Study Room Thanksgiving Special

I love Bob’s Burgers.  I tried it when it first started airing, but for some reason I bounced off it.  Then, years later, convinced by friends of mine, I gave it another try, and now, it’s become not just one of my favorite animated shows of all time, it’s surpassed Futurama as my top comfort show, and is one of my favorite shows full stop.  Barely a day goes by that I don’t watch at least one episode of Bob’s.  I shouldn’t be surprised, since it’s the creative marriage between the people behind Home Movies and King of the Hill, two more shows I love.  Bob’s does just about everything well, but more than perhaps any other show I’ve seen, it absolutely nails holiday episodes.  And since the nation is gathering around tables this Thursday (apologies to my Canadian readers, I’ll take care of you next October), I thought I’d celebrate the many excellent Bob’s Burgers Thanksgiving episodes by ranking them all by my preference for you, so you have an option to occupy the family when the forks are put down and that one uncle you really don’t like wants to start giving you life advice.  Let’s get into it.

11. Season 6, Episode 4: “Gayle Makin’ Bob Sled”

Gayle fans are probably going to hate me for placing this one at the bottom, and while I’m not a Gayle hater, Linda’s sister is at her neurotic peak here—whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is sort of in the eye of the beholder.  But if you’re like me and you think Gayle is best in small doses, this episode where Bob ends up having to drag her in a kiddie pool down a snow covered street to get to Thanksgiving dinner, it’s a little too much Gayle.  But it’s not a bad episode—it ends strongly and is definitely a good watch.  Still, something has to be at the bottom of the list and this is it.

10. Season 4, Episode 5: “Turkey in a Can”

Gayle and her cats are over for Thanksgiving, and as Bob tries out a new three-day brine, the turkey ends up in the toilet overnight.  And then the cat box.  After his initial shock, he gets a replacement turkey, but the it also ends up in the toilet.  And so on and so forth.  While this episode ends sweetly as the mystery is revealed and the repeated visits to the grocer for replacements offer some hilarious scenes, this one is this far down the list for me because it’s just too gross for my tastes.  Between the raw turkey in the toilet, rolling around in the litter box, and then Linda being sick on it, it just hits on all the things I don’t personally enjoy.  The episode is not without its moments, but they’re not enough to push this one further up the list.

9. Season 10, Episode 8: “Now We’re Not Cooking With Gas”

We all know that Thanksgiving is Bob’s favorite holiday and he is over the moon to find out that he’s been selected to purchase a Riverbrook Lake Farms heritage turkey after 5 years on the waiting list.  I’m not much of a turkey guy myself (unless it’s smoked, then we’re talking), but I’ve had the kind of turkey he’s talking about, straight from a farm, never frozen, and it absolutely makes a difference.  For Bob’s favorite day of the year, a gas outage on the block and no other oven access drives him to Linda-levels of steamrolling, forcing the family into the alley to cook the bird on a makeshift fire pit.  As the embers start to fade and the fire department threatens to hose him down and fine him fairly heavily, Bob starts a relentless race against the clock to cook the turkey before he runs out of fuel or the fire department returns to shut down the party.  This pushes him to send the kids out for every possible flammable object and Louise’s pyromania goes on overdrive, which is usually fun to watch.  However, when they fail to bring back anything usable, it’s Tina’s sacrifice that makes Bob realizes he’s the one ruining the day for everyone.  While the ending is quite nice and Bob learns a lesson, another episode in this list drives it home a little better and with funnier subplots, so that earns this one a 9th place spot only.

8. Season 3, Episode 5: “An Indecent Thanksgiving Proposal”

Bob’s first entry into the Thanksgiving special is a strong start to a lovely series of episodes.  Bob is left out when landlord and eccentric Calvin Fischoeder offers them 5 months of free rent if Bob cooks his Thanksgiving dinner—and the Belchers pretend to be his family so he can trick a woman who will only date married men into a relationship (the intended length of which I can only speculate).  But, as expected, things take a turn for the Belcher family and what results is a serious bit of madcap fun.  Also, Linda debuts her Thanksgiving song and it’s an earworm.  Not my favorite, but it’s catchy as hell.  I’m a huge fan of Fischoeder and his affection for Bob and this is a very funny episode; placing this one 8th isn’t a criticism of the episode so much as it is a testament to how good the Thanksgiving episodes of Bob’s have been.  That this first one has been bested—in my opinion, of course—several times over shows how good a Thanksgiving episode Bob’s is capable of.

