Has Comedy Bang! Bang! taken The Leap?

Shows -- especially comedies -- usually take a while to truly get good.  It's difficult to come out of the gate free of kinks, so the first few episodes are a feeling-out process, tinkering with the established formula until the perfect variables are set in place.  Even a show that's already good can have an uptick, where it finds another gear and ascends to the level of greatness.  This is where the concept of The Leap comes in.  Whether it comes 6 episodes in or after an entire season, when a show finally realizes its full potential, it can be an electrifying thing to watch.  A strong case can be made for Comedy Bang! Bang!, which just concluded the first half of what has been a magnificent second season, taking The Leap.

I've been a huge fan of Comedy Bang! Bang! the podcast since high school, so I was hotly anticipating the premiere of the show last year.  The first season was good, and certainly made me laugh quite a bit, yet I couldn't help but compare it to the podcast.  Aside from a few flourishes, the show didn't stray too far away from the format of its progenitor, starting off with a standard interview with somebody in the comedy world, then a visit from a character, and a game to close things out.  Unfortunately, the podcast's odd rhythm is perfectly suited for an hour-plus runtime, and many of the flaws in the first season came from trying to condense that momentum into a 22-minute episode.  Shifts from improvised dialogue to scripted bits were jarring, and many of the popular characters from the podcast had hours of backstory reduced to 4 minutes of screentime.  Most of all, the first season felt insubstantial, the kind of thing you'd thoroughly enjoy in the moment, but not think about after it was done.

Many of those edges have been smoothed out in the second season, and the show has improved in every way because of it.  Few shows reduce me to a giggling mess in the way that this season has, and it has quickly risen to the ranks of my favorite currently running comedies.  There's a better blend between script and improv, allowing for the interview segments to feel more natural.  Guests who are luminaries in the comedy world like Andy Samberg, Aziz Ansari, and Andy Richter mostly bring the laughs by playing skewed versions of themselves, but people like Anna Kendrick and Zoe Saldana have also appeared, and were unexpectedly just as great.  Characters from the podcast are still forced to condense their stories into small chunks, but it's a little more cohesive this time around.  Take last week's episode, "Bill Hader Wears a Grey Button Down Shirt & Sneakers," which featured podcast favorite, Fourvel, the murderous orphan played by Bobby Moynihan.  His segment is essentially a retread of familiar material for any listener of the podcast, but they inject life into the bit by taking the adult-sized Moynihan and shrinking him down to the proportions of a child.  It's just the kind of bizarre, hilarious thing that can only be achieved through a visual medium.

What's been the most impressive thing about this season though is how it has completely blown the doors off of the talk show format.  Like the first season, the show still parodies talk show staples like man-on-the-street and makeover segments, but this year they've been incorporating more long-form ideas that build over the course of an episode.  I've heard accusations of Comedy Bang! Bang! being anti-comedy, but in no way can those criticisms be true when there's so much comedy packed into a given episode.  The show just throws everything out there, stacking bit after bit on top of each other, and fully committing to every single one of them.  The best example of this is the season's 6th episode, "Gillian Jacobs Wears a Red Dress With Sail Boats" (yes, even the episode titles are a running joke), which plays with time, foreshadowing how the episode will end.  Over the course of the show, we get more pieces of how the story will conclude, and how all of the various characters factor into the big event that's being alluded to.  All the while, the normal show is still going on, slowly converging with the flash forwards.  It's bold, dizzying stuff, and the way that the actual conclusion upends the foreshadowing is absolutely perfect.  Even when overarching bits don't quite work, like the Tim Meadows narration in "David Cross Wears a Red Polo & Brown Shoes With Red Laces," it's all just so impressive on a conceptual level that it's hard not to cut the episode some slack.

In alot of ways I'm reminded of Nathan For You, another show from this year that felt like nothing else I've ever seen on television.  There have been other shows that have played with the talk show format, but none as gleefully as Comedy Bang! Bang! does.  Its rhythm takes a while to get used to, but once you're synced up with it, it's a loopy and hilarious experience.  This past week's episode was the midseason finale, but the show will be back on October 18th, and I can't wait to see what it does next.

