A lot this week.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

I was excited to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse because its predecessor was the best Spider-Man movie I’ve ever seen. Period. So this one just had to be better, right?! Unfortunately, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is still the best Spider-Man movie I’ve ever seen, but Across the Spider-Verse comes mighty close at times. This is some of the most visually impressive and thoughtfully executed animation I’ve seen since Makoto Shinkai‘s Your Name. Like that film, Across the Spider-Verse is all built on fascinating, cerebral concepts that yield so many little ideas of their own. It isn’t just pretty to look at, there is depth and visual metaphors in filmmakers Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson‘s celluloid canvas. There’s also a great deal of humor and pathos scattered about, no doubt hugely attributed to Lego Movie and 21/22 Jump Street helmers, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who co-wrote the film’s screenplay. My biggest complaint about the movie is that it’s overlong by about 20 minutes or so. It does this real Return of the King thing where it has four or five successive scenes that easily could have served as a “bittersweet” ending, all basically leaving you on the same emotional note, and then by the fifth or sixth scene they introduce a new issue and before you can say, “WTF? It’s still going??”, the movie ends on a cliffhanger. My reservations about the third act padding aside, this is a truly unique and fun motion picture that’s delivering in ways a Marvel movie never has. I didn’t enjoy the story quite as much as Into the Spider-Verse, but I do have a certain weakness for origin stories. The voice cast remains beyond reproach with basically everyone returning as well as some new peeps like Oscar Issac as Republican Spider-Man and Jason Schwartzman as Hole Slut. Before I go into more depth on how much I liked the voice cast, I’ll end on a cliffhanger. Grade: A- (In Theaters)

Succession Season 4

Was debating whether or not to even review the final season of Succession since I’m pretty late to the party. Everyone seems to be suffering Waystar-Royco fatigue. I’ll make this as quick and blunt as I can – Succession was the single best drama to see living room screens since the Sopranos/Wire days of the early 2000s. It died as it lived – an uncomfortably bleak examination of how the most serious issues in our country are often decided by or influenced by the most infantile and laughably unqualified buttholes imaginable. The only thing that kept me from chucking a lawn chair into my Vizio was the remarkably caustic wit deployed by series creator Jesse Armstrong (Peep Show – arguably the greatest sitcom ever made) that managed to take the edge off. It’s the only drama I can think of where the dialogue and interplay between the characters have the rhythm of a sitcom. It allowed the viewer to empathize with these characters far more than they could IRL.

However, for as funny as the show was, it never lost sight that it was above all else a tragedy, and a super prescient one at that. The emotional stakes were always at the center because the characters were so well defined yet somehow still a bit unpredictable in their actions. The cast was more or less flawless, just an armada of brilliant character actors bringing even more to the table than their characters had on paper. Veteran stage and film actor Brian Cox was terrifying as the family patriarch, but the real standouts in the final season were the three kids plus Tom. Jeremy Strong has rolled a few eyes with his intense “method” process, but it allowed him to create one of the most tragic television characters in recent years. Sarah Snook continued to be amazing this season and her scenes with Tom, played by possible cast MVP Matthew MacFadyen, were the best marital disputes I’ve seen since Tony and Carmela…or my own parents. The real surprise this season was Kieran Culkin who was always great but reached new heights this season, especially in a wonderfully delivered monologue to Alexander Skarsgaard‘s tech bro on a friggin’ mountain. When Culkin says “I’m dead, it’s over for me.” you really feel it in your bones.

Although the show’s second season is probably Succession at its best, the fourth and final season didn’t feature a single episode that was less than stellar. My favorite is probably America Decides, a perfectly directed hour of television that sees the three kids trying to call an election from the bleachers at ATN. The finale was also a brilliant 88 minutes of television that felt both unexpected and inevitable in where it left its characters. Shows like this only come around once every decade or so. I can’t wait to see the next one when I’m 43. Grade: A+ (Max)

Barry Season 4

I can’t think of a final season of anything that took a bigger swing as Barry Season 4, a certainly not perfect but frequently brilliant end to the story of our favorite hit man turned aspiring actor, Barry Berkman. Over the years, Barry felt like a lot of things, but chief among them was a one-stop shop to showcase just how brilliant Bill Hader is at just about everything. As an actor, he created a wonderfully complex protagonist in Barry. As a writer, he kept flipping the script on the audience so we had no idea where the story was going. As a director, he deployed really creative visual techniques to give the show more more depth. Actually, Hader is about as good as any actor turned director that comes to mind. He’s a real triple threat, this fucking guy.