7. Season 11, Episode 7: “Diarrhea of a Poopy Kid”

Okay, so you know I don’t like toilet humor by now and while Gene does spend this entire episode on the bathroom floor, it keeps the truly gross stuff off screen.  I know there’s a contingent of Bob’s fans that don’t like “story” episodes, but I love them, so this one earns the 7th spot.  As Gene is quarantined in the lav because of a stomach bug, Louise and Tina (and eventually Bob) decide to tell him stories through the door to comfort him as he’s missing the best food day of the year and Bob’s new experimental menu.  Gene asks for stories that make him hate food and the kids do their best to comply.  Louise tells the story of The Breadator, a parody of The Predator, where Gene is the hero who takes on an invisible alien hunter made of rosemary bread, one of Bob’s new dishes.  Tina tells the story Pear Force One, a spoof of Air Force One where President Gene and his wife, First Lady Mom (yeah, Gene’s Oedipus complex is on full show here), are hijacked by sentient pear terrorists who want to prove that pears are as good as apples.  And Bob tells Parmageddon, a story about deep sea marinara miners who have to save the Earth from a Texas-sized chicken parm from space.  A very sweet episode that offers a lot of laughs, it’s only not higher on this list because other episodes are just better.

6. Season 12, Episode 8: “Stuck in the Kitchen with You”

Similar in structure to “Now We’re Cooking”, Bob’s Thankzilla side rears its ugly head here as he steps in to serve Thanksgiving dinner to the residents of a retirement home when the cook goes into labor. But, where this outshines “Now We’re Cooking” is the direct confrontation that leads to Bob altering his behavior and strengthening his relationship with Louise (my favorite pairing in the show) and a lovely and funny B-plot where Zeke and the remaining Belcher kids rally together to entertain the senior citizens when a TV outage means they can’t watch the parade.  Even Linda has a great little subplot with Sergeant Bosco and his mother.  These things just take it up a level for me and make it a classic Thanksgiving episode.

5. Season 7, Episode 6: “The Quirk-Ducers”

Despite being given a half day on the day before Thanksgiving, school counselor Mr. Frond’s dreadful yearly Thanksgiving plays keep them there far too long and hamper the beginning of what should be a very long weekend for the kids.  So, Louise concocts a plan (this phrase shows up in my notes a lot) to adapt one of Tina’s “erotic friend fictions” into a musical that is so offensive that Frond himself shuts it down and sends the kids home.  You see, Tina got Mean Girl’d when Tammy calls her quirky and she takes it out on the page.  What comes next is a very sweet and genuine story about Tina learning to value her uniqueness in a time when conforming is the easiest path to peer acceptance, with one of the best songs in the long history of great songs in Bob’s.  I genuinely love this episode.

4. Season 13, Episode 8: “Putts-Giving”

This might be a controversial one, but I adore this episode.  Thanksgiving just happens to be the last day that a 50% off coupon for the local mini-golf course is valid and Louise convinces Bob to take the family there for a short trip before dinner is served.  The course has a yeti obstacle that is rather involved and Louise tries to get it to perform all its tricks at once—however, Tina abandons the effort because she wants to show Bob and Linda that she’s mature enough to go to an after-Thanksgiving party with high school boys in attendance.  What ensues is classic Louise chaos, however what really pushes this episode up the list for me is Louise’s motivation; sure, she wants to see the yeti do its crazy dance, but when it comes right down to it, she is reacting to fear.  Despite Louise’s tough exterior, the 9-year-old is afraid that her older sister is maturing beyond her and will never want to have fun with her and Gene again.  It’s a touching episode about growing up and what it means to mature and the sense of loss that comes with your older sibling outgrowing your interests as new things start to interest them in life; for Tina’s adolescent brain, that largely means boys (and their butts specifically) take priority over goofing off with her siblings.  As things go terribly wrong (another phrase often in my notes), Tina steps up and shows a real maturity and affection for her little brother and sister that is absolutely heartwarming.  An instant classic for me and it just misses out on the top 3 because of three even more excellent episodes.