Season 2 of The Legend of Korra comes out of the gate with two terrific episodes

Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of my favorite shows of all-time; I think it's essentially the Star Wars of our generation.  So naturally, I was in between and excitement and extreme trepidation when I first heard the news that creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino were making a sequel set 70 years after the original show.  However, The Legend of Korra quickly justified its existence by delivering the same quality of its predecessor without peddling the same content.   In fact, the two shows display an interesting contrast in the way that they depict their worlds.  In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the characters were still children, and that show was about being at the entry point of discovering all these feelings about yourself and the world around you, whereas the teenage protagonists of The Legend of Korra are right in the middle of it.  The former explored broader, more universal themes of friendship, good & evil, and responsibility, and while it wasn't always light and fluffy, its general tone was more firmly rooted in the style of children's programming.  The latter, however, dove deep into mature and complex themes of racial and class inequality; an Occupy Movement for the Nickelodeon crowd.  Sometimes it felt like a miracle that Nickelodeon allowed the show to air at all, because it didn't shy away from the dark undercurrents of its world.  Where Avatar: the Last Airbender went out of its way to avoid death whenever possible, The Legend of Korra had no problems incorporating a murder-suicide into the story in season 1.

The two shows deviate from each other on a pure structure level as well.  Avatar had 20-episode seasons, while Korra's first season was 12 episodes, and the difference between the two boil down to the standard tradeoff between the network and cable drama models.  The 20-episode Avatar structure allowed space for characters to grow along with the story, taking breaks from the larger narrative to tell standalone tales.  Unlike many other cartoons, the "filler" episodes were as vital as the ones that were heavy on plot (listen, I love "The Fortuneteller" and "Cave of Two Lovers" -- sue me).  On the other hand, Korra benefited from the kind of intense, breathless serialization that only 12-14 episode seasons can deliver.

What we see in Korra is a world that has advanced far beyond what we saw in Avatar.  In just 70 years, a universe similar to feudal Japan has transformed into a steampunk, industrial one centered around a place called Republic City.  The progression is jarring, but Konietzko and Dimartino sell it because of their knack for detailed world-building, and you can just tell that all of the interworkings of Republic City have been fully thought out.  Not only do they fill the fringes with fascinating little details, but the world is also populated with rich characters at its center too.  The main trio of Korra, the new Avatar, and brothers Mako and Bolin, resemble the construction from Avatar: the Last Airbender, but they quickly take on their own lives in the first season.  Korra in particular is just a fantastically written character, one of my favorite protagonists on television.  She's the hero of the story, but the writers aren't afraid to bold and underline her hot-headed tendencies, and the first season featured her constantly bristling at orders from her master, Tenzin (the son of Aang from Avatar).  Couple the layered writing with some stellar voice acting and action sequences, and you've got the first season, which was one of the best of 2012.

That's not to say that the show wasn't without its flaws.  One of my biggest complaints about the construction of the show is that it gave into the urge that many prequels, sequels, and spin-offs fail to resist, in that so many characters seemed to have some kind of relation to a character from the original series.  I mentioned that Korra's master is Aang's son, which is an acceptable and logical choice, but throughout the first season you meet a handful of other characters who share genes with those you know and love from Avatar (and a few more in season 2).  A nod or two to fans of the original series is fine, but eventually the world begins to feel a bit small if it's just an elaborate family reunion.  The other problem hearkens back to the pros and cons of a cable-length season, because the first season sometimes felt like it was too rushed, particularly towards the end.  There was less of a chance to get a sense of the characters due to the forward momentum of the plot dealing with Amon and his Equalist movement, so some of the crucial moments didn't land as much as they could've.