Barry managed to subvert expectations across four seasons, but this final outing took that to a whole new level, perhaps a bit too much. In the moment watching it, I was so thrown I sort of just surrendered myself over to it. In the two weeks since it aired, I realize the back half of this season felt very rushed and provided some unsatisfying conclusions (NoHo Hank in particular, played to the hilt by the hilarious Anthony Carrigan) to characters we really loved. Henry Winkler and Stephen Root were great as always, but once again it was Sarah Goldberg as Sally who really ran away with the show. There was some profoundly funny moments scattered throughout this polarizing eight episodes, but all in all it was actually bleaker than Succession, the actual drama on HBO before it. I never say this, but I think another season would have greatly benefited the show as a whole, but it may have killed Hader. Grade: B+ (Max)

The Boogeyman

I was a big fan of filmmaker Rob Savage‘s first film, Host, a short, simple, and very effective horror thriller that took place over Zoom. It was the best post-Covid horror film that directly addressed the pandemic. This dude then went on to make Dashcam, which I didn’t see but heard was awful, before making his big budget mainstream horror debut with this. The Boogeyman seems like what happens when a talented director gets handed a really mediocre and generic script and then tries to do his best with it. There’s some really well designed jump scares and sequences that sometimes make you forget you’re basically watching a Dark Castle movie from the early 2000s. The overall concept and anything but subtle social commentary the movie sits upon is good, but it’s all tied together with painfully one-dimensional characters you never really care about. Chris Messina (Air, Sharp Objects) plays a traumatized widowed dad who can’t properly grieve his wife and is therefore neglecting his children played by Yellowjackets‘ Sophie Thatcher (young Juliette Lewis on that show) and a very good child actress, Vivien Lyra Blair. Blair is the clear standout here playing the only character you actually do care about while Thatcher and Messina are fine, but not given much to work with. From what I’m told, it’s not as good as the Stephen King short story which was, according to the internet, only eight pages. I think this would have been a much better five minute short, great even. As it stands it’s pretty forgettable. Grade: C+ (In Theaters)

I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson Season 3

The best sketch comedy show since Mr. Show has returned for a third season and its just as weird and almost as funny as it’s always been. I can’t think of anyone doing sketch comedy who is better at concepts than Tim Robinson. A short-lived SNL cast member, Robinson left that show early, most likely because they had no idea how to use him or his bizarre and slightly disturbing premises. Lucky for us, Netflix gave him his own sketch show where he can do whatever the fuck he wants. I Think You Should Leave is certainly not for mainstream audiences or people who don’t generally like comedy. This is real niche shit. Comedy nerds will rejoice, and most people will scratch their heads all confused like. Also, at only 15-17 minutes per episode, it isn’t egregiously padded like most sketch programs.

This season we get returning guest appearances by ITYSL stand-bys like Sam Richardson, Tim Heidecker, Connor O’Malley, and the delightfully unsettling Patti Harrison. We also get another wave of fantastic bits from unknown or barely known character actors like Alberto Issac as a filthy limerick performer and Alison Martin as an office worker who really oversells a banana joke. Seems weird to pick apart every sketch so let me give me my Top 5 and Bottom 3.

BOTTOM 3

3. Talk About Your Kids – Great example of a sketch really overstaying its welcome. It’s sporadically very very funny, but the whole business with Robinson and his entourage wears thin after a while and feels sort of just weird for the sake of being weird. Jason Schwartzman in this.

2. Friend Group – Was expecting something funnier from a Beck Bennett / Tim Robinson collab but this one just doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

Street Sets – The only sketch of the season, mark that series, where I failed to chuckle even one time. Fred Armisen plays a man intimidating his kids by showing them a fake video of him beating up other kids because a studio called “Street Sets” will offer you that service, replacing kids with really old stunt performers in parts. That sentence makes it sound like I was “morally opposed” to this sketch but in reality the sketch has the opposite problem – it has no goddamn teeth. It’s such a half-assed, obvious, silly addition where you keep waiting for the hook that never comes.

TOP 5

5. Darmine Doggy Door – Hilarious and unhinged sketch about feuding neighbors using pigs in Nixon masks to intimidate each other. It comes through Robinson‘s doggy door and he’s so scared he imagines it being a fucking horror movie creature. It’s funny how revolting and terrifying Robinson‘s out-of-the-corner-of-his-eye interpretation of what this pig in a Nixon mask looks like.