3. Season 8, Episode 5: Thanks-Hoarding

As Bob plans his meticulous Thanksgiving, Teddy comes in hysterically needing help to host an unplanned Thanksgiving dinner for his mother, her boyfriend, his sister, and her husband.  Bob, being a reluctantly good friend, decides to take the family over and help out.  In the process of prepping and teaching Teddy how to reheat food in the oven (Teddy is overly nervous and unable to follow even the simplest instructions), Linda discovers a room full of junk that hides a dining table.  She figures that cleaning out the junk and preparing the dinner table would be a much better idea than Thanksgiving dinner around the coffee table in the living room, so she and kids start a purge of Teddy’s items.  But as it turns out, Teddy is seriously attached to his stuff and as the purging process goes on, Linda comes to the realization that Teddy holds on to these broken things in the hopes of fixing them as he once did his best to fix his parents’ marriage as a kid.  This is a kindhearted episode that speaks to Teddy’s backstory in a way that we haven’t seen it before.  We always knew that Teddy was a friendly, but ultimately lonely guy who was working through something, but this is one of the best glimpses we get into the damage around which his personality formed.  It is a sweet, sweet story that has lots of laughs along the way and really shows Bob’s at its best; a touching story mixed with laugh out loud comedy.  While it’s an unconventional Thanksgiving episode, it found its way into my heart in a way that only Teddy can.

2. Season 5, Episode 4: “Dawn of the Peck”

Bob’s is always great when it finds a new take on integrating horror into the comedy and its Halloween episodes are legendary, perhaps even more iconic to the series than its Thanksgiving and Christmas episodes, and this one straddles the line of that pure Halloween terror and Thanksgiving brilliance.  The family decides to go to Wonder Wharf (also owned by the Fischoeders) for their Turkey Trot, what Linda believes will be a cute version of the running of the bulls, and the kids are excited to go on the rides and spend a day at an amusement park rather than just sitting around watching TV while Bob cooks.  As a result, Bob decides to boycott Thanksgiving and spend the day alone at home, getting drunk and listening to music.  But as things tend to, they go horribly wrong once again, and the birds are all out of sorts and overly aggressive, resulting in a zombie-like stampede.  Linda is trampled and pulled to safety by Teddy, the Belcher kids, along with Regular Sized Rudy (my absolute favorite supporting character) and Andy and Ollie are stranded on the teacups.  Rudy is always a delight, the crazed turkeys encroach, Linda is frantically trying to get to them, and blissfully unaware, Bob talks to and for his turkey baster (one of Bob’s best quirks that we get insight into in another episode and a classic recurring gag) and, drunk and determined, decides to go get a turkey and make his family the Thanksgiving dinner he’s wanted to make all day.  As the turkeys (and other fowl) wreak havoc, Bob walks into a mess he is woefully unprepared for.  Where later episodes are much more emotionally involved, this one delivers laugh after laugh and leaves you with a big smile on your face.  “Dawn of the Peck” is one of my go to episodes, so good that it transcends the Thanksgiving episode moniker, becoming an any time episode.    

1. Season 9, Episode 7: “I Bob Your Pardon”

Linda’s obsession with the mayor sees the family heading to the town’s first ever turkey pardoning, but she’s distressed when she finds out there’s a bait and switch and the mayor isn’t there, only the deputy mayor.  Beyond all that, the kids overhear a phone conversation in which a mayor’s aide lets slip that the pardoning is a big sham and the turkey, Drew P. Neck, is on his way to a slaughterhouse.  Louise has an excellent arc in this episode as she goes from hating turkeys to convincing Bob to go on a quest to save the turkey, enticed by the thought of adventure, and then pushes her limits to protect Drew P. Neck.  They follow the aide, kidnap the turkey, and try to find a safe place for him to live out his days naturally.  There’s a great callback here to one of my favorite episodes, “Stand By Gene” as they hurdle obstacles on the way to sanctuary.  This episode also has one of my favorite line deliveries by Tina, as she, after-school-special-style, yells “I mean what, we’re going to start lying to turkeys now?  YOU THINK THAT’S PRETTY COOL DAD!?”  I don’t know why that line tickles me the way it does, but I can’t help but laugh at it every time.  This is an episode that delivers on every level—it’s as funny as it is emotionally satisfying, and every little gag and through-line just works.  Even the argument that runs through the episode about fresh cranberry sauce versus canned (which is utterly pointless, since cranberry sauce sucks in any form) offers multiple laughs as it comes up throughout.  While the idea of saving the turkey is Tina’s, in this episode where every character delivers, Louise, as usual, overdelivers and stands out above the rest.  Just a completely brilliant episode that works on every level, it’s my favorite Thanksgiving episode and one of my favorites in the series overall.    