Season 2, which premiered in an hour-long installment last night, does much in the way of answering the first complaint.  Like I said, there are still some introductions of characters who tie back to the original series, but making the arc of the season be about spirits is a smart choice if the show wants to expand its focus.  The spirit world was introduced in Avatar: the Last Airbender, but it was only briefly touched upon there.  The main focus of season 2 of Legend of Korra seems to be concerned with exploring the mythology of the spirit world, as Korra goes back to her home in the Southern Water Tribe to find out that the village has been under the constant attack of restless spirits.  Like in season 1, the major arc is a story goal, but it's constructed in such a way that it's essential to her growth as a character as well.  Although she's changed a bit from when we first met her in the pilot, Korra's natural instinct still is to attack problems with immediate action and brute force, but in order to bridge the gap between the human and spirit world, she's going to have to learn careful consideration and spirituality.  It's an interesting choice to have spirits be the obstacle for the season, as opposed to another Big Bad like in the first season.  Essentially this is like the Eastern version of man wrestling with God.  There may be corporeal adversaries along the way, but having this larger force at work in the background makes the show feel more grandiose.

It's too early to tell whether they've answered the second complaint, but these first two episodes were much better paced than anything from the first season.  Overall, "Rebel Spirits" and "The Southern Lights" was a great reintroduction to this rich and fascinating world.  The hour just felt so cohesive, almost like a single movie that reminded us of all the fleshed-out characters and nuanced relationships that exist within the show.  If there's one theme to extract from the premiere, it's the idea that the frustrations of being a teen and being the Avatar have some parallels.  When you're a teenager, you're stuck between having more freedom than you did as a child and still being trapped under the thumb of authority.  Likewise, Korra is essentially "the chosen one," yet there are so many different people trying to advise her and tell her what to do.  The conflict between what Korra wants and actually what's best for her isn't anything new, but it's a fertile well from which to draw stories.  This season's purpose is not only to lengthen the show but to also deepen it, and this central conflict has a chance of finally cashing in on the potential that was built up in the first season.  It's been gone for so long that I forgot how much I missed the show, but The Legend of Korra is back and not taking any time reminding us of its greatness.

Sarah Polley delivers another knockout film with Stories We Tell

"Who would want to hear about our family"?  It's a question that Sarah Polley's sister asks at the beginning of Stories We Tell, Polley's attempt to make sense of certain events of her family's past in documentary form.  It's a question one might ask themselves when reading a one-line description of the premise, but the film manages to confirm the old adage that sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.

In some ways, the main character of the film is a woman who doesn't even technically appear in it, Sarah's mother Diane.  She died of cancer when Sarah was very young, and Sarah brings together various friends and family from her mother's life to offer their interpretations of who she was as a person.  But naturally, all of these various impressions don't neatly fit together, and the edges that bump together don't create a fluid narrative.  Overall, Diane was a woman who was vibrant, complicated, and full of life on the outside, but it's in the telling of her guarded interior where things start to blur.  Like all of Sarah Polley's films, Stories We Tell is interested in the complexities of memory.  Our recollections are not something we can embalm, and because there's no way to preserve them, they have a habit of fracturing and dissolving.  The past is like a glass wall -- as much as it appears that we can extend our hands and grasp it, we eventually hit a barrier.  In an effort to reach back into the past, Polley's family faces all of the pain and regret that comes with it, as old wounds get reopened and new ones form.

If it sounds like I'm being a little light on plot, it's because that's a deliberate decision on my part, as there are some progressions in the story that are best experienced without prior knowledge.  For being so tiny and intimate, the film also spins quite a yarn, one that you'll want to keep tugging at as much Polley does.  The whole thing almost feels like a story that's constructing itself as it goes along, much like life does.  Away From Her and Take This Waltz, Polley's first two films, were full of lovely lines of dialogue, and Stories We Tell finds its beauty in the form of re-read emails and letters that are just as lyrical as anything that could be scripted.  Sarah's family has many members and they're all very articulate, offering thoughtful insights on the events they're recounting and the human condition in general.  There's some tension that comes from these people being interviewed about delicate subjects by their own family member, but it also generates some very raw moments, and countless scenes have an overwhelming emotional power.

