are… the other two, whose idle commentary is in keeping with superfluous characters everywhere. Ben and Sara casually sleep together, convinced that it doesn’t mean anything when everyone around them knows it does. Sometimes their friends join them in the merry-go-round and sleep with one other, and sometimes they don’t. Later episodes see them exploring party drugs in the naive manner of every programme not on Showtime, followed by mirror-based indulgences and desperate fawning over a series of increasingly dull, handsome dates. Invariably, such adventures will land them right back where started, just a little bit wiser for the experience. And hey, there’s even a narrator to underline their profound spiritual growth.

Friends With Benefits can hardly be called an absolute failure, since its very sterilty precludes any such catastrophic misstep. But in a decade that saw the nurturing of some of the finest shows TV has to offer, is this really the best we can hope for? These writers didn’t fight their way into television just to spend their days rehashing reasons for anonymous, airbrushed characters to have inconsequential sex in soft-focus settings. The pandering isn’t even going to be successful: forgetting all the other networks for a moment, NBC is home to not only the infinitely superior ‘Community’ and ‘Parks and Recreation’, but a whole host of more directly competing shows that in a saner world would have precluded this from even being commissioned.

No matter. Failure is all relative when cancellation just means replacement by an identical show. ABC’s Work It. CBS’ 2 Broke Girls. Fox’s New Girl. NBC’s Witney. Take your pick between a rock and a hard place, loyal viewers, because either way the executive producers are gonna get paid.

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Bad Teacher

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Paul

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It’s hard to imagine writing a Bad Teacher review without making reference to either School of Rock or Bad Santa: the obviousness of its lineage simply demands it. Were it not for those infinitely funnier and smarter forerunners, Bad Teacher would have even less going for it than it does – impressive for a film that already has scarcely little to say, and only Cameron Diaz to say it with.

Most films – even bad ones – begin with some kind of exposition, in which characters are established within a context, their motivations and subsequent goals made clear. Bad Teacher sort of starts at the end and doesn’t bother working its way back. Principally, Elizabeth Halsey (Diaz) wants to earn enough money for a pair of breast implants. Aren’t there easier ways to raise that kind of sum than teaching? Bad Santa at least gave Billy Bob a substantive reason for his character showing up every holiday season. What logic is at work here?

Watching Bad Teacher is like reading a book with a bunch of pages torn out. Of its few memorable scenes, the majority are cut about 10 seconds short of resolution. Accordingly, the narrative is often horribly disjointed. When we first meet Halsey, her screeching tyres signal a departure from teaching for a life of marriage and wealth. Seconds later, her engagement is called off and she duly sulks back to work in a slightly less glamorous car. No one says anything. The arrival of a dashing substitute teacher is likewise met without acknowledgement, as though handsome young men like Scott (Justin Timberlake) are two a penny in the John Adams Middle School. The mania continues: when one teacher is busted for possession and a whole litany of other misdemeanours, she simply reappears in a subsequent scene with little fanfare. This happens a lot. I’d give other examples if I cared to, but I don’t. The film has that kind of effect on you.

You’ll have a better time if you stop trying to join the narrative dots. After all, there are a handful of cheap gags that I’m not above finding amusement in, exemplified by the crude spectacle of Diaz and Timberlake dry-humping their way to an unwelcome laundry bill. We’re also treated to an finale that, by traditional standards at least, offers comparatively little redemption – despite an implausible romance that betrays her sole motivation, Bad Teacher refuses at least to redeem Halsey’s professional tenure. She’s a liar, a cheat, a cynical manipulator, and remains as such until the credits are through. In the wake of montages that see teachers inspiring their complacent students, success in Bad Teacher comes by far more believable means than mere hard work.

What success it does find is no thanks to Diaz and Timberlake, whom rank amongst the film’s least interesting characters: she an unreservedly nasty piece of work, and he not much more than a wholesome, one-note homage to Disney Club. Jason Segel, meanwhile, is a dispirited gym teacher whose languid manner is indicative of contractual obligation, the only benefit of which is a reminder to see his other, better movies. Conversely, Amy Squirrel’s smiley-Machiavellian creation seems straight from the Mean Girls/Easy A stable, full of peppy hysteria that sits well with bug-eyed plotting and her eventual collapse into jealous frenzy.

John Michael Higgins is similarly enticing as a gosh-darnit principal in the manner of Ned Flanders, but his effort is every bit as wasted as hers. Even setting aside the ruinous lead pairing, the pupils – who were at least half the fun in School of Rock – are all but anonymous by comparison. Consequently, the film lacks the necessary humanity to entice its audience on a journey of backbiting and sub-human pettiness. A word to filmmakers everywhere: Bad Santa worked because of its heart, not in spite of it.