So there you have it.  If you’re not already a fan of Bob’s Burgers, I hope this ranking convinces you to give the show a try (the entire series is streaming on Hulu at the time of writing) and if you are a fan, I hope you enjoyed my look at each of the show’s excellent Thanksgiving episodes.  There really isn’t a stinker in the bunch; each one has its merits.  Thank you for reading this very long bonus post and have a safe and happy Thanksgiving!  Save me a piece of pumpkin pie, will you?

The Penguin with the Mad, Bad Scar

You can put away the shovels; there’s no digging necessary, the lede will not be buried.  The Penguin is one of the best shows HBO (and streaming on Max) has made in years and definitely the best show they’ve made since Succession ended.  If you’re looking to fill a Logan Roy-shaped hole or you’re wondering why House of the Dragon isn’t satisfying your need for Game of Thrones content and you’re hoping to find what will, look no further than The Penguin.  You can stop searching for a replacement for prime GOT, you can stop waiting for the next Succession-level show, you can even stop reading right here (but don’t, please).  The Penguin is simply that good.  Is it as good as Succession?  No, I don’t think so.  Not quite.  Is it better than Game of Thrones when you look at the entire series as a whole?  Absolutely.

If you don’t know the Penguin as a character, he’s Oswald Cobblepot, a deformed Gotham City criminal with delusions of standing; he lives in a sewer, drives a distinct limousine, eats live fish, and has a crazy array of trick umbrellas that have more gadgets than a Swiss Army knife—everything but the carousel reversal spray—but this time, he’s a bit different.  He goes simply by Oz to those who know him well and the last name is shortened to Cobb.  And while he doesn’t live in the sewers, he certainly has permanent residency in the Gotham underworld.  Gone are the tux and tails, gone is the limousine, gone is the living sushi.  Replacing them is a series of clothes normal people wear, a purple Maserati with gold wheels that’s so ugly it looks like something that even Jared Leto’s Joker would reject and was left on a dealer lot gathering dust, and, you know, cooked food.  Oz’s nickname—the Penguin—is a sore spot, born from his distinctive waddle due to a deformed leg.  Colin Farrell picks up the role from the conclusion of Matt Reeves’s The Batman, as Gotham reels from tragedy that changes the city forever.

But The Penguin isn’t interested in Batman.  As much as he remains a looming specter over the city, The Penguin can stand on its own as a story and doesn’t rely on name dropping constantly like HotD. Rather, the show is interested in telling its own story, getting deep into the seedy underbelly of their fair city, telling Oz’s tale as a man who gambles more than Oceans 11, 12, and 13 combined and shucks and jives more than the Duke boys.  He’s always looking for an angle, doing his best to walk into very dangerous rooms and walk out somehow still alive.  I promise you, no big top has ever had a more precarious tightrope act, nor one nearly this impressive.  Farrell completely disappears into the role of Oz Cobb, thanks in part to his extremely convincing make-up job, but also his performance.  If you remember Farrell solely from his early 00s heartthrob roles, it may come as a surprise, but his acting ability has always been there.  In Bruges and, more recently, The Banshees of Inisherin cemented him as a great actor in my mind (and yes, even Fright Night); hell, even in the terrible second season of True Detective, his performance was possibly the only redeeming quality.  Farrell is on top of his game here.  And the best part is that he’s not alone.