I love documentaries that implicate the documentarian, and this film doesn't just involve Sarah, she's tangled right up in the middle of it.  At a certain point, she has to ask herself why she's making this film that exposes the intimate details of her family's history.  As much as the bending of stories can be for entertainment purposes, it can also be an act of avoidance.  Though the film may be her way of exploring difficult aspects of her life without directly confronting them, it also draws some thoughtful conclusions on the importance of storytelling.  There's a crucial scene near the end where one of Polley's subjects questions the validity of including so many differing perspectives, even ones with only a tangential relationship to the story.  But in his skepticism of the necessity of the film, he's only emphasizing it.  That's what stories are.  They reverberate and affect those in concentric circles far removed from the epicenter.  They shift, reform, and gain new life over and over again.  They're not a facsimile of events, but a translation of them, the closest we can ever come to getting back to the true moment.

Is is time for Sarah Polley to start entering the conversation of best directors working right now?  Away From Her was an astonishing debut, and while Take This Waltz didn't quite hit those same heights, it was still very good.  Now with this one, which is number 1 on my ever-changing list of favorite films this year, that's two masterful films and another great one before the age of 35.  Going by that trajectory, she should be considered a wunderkind in the same vein as Paul Thomas Anderson.  Her films are special because of the way they navigate fraught emotional terrain, and although Stories We Tell is about one family, its themes of loss and the ephemeral nature of memory can resonate with anyone who has a beating heart and firing synapses.

Late to the Party #6: Do the Right Thing (1989)

Late to the Party is a recurring feature that addresses older movies, TV shows, albums, and books that I missed the first time around, for some reason or another.

You don't have to look very hard to see that there's an unfortunate lack of representation for African-Americans in film these days.  Really, Tyler Perry is the only director who's consistently putting out films with a predominant black cast, but those films are marketed to a niche audience (and are of questionable quality, some would argue).  Even still, I don't personally feel under-represented in stories.  There's so much more to me than being black, so I find representation in all of the other aspects of myself that appear on television and in film.  There are so many stories littered with male nerds, depressed people, and lonely indie music lovers that the lack of African-Americans, while troubling, was never something that I felt personally wounded by.  That is, until I watched Do the Right Thing for the first time last week.  Of Spike Lee's filmography, I'd seen Malcolm X, He Got Game, and Inside Man before, but I saw the first two at such a young age that I couldn't really process them and the third was outside of his usual style, so I never gave him much thought.  But everything started to make sense once I saw Do the Right Thing, and I realized how vital Lee is as a filmmaker for his efforts to shine a light on the lives of black people in America.

The film is such a great depiction of black culture -- all of the colors, clothes, and hairstyles so perfectly attuned to the details at the turn of the 90s.  Though I've never lived in a kind of neighborhood like Bed-Stuy as portrayed here, it feels so specific and tactile.  Just look at everything going on in the background of any given scene.  Mookie (played by Lee himself) and Buggin' Out (a young, completely unrecognizable Giancarlo Esposito) will just be talking in the foreground, but there's an endless amount of activity to look at on the periphery.  And it's not just the faked processes of paid extras; it feels like a living ecosystem at work.  Most of all, it just gets that ball-busting, "shooting the shit" feeling right.  Lee's work is known to be flabby, and some of the scenes might not contribute much on a plot level, but they're all so vibrant that it's hard to make a case for any of them being cut.

The hangout vibe benefits from the plot, which is mostly just about an entire neighborhood going through the hottest day of the summer.  Mookie, a black pizza delivery man working at an Italian family restaurant, is the closest thing the film has to a main character, but he's really only an entry point into this knotty world.  Stories start with him, then break off completely, and so many vivid characters get their own little arcs that intersect and accumulate.  In a sense, it's sort of like Jamie Hernandez's Love and Rockets stories in the way that individual parts form a composite piece.  Bed-Stuy is a mostly black neighborhood, but there's also a bit of a cultural blend going on.  As the temperature rises, so too do the closeted tensions between the different races.  It's a figurative melting pot in more ways than one, and like the atoms in a liquid boiling over, the entire neighborhood is gaining energy and knocking against each other.  You can just see the beads of sweat on people's faces increase as the film goes on, the waves of heat rise from the pavement.