4. Surprise Party – Patti Harrison is one of the top guest performers on ITYSL, so it’s no surprise her single contribution to Season 3 made my Top 5. Some office manager is having a surprise party and the office surprised him with a cardboard cutout of himself. Over the course of the party, the manager becomes increasingly concerned that a disgruntled employee (Harrison) is feeding his cardboard cutout bleach and generally abusing it. Harrison is great at playing quietly unhinged and this may be her most disturbing character, and this even before she starts talking about her rats.

3. Driving Crooner – Such a simple and ridiculous sketch. Does for car decals what Jaws did for swimming.

2. Ziplining – The simplest sketch of the season plays one joke 20 times and then ends under two minutes. Robinson is a reality dating show contestant only interested in using the house’s zipline.

Pay It Forward – The cleverest sketch this season also the simplest, and didn’t get bogged down by half-tangents. It also had a definitive ending. This one sees Robinson in a drive-thru line offering to “pay it forward” and pay for the driver behind him’s meal. Hoping this next driver will also pay it forward, he rushes his car to the back of the line to order 55 BURGERS, 55 FRIES, 55 FRIES, 55 TACOS, 55 COKES, 100 TATER TOTS, 100 PIZZAS, 100 TENDERS, 100 MEATBALLS, 100 COFFEES, 55 WINGS, 55 SHAKES, 55 PANCAKES, 55 PASTAS, 55 PEPPERS, and 155 TATERS.

Honorable Mentions: Jellybean, ABX Heart Monitor, Egg Game

HARDEST SINGLE LAUGH

Tim Meadows throwing up after deep throating a feather prop in Wedding Photo, a sketch that has an amazing first beat but then struggles to heighten and just sort of stops.

Grade: A- (Netflix)

Yellowjackets Season 2

The single most frustrating show this television season for me had to be Yellowjackets. I really loved the first season despite harboring some suspicions they may have “jumped the shark” a bit, but Season 2 really started to show some cracks. I guess my biggest gripe is that it takes this fantastic premise filled out by interesting characters inhabited by top-notch actors, and then just fumbles the ball repeatedly. Whether it be some wonky-ass dialogue, a poor rendering of Van’s adult character, characters making choices that seem glaringly uncharacteristic for them – ever since Shauna killed Adam, I really don’t buy any of her motivations, despite such a fantastic and entertaining performance from Melanie Lynskey. And yet, every time the show dropped a new episode on Showtime at 9pm on a Thursday, I was there with friggin’ bells on. There’s a promise from this show that we’ll eventually get an explanation as to what all this maybe supernatural shit in the woods is about. If we don’t, I’ll be fucking pissed because Yellowjackets isn’t a show like Succession where it can find power in being ambiguous and open-ended. Sorry, Yellowjackets. You’re not that good of a show. If you aren’t creating plausible character relationships and reasonably grounded stakes, you can’t pull a less is more move. You have to go all in, show-runners of Yellowjackets. If I get five seasons into this thing and you show-runners hand me some obscure explanation or some kind of deus-ex machina ending, I’m going to be pissed. I might even write a letter, cause I’m that fucking petty.

Anyway, this season sees Shauna (Lynskey) trying to fend off a police investigation into Adam’s death. It also sees Taissa (the underrated Tawny Cypress) dealing with the fall-out of eating the family dog because she’s blacking out and becoming a forest monster. Natalie (Juliette Lewis) was kidnapped by Lottie’s lavender sweatpants cult, and Misty (Christina Ricci) is hot the case to figure out what happened to her. On paper, this sounds much more frenetic and fast-paced than it ends up being. The beginning and end of the season are as strong as most of Season 1, but the middle parts, especially when Van (Six Feet Under’s Lauren Ambrose) is introduced (a character who was my favorite before meeting her adult counterpart), and she has some pretty slow and fairly unrewarding character moments with Taissa.

A show that isn’t this tight and buttoned up can’t operate this slow. I’ll wait half an hour for a perfect mid-rare dry-aged ribeye, but I won’t wait around that long for a Big Mac. The tragedy of Yellowjackets is ultimately it’s a salacious pay cable thriller that identifies as a prestige drama. Characters aren’t nuanced enough for the story to unfold this leisurely, and it’s getting to a point where I honestly believe the show-runners have no fucking idea where they’re taking it. However, for now, it’s still fun in places. Let’s see how long this house of cards lasts. Grade: B– (Showtime)