To call The Penguin a star turn for Cristin Milioti is to understate how much she should be a household name already.  If you only know her as the mother who got in the way of Ted and Robin in the awful How I Met Your Mother, you have been sleeping on one of the most talented actresses to grace the silver screen in years.  After her role in Fargo season two, I watched and waited for her to get her due and start to pop up everywhere.  Yes, she did the wonderful Groundhog Day-like Palm Springs that released during the pandemic and her episode of Mythic Quest was the best in the entire series, but that didn’t do as much to make her stock rise as it should have.  I’m hoping that’s not the case with The Penguin, because Milioti deserves all the praise I can heap on her and more.  Here, she plays Sofia Falcone, daughter of the recently deceased mob boss Carmine Falcone, released from Arkham Asylum after 10 years of incarceration.  And if you know anything about Batman lore, even if you go into Arkham sane, that much time there leaves indelible marks on mind and body.  Her performance as Sofia Falcone manages to outshine even Farrell’s as she navigates life on the outside in a family hostile to her and a city even more hostile, where she’s known as a serial killer called The Hangman.  I can’t go much into the details of her character arc because that would rob you of the true delight of watching her masterclass, but trust me when I say that whenever she is on screen, she will command your attention like little else in television does today.

And rounding out these powerhouse performances is a young actor I’ve never seen before, but, again, to tell you more about him, even naming the character here would take something from the experience for you, and you deserve to be as delightfully surprised and as on the edge of your seat as I was.  Suffice it to say, there’s no one in this show that doesn’t deliver.  Even the casting change from Jon Turturro to Mark Strong for Carmine Falcone (in flashbacks, obviously) works out just fine.  It’s a top notch cast working with a top notch script and great directors.  You’re in for a true treat.

Everything about this show is satisfying.  Every single little thread that is started is woven in and comes to an excellent conclusion; nothing is simple, nothing is convenient, nothing is unearned.  Everything about The Penguin is expertly crafted.  From wardrobe to cinematography to each and every line, this is peak television.  So many times, a scene would start one way and I thought I knew how it was going to end—just a side effect of consuming and studying media as much as I do—but then I would be delighted that it didn’t play out the way I thought it would.  More than just subverting expectations for the shock value, The Penguin puts together coherent and original storytelling where not everything goes to plan.  As Oswald Cobb does his best to say the things that need to be said to save his skin, the show manifests itself as a true accomplishment in a time when I feared that originality is only met with cancellation and the collective shrugging as we head off to the next by-the-numbers superhero movie or derivative procedural.  Yes, The Penguin is part of a huge IP, but it doesn’t need to be to work.   

Perhaps the most surprising and enjoyable part of this show is the incredible depth of storytelling.  This isn’t just a criminal story, it isn’t just Succession with guns, it’s a truly deep and rewarding narrative that will have you feeling things that you never expected to feel when watching a show about a character that was once fed a fish by Michelle Pfeiffer like a dolphin in a tank.  I’ve often said that villain-centric stories don’t interest me because villains are only interesting as foils for their heroes.  A great villain is nothing without a great hero with whom to battle.  Without a protagonist to root for, a villain story is just, well, a lone idiot dancing on a staircase to a song written by a child predator.  But even though the protagonist here is a villain, even though he is perhaps the monster people think he is, there are far worse in Gotham.  And the show doesn’t shy away from the things that make a villain, that build them, that turn normal people into those wrongdoers they eventually become; much like every good iteration of Batman has, including the venerable Batman: The Animated Series.  Nothing happens in a vacuum and The Penguin is keen to show you that.  While we’re all trying to battle not with monsters lest we become one, Oz’s battle is not just with the mobs and gangs of Gotham City, but with the city itself; with a broken system that allows people—all once innocent children at some point in their lives, just like Oswald was—to go down a path where crime and criminality are not only the sole option, but also aspirational.  It is through violence that those with no options find a way to make something of themselves, to be loved, to be adored, to snuff out their humanity and replace it with material success and power.  And in telling this story, The Penguin does what Joker utterly failed to do—present a compelling story with human characters who are at the mercy of an unforgiving world and respond in the only way they know how.  The Penguin is quite simply a must watch.