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Super

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Paul

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In the six degrees of Kevin Bacon, Liv Tyler is one, and Rainn Wilson a two. And when Kevin Bacon takes that first degree as his own, what is there left for a second degree like Wilson to do but strap on a costume and take her right back?

Frank has fought for very little in his life, least of all himself. As a child, he was taunted mercilessly; his features, scrunched up and red, suggest formative years spent being shaken down for lunch money. Nowadays he works as an out-of-sorts chef for Joe’s Grill, looking sourer than his 30-something years might suggest, and living a life of quiet disappointment with his wife, Sarah. Perhaps disappointment is the wrong word. ‘Acceptance’ seems more fitting of a man who defines happiness in a thankful-for-company-on-the-slow-march-to-death-and-despair kind of way. Hand-drawn at the foot of his bed are two pictures of success. In one, his crude stick figure marries Sarah. In the other, he points a pursuing cop towards his suspect. A noble citizen, married; in a life spent flipping burgers, that would be Frank’s legacy.

If only Sarah hadn’t left with Kevin Bacon. Then none of this would have happened.

Frank is visited in the middle of the night by the ghost of TV’s Holy Avenger. A brightly-coloured pillar of faith in a world of lawless debauchery, Avenger speaks in the language of public service announcements. “Remember kids: it’s more important to fight crime in all its forms, rather than give into Satan because it’s easier that way”. For Frank, the message is less evangelical. “All it takes to be a superhero is the choice to fight crime” booms the proud Avenger, blue cape swaying in the wind. In the manner of early Sam Raimi, Frank’s bedroom begins to bow and creak with maniacal life as his body is lowered into a happenstance surgery. Bloodied brain matter exposed, an ounce of courage is quite literally paint-rollered into him, the finger of God re-imagined as flailing anime tentacles that emerge from the white light beyond his panelled walls.

Awakening with a renewed sense of purpose, Frank begins to transform himself into a spherical Peter Parker. There’s a garish suit too, one befitting his new identity as The Crimson Bolt, defender of nit-picking laws everywhere. Boneheaded garnish abounds: as far as pithy slogans go, ‘Shut Up, Crime!” is both reductive and to the point. He’s at his best when erring towards well-meaning nightwatchman: hiding behind a rubbish dumpster in the part of town least likely to play host to crime, his first night as the Bolt is spent surveilling a tearaway cardboard box blowing helplessly in the wind. He laments into a Dictaphone, unflinching in his earnestness. “I’ll pick it up later. I just don’t want to expose my position at this time”.

Aside from the inspired cameo of Nathan Fillion, little about ‘Super’ is half as fun as it thinks, though I dare say some will argue that’s the point. That Super, far from being a comedy, is in fact a heady mix of insanity and ultra violence, skillfully subverting our expectations of genre conventions. To that, I proffer they were likely watching an altogether different movie. Far closer in tone to ‘Hobo With a Shotgun’ than ‘Kick-Ass’, if this is director James Gunn playing a joke on us, then it isn’t a funny one: strip away the cartoon voyeurism, and what you’re left with a brainless slasher no better than Gunn’s own Slither. Car keyers, drug pushers, line-butters; few escape the indiscriminate rage burning within Frank’s red hockey pads, in a film that executes friend and foe with wrenches and blades in either a celebration of nihilism or nothing at all.

Rainn Wilson may lack range, but what he does he does well. As perhaps the only man capable of playing the casually deranged Frank, Wilson quickly surrenders to a character who resembles Dwight Schrute letting loose on his day off. Indeed, the wider narrative of a power-crazed weekend sheriff is like a particularly heartless trust exercise from a Dunder Mifflin company retreat. As fellow crime-fighter Boltie, Ellen Page – who until now has favoured more hip, knowing sensibilities – breaks type to play a murderous vixen who flirts with psychosis and Lolita-style seductions, without really committing to either. She, like the film, is a confused construction. Unable to reconcile his Jason Reitman pretensions with later scenes of beloved actors being unceremoniously mangled, Gunn focuses so intently on shattering pre-conceived notions that he gives no real thought to what might come next.

Super ends on a note akin to Inspirational Justice with Tony Hart, finally taking itself seriously enough to achieve a strange kind of catharsis. Enterprising viewers may find value in a deeper analysis of the text, but, for the rest of us, Super blurs the line between vigilantism and ill-gotten vengeance, seeming to make a point only to bury a wrench in it just as soon as we get too close.

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