thoughts on This is Where I Leave You

Jason Bateman stars as Judd Altman, who in the early moments of This is Where I Leave You catches his wife (Quinn, played by Abigail Spencer) in bed with his boss, shock jock radio host Wade Beaufort (Dax Shepard).  Not long after, his sister Wendy (Tina Fey) calls to tell him that their father has passed away.  Not only that, their father wants Judd, Wendy, their siblings (Paul and Phillip, played by Corey Stoll and Adam Driver, respectively), and their mother (Hilary, played by Jane Fonda) to sit shiva for seven days.

This provides the impetus for the four siblings to descend on the family home with assorted spouses, romantic partners, children, and personal dramas in tow.  Judd arrives alone and makes excuses for why Quinn didn't come along; Wendy knows the truth and presses him to tell everyone until, of course, he loses it and winds up spilling the beans in front of a houseful of mourners.  Wendy has a husband who won't get off his cell phone and a toddler who carries around his plastic potty everywhere and drops his pants whenever and wherever he feels like it.  Paul and his wife, Alice (Kathryn Hahn), have been trying unsuccessfully to conceive for two years; at one point, Alice, who dated Judd before she dated Paul, tries to get Judd to impregnate her.  Phillip, the baby of the family, roars up to the funeral late, in a Porsche, and later introduces them to his much-older fiancée (Tracy, played by Connie Britton).  This is all proceeded over by Hilary, a therapist who is none too shy about showing off her new boob job and made her name with a book on child rearing that revealed details of her children's early sex lives that they would rather she had kept private (Paul used to masturbate with an oven mitt, for instance).  Also popping up now and then are Penny (Rose Byrne), a local woman who apparently had a huge crush on Judd when they were young; Horry (Timothy Olyphant), their neighbor and Wendy's ex-boyfriend, who hasn't been quite the same since a car accident and brain injury twenty years ago; Horry's mother, Linda (Debra Monk), who has grown close with Hilary in the wake of Hilary's husband's illness and death; and Rabbi Charles Grodner (Ben Schwartz), a childhood friend of the family who can't stand that they all still call him Boner.

Got all that?  It's all a bit crazy and confusing, but only because that's how visits home under trying circumstances are.  Certain things are familiar, yet others are a bit off; with a houseful of guests, Judd is relegated to a sleeper sofa in the basement that won't even fold out all the way, and the electricity always fails at the exact moment Judd has a headful of shampoo in the shower.  Phillip is gleeful to get to go out to a bar with his older siblings (he was always too young when they were all living in the same house)...but not long after they've all done their first shot, Paul is getting called away by his ovulating wife, and Penny's there eager to flirt with Judd.  The brothers have fights that devolve into wrestling around on the front lawn and, at one point, accidentally set off the fire alarm sneaking a joint at Temple.  Judd catches Wendy doing the walk of shame home from Horry's house.  Judd actually gets away with spending the night with Penny...except then Quinn is showing up with big news.

As with many movies that are adapted from books, as this one is, there are a lot of things you find yourself wanting to know more about, yet it still feels a bit too long.  Yet it plays out better on the screen than I remember it playing out on the page; the actors' performances are grounded in reality, making it seem less self-consciously funny and outrageous than I remember the book being.  Bateman, Fey, Stoll, and Driver are believable as siblings; these characters don't spend a lot of time together on a day-to-day basis (Paul is the only one who still lives in their hometown) and aren't the kind of siblings that would refer to each other as best friends.  Yet there is an easy dynamic between them that feels comfortable and familiar; there are old resentments between these siblings, to be sure, yet you can tell that they all would be there for each other in a second if they needed to be.  I liked the way that so often the other people in the siblings' lives just faded into the background as the four of them gravitated to each other.  These are people that know each other's shortcomings (when asked, Judd tells Tracy that yes, there is a good chance that Phillip has cheated on her with his ex-girlfriend; Wendy tells Judd that if he had really loved Quinn, he would have noticed that she'd been cheating on him for a year) yet always have each other's backs (Phillip cheerfully calls Quinn a "heartless slut" to her face; Wendy punches Wade in the face when given the opportunity).  Their interactions feel real.