Bore-nado Alley

Twister was not a masterpiece.  In fact, I missed it the first time around and only saw it a few years ago.  It may seem strange now, considering the massive amount of content that’s available digitally, but when I was a kid, it was physical media. So you had to get people to agree to watch a movie and then go to a place and rent it.  My crush on Helen Hunt was never enough to win the argument as to what to rent, so I didn’t see it.

And I don’t know if that makes it better or worse, my experience of Twisters.  Twister itself was a fairly ridiculous movie, but it did have a certain charm about it and it felt like a 90s disaster movie and lived up to that billing fairly well enough.  Twisters has more expectation coming with it because, whatever my opinion of the original movie is, a lot of people hold great affection for it, and decades later, there are some fairly big shoes to fill for Twisters.  Sure, they’re not Star Wars big, but I know lots of people who loved Twister.  And I am an unabashed fan of Glen Powell.  Ever since saw him grace my screen as the purposefully douchey Chad Radwell in Scream Queens, I thought he was the best thing about that show and I’ve been following his career ever since.  I even watched Anyone But You and enjoyed it.  He’s got a way of playing a character that you probably shouldn’t like, but do for some reason, and, well, I have to admire that.  His role in Top Gun: Maverick was just about the only thing I liked about that lazy rehash of the 80s classic mixed with a Death Star Trench Run against a nameless enemy.  So despite the tepid reviews (the curse of the 70% range on Rotten Tomatoes continues, with this movie scoring a 75% and a whopping 91% audience score), I had relatively medium-high expectations for the film when I saw it come across my Peacock feed.

I’ll start with the good.  The majority of actors in the film do a really good job with what they’re given.  Glen Powell does not disappoint, despite the fact that everyone else was in a movie and his character was shot like he was in a Wrangler Jeans commercial.  Daisy Edgar-Jones was a true delight, never underselling her character and doing her best to bring emotional weight to the film.  Anthony Ramos, yes, John Laurens himself from the original cast of Hamilton, once again brings his immense talent to a blockbuster popcorn flick for which he is overqualified and, again, convincingly plays his character with the talent and aplomb that you’d expect from someone who broke out as an original Hamilton cast member.  I am really excited to see where his career goes.  And the same goes for Daisy Edgar-Jones, because if she can put in the shift she did in Twisters, I cannot wait to see what she can do with a really hefty, weighty role.  Now, to be fair, I believe her miniseries Normal People was well received, I’ve never seen Where the Crawdads Sing (which was not, at least critically), and I’ve only seen her in Under the Banner of Heaven, which was much more of an ensemble cast than a vehicle for her talent.

Even with the compression that happens with streaming media, the audio was fairly well mixed and the visuals came through with good fidelity.  I knew I was looking at CGI a lot, but it wasn’t so bad that it took me out of the moment, nor did I ever have trouble hearing the characters’ dialogue over the roar of the multiple tornados.  On the technical side, the movie was certainly successful.

But from a writing standpoint, it was very rough.  It doesn’t really matter how good or talented your cast is if your script feels like it was written by an 8th grader.  That’s harsh, I know, but after having watched so many good movies last month with you all, I had a hard time not contrasting it Late Night with the Devil, a movie in which not a single word, nor even a single frame of video was wasted; with Twisters, so much of it felt like filler to hit a minimum two hour runtime (the extra 2 minutes were icing on the cake, I suppose).  It starts with a flashback, which came with the painfully obvious immediate conclusion that it was about to turn into a bloodbath, because none of the characters were in a single trailer I saw for the film.  And that’s fine, it’s fine to spoon feed your audience trauma when you’ve got a film centered on a traumatized character; I’m not always against flashbacks.  But when you then rehash the opening 10 minutes of the film to explain what happened to another character, it sometimes feels like a clip show in the middle of the movie, a “previously on” segment that shouldn’t really be necessary because I just saw that scene an hour ago.  Adding insult to this, in that scene where she explains what happened, Edgar-Jones gives such an excellent performance selling her character’s emotions that it showcased what a good actress she is.  If there had been enough trust in the character and in the audience, that whole first scene could have been cut, because Edgar-Jones is a clearly a strong enough actress to convey what her character is going through, explain her reluctance to join Ramos’s team, and do it without zipping the spoon around like an airplane and telling the audience to open wide for the mashed pea purée landing.  I didn’t expect this film to blow me away, pardon the pun, but it could have been so much better and paced so much tighter with just a few tweaks.  Because the talent is there; in the rare moments that the script allows the actors to shine, they do.  This is not a low budget movie trying to punch above its weight class as a blockbuster, these are talented people playing roles very well, despite the writing.  It should have been better.

