Feb 21, 2011 4
To glean the differences between a regular episode of Community and “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking,” it’s first necessary to discuss how a mockumentary actually works. While the format takes its style from documentaries, it actually very rarely mimics real life — the mockumentary is fundamentally a genre of outsized performances and ridiculous developments.
Feb 17, 2011 0
Part memoir, part devastating lyrical elegy, Just Kids (2010) is Patti Smith’s fulfillment of her promise to Robert Mapplethorpe, who, dying of AIDS in 1989, asked his friend to write the story of their lives together. But just as Smith has here given us a kind of memoir, so too has she created something far grander for its literary ambition—and, indeed, for its merit: a text at turns elusive, musical, and deeply affecting, and which bears indelibly the structure and arc of tragedy.
Feb 16, 2011 0
Greg Garcia’s first foray into poor, white American life, NBC’s My Name Is Earl, never quite broke free of the stereotypes it mocked, maybe because Earl’s mystical list said little about the human potential of those around him. Fox’s Raising Hope, Garcia’s second go, corrects Earl’s missteps by incarnating magic in the form of a baby, the universal lovable object. This baby is foisted on her 23-year-old father, Jimmy, when her mother is executed.
Feb 14, 2011 0
During Community’s first season, Señor Ben Chang, as the teacher of Spanish 101, the course that united the cast into a study group, was explicitly necessary for the show’s existence. With the loss of his stated purpose, Chang has gone from central to ethereal. Second-season Chang must work to surreptitiously inject himself into the main cast’s milieu, insinuations that are becoming more and more important.
Feb 8, 2011 2
Seinfeld is callous. The show seems, deceivingly, to eschew all responsibilities at sensitivity to marginalized others in favor of a cruel, mocking engagement with the otherness of those others. Nowhere is this as stark as in Seinfeld’s treatment of mental illness. Until late in the series, only two beings are discussed as carrying anything like a true mental malady worthy of deference. One of them is a fat, pitiful, failing artist. The other is a monkey.