Lee is on-the-nose about these tensions in the film -- and race issues in general -- but subtlety is not his intention.  It's all supposed to be fiery and in your face, aiming to work you up into the same frenzy that ultimately results at the end of the film.  There are numerous scenes where characters talk directly to the screen, like the infamous insult sequence, and it almost feels like Lee is urging you not to be a passive viewer.  Yet for all of its brazen blustering, the film is still able to sneak up on you.  At the beginning of the film, you'd hardly be able to guess that the seemingly minor conflict between Buggin' Out and Sal the pizza shop owner (Danny Aiello) would end up being the film's most essential plotline.  Early on, Buggin' Out gets kicked out of Sal's because he complains about the fact that restaurant's wall of fame has no black people on it.  His campaign against the restaurant is taken as a joke until it isn't, and eventually he gets Radio Raheem, the neighborhood's DIY DJ, in the mix.  This leads to the fight between the Italians and the blacks, which leads to a mini-riot that alerts the cops, which leads to Radio Raheem's death at the hands of one of those cops, which leads to an even bigger riot.  There goes those details again, always seeming to amass.

The almost accidental way things progress is one of the biggest themes of the film.  Lee does a great job of depicting how these kinds of things can just spin out of control.  Initially, Radio Raheem wasn't even mad at Sal for the wall of fame, but when Buggin' Out presents him the opportunity to channel his anger -- even if it's for something unrelated -- he takes up the offer.  Everybody in the neighborhood is fed up, and they might not know what it is that they're fed up with, but they all unite together against one target.  Like the city it depicts, Do the Right Thing is all about exploring warring impulses.  The love/hate scene, from which the picture at the top derives, spells it out in the middle of the film, arguing that we are not just one prevailing disposition, but a constant balance between multiple feelings.  When Sal says that he loves and appreciates the black community that has grown up on his food and helped his business thrive, he probably means it.  But in that moment where Buggin' Out and Radio Raheem confront him?  He can't contain his racist rage, even if he didn't know it existed at all.  And that's why I think Mookie's decision to toss a garbage can through the window of the restaurant, effectively causing the riot to swell, is much more complex than Spike Lee would later make it out to be in interviews.  According to Lee, questioning whether Mookie "did the right thing" is equivalent to thinking that a white man's property is as important as a black man's life.  But the film ends with contradictory quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X, punctuating the idea that the true warring impulses are the ones that cause us to wonder what is the right thing.

When I saw the movie Fruitvale Station last month, I cried at the end.  It was less about the film being sad -- although it was unfortunate for Oscar Grant to die unnecessarily -- and mostly because it caused 21 years of being black to rush at me all at once.  I've lived a pretty easy life, and haven't faced many overt hardships, but even still, there are certain little things that can make being black feel so unfair.  Maybe I wouldn't have been stopped and searched by a cop in the middle of the street for no reason that one summer afternoon, or maybe a white girl I had a crush on would've been more inclined to like me back, or maybe I wouldn't feel like have to appear as nonthreatening as possible when meeting people for the first time if I wasn't black.  If Fruitvale Station made me bummed out about being black, Do the Right Thing made me fiery.  Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" plays multiple times during the film, and it's almost like an encapsulation of the movie as a whole -- brash, powerful, and completely unapologetic.

The Canon #4: The Killers - "Hot Fuss" (2004)

The Canon is a recurring feature where I look back on movies, tv episodes, albums, books, etc. that I love; inducting them into my own imaginary canon of all-time favorite things.  (Inspired by the podcast, Extra Hot Great)

Back in late 2004, I didn't really listen to any kind of rock music.  My tastes mostly consisted of rap, R&B, and top 40 pop.  At this time, The Killers were inescapable, with their first single, "Somebody Told Me," getting constant play on VH1, MTV, and various radio stations.  Their second single, "Mr. Brightside," was even bigger, solidifying the band as something that wasn't going away any time soon.  Here's the thing: I loved these songs.  I'd never felt this way about any kind of "rock" music, besides songs that appeared on various Madden soundtracks, and that was more a case of attrition than it was genuine enjoyment.