The structure of the movie, after the initial flashback scene, follows a terribly boring formula.  It goes storm, talking scene, storm, talking scene, storm, talking scene, and so on and so forth.  There’s no real buildup of the story, there’s nothing it works towards, and it just feels like the time between storms is there to take up space between monster attacks, except in this case, the monster is CGI wind.  The movie has no flow, it has subplots that go nowhere, and a shoehorned romance between two characters that are so wildly not into each that it’s almost Jurassic World-level insulting.  Add to that a generic country music soundtrack in the talking scenes, all that rural noun, simple adjective, good ol’ boy bullshit, makes for a movie that’s a fairly unpleasant experience unless you’re just there for the spectacle of carnage.  Everything just happens and the climax occurs out of nowhere; the same as the tornadoes that occur in the other storm scenes.  I know these are storm-chasers and meteorologists and researchers, but they have Jack Bauer levels of bad luck when it comes to being in the path of funnel-shaped terror.  The movie flirts with the idea that climate change is causing strife for people and that there are those who are willing and happy to take advantage of that strife for their own personal gain, but it never comes close to actually having anything to say.  And somehow, that’s worse than not even trying, not even paying the half-assed lip service to what’s going on in the real world in which this movie is supposedly set.

How 91% of people enjoyed this, I’ll never know.  I worked very hard to enjoy myself while watching Twisters, and I just about did, until I sat down at my desk, starting thinking about it, and opened up this document.  It just makes me so disappointed to see what could have been a just fine summer blockbuster end up being such a huge waste of great actors because the studio and the writing just didn’t trust the audience to do some real storytelling.  It’s difficult to think of a movie that was so simultaneously overstuffed and yet so boring, but still with very good acting performances.  And maybe Twisters is worth watching just for that.  And maybe you’ll think I’m wrong and you’ll have just a lovely time with it.  Clearly, I’m in the minority here.  And baffled as to why. 

Disgrace Invaders

A few years ago, I wrote about how much it hurt to lose the ability to go to movie theaters and how it felt like it isolated me from both a social experience that I really enjoyed and a solitary one that felt like stolen time.  For me, going to the movies alone was like taking time back from everyone and everything else that demanded it from me.  It was two hours or so where I could turn my ringer off, put my phone in my pocket, and train my eyes on something other than the crushing weight of endless connectivity.  I praised trash TV like Tiger King for its ability to help us cope with the outside world that kept us on edge and, at the time, in fear of spreading a deadly disease to our friends and loved ones.  In times like that (and times like these), I still find merit in watching something with no real artistic value, something that doesn’t make you feel…anything, really.

And now I’ve found something else to replace that Tiger King feeling at a time when reality no longer makes sense to me.  If you’re a regular reader here, you’ll know that I am a gamer.  I hesitate to call myself that because it’s become a loaded term these days, but I enjoy TTRPGs, board games, chess, and, especially, video games.  Video game media kind of sucks, though.  Until Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog, game-based media was pretty poor.  What tends to be worse than video game-based movies are movies about gaming and gamers.  Sure, Grandma’s Boy had its moments here and there and was generally watchable, and Max Reload and the Nether Blasters had its own sort of low budget charm, but a lot of is very bad.  Leave aside films like Wreck-It Ralph and WarGames, which are quite good; that’s a different feel altogether than the kinds of films I’m talking about.  Record stores and movie rental places certainly drew the longer straw in that particular game.