I enjoyed it a lot.  Funny, touching, great cast.  I'd recommend.

thoughts on The Mindy Project Seasons One and Two

It's interesting how shows find their stride in the first couple of seasons.  Throughout the first two (and thus far only; the third season debuts on September 16) seasons, The Mindy Project is about a single gynecologist (Mindy Lahiri, played by Mindy Kaling) in her early thirties who, in a nutshell, has dating misadventures while interacting with a wacky bunch of coworkers and eventually realizing her feelings for fellow doctor Danny Castellano (Chris Messina).  But the supporting cast shifts around a bit as the seasons progress, and this really makes a huge difference.  In the first season, she has a married friend who lives in the suburbs (Gwen, played by Anna Camp); we don't see her in the second season, and we don't miss her.  Receptionist Shauna (Amanda Setton), an attractive Jersey girl with a crush on Dr. Castellano, is unceremoniously replaced by Beverly (Beth Grant), a sixty-something woman who is fired as a nurse in the first episode for doing things like taking blood samples home.  There are other cast changes, too, but probably the best is the addition of Peter Prentice (Adam Pally), a doctor who, during his interview at the practice, tells a story about having sex with a Christmas tree at an office holiday party.  More on him later.

So, I like the show a lot, for a number of reasons.  For one, the dialogue is hilarious.  I could give plenty of examples of humorous exchanges and one-liners (and have on my Facebook page), but I'm constantly cracking up from little things, like how Mindy is constantly saying "How dare you!" and addressing people as "sir" (as in, "Excuse me, sir, but how dare you!").  For me, also, a lot of the humor also comes from the fact that, as a single woman in my thirties, I can relate to a lot of the situations she gets herself into (sometimes to a painful degree)...yet she is nothing like me.  For one thing, she is way more outspoken than I am; sometimes I'm appalled by the things she says, while other times I wish I was better at speaking up for myself and less guarded with my emotions like she is.  It's like watching how a completely different person would handle aspects of my life, basically.

Then there is the supporting cast.  There is Danny, who grew up in Staten Island, was hurt badly by his divorce from Christina (Chloe Sevigny), is Catholic, practically raised his younger brother after their father left, and, though in his thirties, is kind of a grumpy old man ("Get this guy a sandwich, and I don't mean a WRAP.  I mean a REAL SANDWICH, with bread").  There is Jeremy (Ed Weeks), a handsome British doctor who Mindy occasionally hooks up with at the beginning of the first season.  There is Nurse Morgan Tookers (Ike Barinholtz), an ex-con who I have a hard time even beginning to describe, except to say that he is a ridiculous person, and hilarious (Danny, at one point, describes him as having a "charming Huckleberry Finn illiterate vibe," which is fairly accurate).  And there is the aforementioned Peter, who joins the cast in the second season and really adds something to it.  He and Mindy don't get along at first (she invites him to lunch to try to make friends, but takes him to, as Danny describes it, "that doll restaurant where you tell the story about your period").  He goes with Mindy to her ex's wedding, is the life of the party, and then winds up having sex with the bride.  He and Mindy become close when she has a falling-out with Danny, and he gives her completely different advice than Danny would ever give her, but it's kind of great.  There is also a nurse named Tamra (Xosha Roquemore) who is constantly complaining about her boyfriend Ray Ron (Josh Peck), and a pair of midwife brothers (Brendan and Duncan, played by Mark and Jay Duplass) who serve as sometime rivals for the doctors.  And don't even get me started on the guest stars.  James Franco! Bill Hader! B.J. Novak! Ed Helms! Max Greenfield! The list goes on and on!

Basically, the employees of Schulman and Associates make up a group of coworkers and unlikely friends that rings true for a group of mostly single, mostly thirty-something coworkers and friends.  Some of them wind up dating and/or sleeping with each other, or developing crushes on each other that nothing really comes of.  They get into arguments over issues both big and small.  They interfere too much in each other's lives.  They all have their quirks, and they're not people who probably would have hung out with each other had they met in high school or college, yet they're incredibly loyal to each other when it counts.  They're all pretty great, and pretty fun to spend a half hour with once a week (or, you know.  Hours spread out over a couple of weeks on Netflix).  I'd definitely recommend.