It was such a new feeling that I was almost scared to like them.  I remember wanting to ask for Hot Fuss as my Secret Santa gift in 7th grade, but I didn't want anybody to know that I was into The Killers.  I eventually bought the album myself (along with Jay-Z's The Black Album) and never looked back.  It's just a perfect set of catchy pop/rock songs.  The sounds of sirens that appear in the album opener, "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine," were almost like a clarion call for the effect that the band would have on me.  Everything just felt so new, and hearing that throaty bass on "Jenny..." was like a baby opening their eyes for the first time.  After that was the endlessly catchy "Mr. Brightside," and then "Smile Like You Mean It," a wonderfully wistful song with arena-ready sonics.  But it's "All These Things That I've Done" that's the weirdest, most triumphant song on the album.  A chugging rocker one second, a piano ballad the next, "All These Things..." is a perfect example of the band's knack for deceptive melodies.

Hot Fuss has gotten a reputation for being front-loaded, but that's simply just not true.  The first half has all the singles, sure, but it's the second half where the band gets interesting.  "On Top" showed that they clearly had chops, and it's probably still their most instrumentally accomplished song, with the tight groove between the bass and drums, and the guitar adding layers over the low-end.  "Change Your Mind," the jangler that follows, shows another shade to the band, a midtempo swoon that they wear well.  On the other hand, "Midnight Show" is so huge that it's at risk of careening out of control at any moment.  It's the emotional highlight of the album, yet instead of ending on that high note, they close out with the woozy "Everything Will Be Alright."  It's a fascinating, but ultimately successful choice; the perfect denouement to the album.  The only song that I had a problem with at first was "Believe Me Natalie," the 9th track.  Instrumentally it's all over the place and lyrically it's nonsense, but the dreamy heartache of it all kind of grows on you after hundreds of listens.

And that's the key to this album.  Emotionally, it just feels so high-stakes that it connects on a visceral level, even when a song or section shouldn't work.  It's essentially the perfect album for middle school.  Where I would later find Brandon Flowers' lyrics painfully bad, the melodrama that soaked "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine" and "Andy You're A Star" was really profound to me at 13.  The songs were so splashy that it was hard not to get wrapped up in them.   Flowers was never afraid to get big and theatrical either.  He dipped to the dugout and belted to the balconies without fear.  He even had a freaking gospel choir on two songs in a row and somehow we let him get away with it!

Many of the negative reviews of Hot Fuss were steeped in accusations of the band's apparent lack of originality.  It's true that their sound recalled the 80s in general, but they rarely sound like they're just blantantly ripping off bands.  "Change Your Mind" is a bit Morrissey-esque and "Midnight Show" has some Duran Duran to it, but that's not really different than the pastiche being done by other acclaimed bands of the time (Franz Ferdinand, The Strokes, Bloc Party).  Plus, they set themselves apart because of how good they were at laying on atmosphere, especially when it came to their synths.  Brandon Flowers' synthesizer work blew my mind back then, and I've still never heard better synths than the ones on Hot Fuss.

So what happened to The Killers?  There are two things that ultimately led to the downfall of the band: 1. They were so offended by some of the criticism of Hot Fuss that they wanted to do anything to get away from that sound.  2. Flowers' ambition got the best of him, and he lost the ability to reign in his ideas, just throwing everything out there and trying to make it work.  So the band got really into the Bruce Springsteen and made Sam's Town, and while I still think that's a pretty great album, it was clear to see that they had lost a bit of their magic.  In 2008 they released Day & Age,  and it was fine, but I just stopped caring about them.  Last year's Battle Born was poised to be the band's big comeback, and I was optimistic after hearing "Runaways," but the album as a whole is atrocious.  They're a band that I'll always check up on, given my residual love for Hot Fuss, but I think their heyday is long behind them.

Yet I can't emphasize enough how important Hot Fuss was to me.  I read every review, checked out every older band referenced in them, and sought out anything current that sounded like them.  They were essentially my gateway band into the world of alternative and indie rock; my six degrees of separation.  Every band I listen to today is in some way because of The Killers, and although it may not be hip or edgy to say this, Hot Fuss is still one of my top 5 albums of all time.  Whenever I revisit it, the wave of nostalgia hits, but when that has passed, I'm left with a marvelous album that still holds up.