So that brings me to the trash I’m talking about today: Pixels, a rightly forgotten film from 2015 with a robust 18% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 46% audience score.  Now, mind you, I’m not here to defend this movie as a misunderstood film that should actually be well regarded, like Be Kind Rewind or 2 Fast 2 Furious, because Pixels is truly, truly bad.  From the uninspired Suicide Squad-esque soundtrack (substituting 80s pop for the schizophrenic classic rock radio station that scored that film) to the by the numbers plot, pretty much everything about Pixels is bad storytelling.  And I knew this going in, after all, it is an Adam Sandler movie, which has been a hallmark for really terrible films for the past couple of decades now.  Sandler on the movie poster generally equals a bad movie.

And yet, somehow, this movie made an impression on me.  A world in which Kevin James is the President and Adam Sandler and Josh Gad are the only hopes for humanity against an alien invasion that modeled itself after an arcade tournament from 1982 that NASA sent to space for some reason manages to make more sense than the one we live in now.  And for that reason alone, it became some comforting piece of fast food that leaves you feeling a little sick afterwards, but still, satisfied, in a strange and inexplicable way.  The amount of talent in this film that doesn’t show is truly stupefying.  Josh Gad, we know is a multitalented individual who can act, sing, and voice almost unbearably sweet cartoon characters; yet here, he’s a one dimensional stereotype that makes the characters in The Big Bang Theory seem deep.  Michelle Monaghan plays the obligatory romantic interest for Sandler, with the predictable lack of chemistry not keeping them from getting together for no reason at all other than the fact they’re both there, and I believe I’ve made it clear that I hold her in the highest regard.  She’s one of my favorite actresses of all time and one of the most talented, in my opinion.  But, that doesn’t really matter in a movie like this.  Peter Dinklage, at the time still riding high on the success of Game of Thrones, comes in with a fairly bog standard jerk character that really doesn’t strain his acting abilities.  Brian Cox, years before he dominated the screen in Succession, plays one of the Joint Chiefs whose main role is to insult Adam Sandler (which, well, I’d take that job too).  Sean Bean, Boromir himself, has a small part, but I guess after Fellowship, he has nothing left to prove, so why not get the paycheck?  Even Dan Akroyd, comedy royalty, has a neat little cameo.  But none of that really matters, by design.  It’s a bad movie and was always meant to be.

There is some novelty to seeing Pac-Man marauding down the streets like some giant yellow menace and I’m sure if I ever actually played Caterpillar, I would have had an opinion on how faithfully it was rendered on screen as an alien attack, but that was before even my time.  The production value of the film is quite good, certainly befitting of its $88 million budget.  But other than the fact that it looks good in HD there isn’t a whole lot to praise here. I mean, I guess I enjoyed it more than Ready Player One, which is a bar set so low an actual caterpillar could hurdle it.

However, it did something for me that I sorely needed at the time; it allowed me to turn my brain off.  And I mean all the way off.  Everything about it that was stupid, for some reason, didn’t bother me and its failure to engage my emotions in any way was a welcome reprieve from the world at large.  So now, in a way that I cannot possibly explain, I have a strange level of affection for a movie that is bad, that I know is bad, and that I couldn’t defend in just about any way.  I could say that I got three genuine laughs during its rather unnecessarily long 1 hour, 46 minute run time (the first 40 minutes or so really drag, with way too much setup), which is a better hit rate than some sitcoms.  It’s three more laughs than I got in the entire 16 episode first season of the Night Court reboot, but that’s not what matters to me when it comes to Pixels (also, don’t watch the Night Court reboot, it’s bad in a way that’s not good at all; I suffered through that so you don’t have to).

This isn’t really a review of Pixels, I couldn’t in good conscience tell you to watch it just because I found some comfort in it.  It’s more of a song of praise for finding the right kind of trash in the moment you need it.  And, dear readers, you know I try to be honest with you; I tell you when things make me cry, I tell you when they make me laugh, when they make me question my own existence, and when a guilty pleasure shouldn’t be guilty at all.  Because we are all so hard on ourselves in a world that’s really hard on us too, so if you like something that’s bad, or even if you don’t like it and it makes you feel good or even just feel nothing at all, that deserves to celebrated and you don’t deserve to feel bad about it.  So, I leave you with this final thought: remember to be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and if you can, watch Be Kind Rewind; it’s really a hidden gem.