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.

thoughts on Boyhood

On the bookshelves in my apartment, I have more than thirty photo albums.  I got my first one and started filling it with photos when I got my first camera at age seven, and most recently added pictures in late June of this year.  On occasion, I have gone through them looking for a specific picture or pictures and been struck how, in some ways, it seems that I am living the same year over and over.  In multiple albums, there are pictures, for example, of me decorating Christmas cookies at my parents' house.  There are multiple pictures of groups of friends sitting around dinner tables on Thanksgiving, plates full of turkey and green bean casserole and mashed potatoes.  Often, it is difficult to tell when specific pictures were taken; you can tell, maybe, by hairstyles or glasses or the absence or presence of people who have drifted in and out of my life.  And yet...there are enough photos of things that only happened once, or only happened for awhile, or people that I'll probably never see again to let me know that while life is, in fact, organized by certain holidays and traditions that do happen over and over again, it's not the same year over and over.  Friendships start and end.  New hobbies are taken up.  Vacations are taken.  I move to different places and so do other people.  People are born and people die.  And some of the most important events aren't captured on film.

The experience of watching Richard Linklater's Boyhood, which follows Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as he ages from six to eighteen, was similar to the experience of flipping through those old photo albums.  This is not because most of the events selected from Mason's life are ones that would be caught on film, but because of the things that change and the things that stay the same as he ages.  His parents and sister are consistently part of his life, and a few other people pop up again and again, but others-- neighbors, friends, stepfathers, and eventually girlfriends-- come and go.  He moves with his mom and sister  from a two-bedroom apartment to a three-bedroom apartment to a house that his first stepfather owns to a house that his mom buys herself to his first dorm room.  He plays video games on systems that change over the years and becomes more and more interested in, and more and more skilled at, photography.  His father (Mason Sr., played by Ethan Hawke) spends a lot of Mason's life pulling up in a GTO to pick him and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) up for weekend visits, then eventually gets remarried and trades the GTO in for a mini-van.  His mother (Olivia, played by Patricia Arquette) earns her Bachelor's and Master's degrees, eventually begins teaching at the college level, and, along the way, marries and divorces men who seem great at first but turn out not to be.  The audience is reminded that time is moving forward not only by the ages of the characters, but by changes in technology, by current events (Mason Sr. rails against President George W. Bush early in the film and later takes his kids with him to campaign for Obama), and by pop culture (Olivia reads to Mason and Samantha from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone early in the film; later, Mason and Samantha dress up in costume to go get their copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire).

The film has a good heart.  There are some unpleasant and even terrifying moments in Mason's life (such as when Stepfather #1 drives him, Samantha, and his stepbrother and stepsister around drunk); he crosses paths with some bad people and even has experienced his first heartbreak by the end of the film.  Yet the core characters in the film-- Mason, Samantha, Mason Sr., and Olivia-- seem to be flawed but good people.  Olivia succeeds in her educational and professional goals but consistently falls for the wrong men.  Mason Sr. starts out roaring up in his GTO, taking the kids to do fun activities and forgetting not to swear around them, and then disappearing again, but eventually grows up, starts a second family, and becomes a more stable and consistent presence in the children's lives.  At one point, I was concerned that all of the men in Mason's life (which include his father, the two stepfathers he has over the years, a photography teacher, and a boss) seemed to be jerks, but then his father matures, and the teacher and boss wind up challenging him in ways that are good for him.  Again, Mason has some bad experiences and meets some bad people, but it's not a bad life, all in all. 

There are a few moments in the film that are just incredibly nice, moments when you are allowed to feel genuinely happy for the characters.  One of these is a section of the film in which Mason Sr., his wife, Annie (Jenni Tooley), and his infant son Cooper (Landon Collier) pick Samantha and Mason up and take them to visit Annie's parents.  The scene in which Mason Sr. and his new family pull up is the first in which the audience is introduced to Annie and Cooper, and we see immediately that Samantha and Mason are close with both of them.  It is Mason's fifteenth birthday, and Annie's parents proudly give Mason his first Bible and a shotgun that Annie's father tells him has been passed down in his family for generations.  The gifts aren't anything Mason would really want, but it's incredibly sweet how much Annie's parents want Mason Sr.'s kids to be included in their family.  Mason Sr.'s gifts are incredibly sweet and fatherly, too-- his first love is music (though he eventually gets a stable job in insurance), and he has painstakingly arranged all of the Beatles members' solo work into a "Black Album" for Mason, as well as bought him a shirt, tie, and jacket for things like school dances and job interviews.  It's just a really nice moment in the characters' lives-- Mason Sr. has clearly pulled himself together and is happy and surrounded by good people, and his kids are happy for him and accepting of the changes in his life. 

Olivia gets a nice moment, as well.  At one point, we see her tell a young man who is doing some work on her house that he is smart and should go to college.  A few years later, she runs into him again, and he greets her by telling her, "You probably don't remember me, but you changed my life."  He has finished community college and is working on his Bachelor's degree.  We see Olivia have a few "What am I doing?" or "Why does any of this matter?" moments over the course of the film, and even her own kids, who spend much more time with her than they do their father, are sometimes hard on her.  It's nice to see someone directly tell her that she's really done something right.

I really liked it.  The filming of the movie was spread out over twelve years, which gives it, for lack of a better word, a more genuine feel than the film might have if the same story was told with different actors playing the children over the years and the adults being made to look as if they were aging.  The pop culture, current events, and technology feel more authentic than they often do in movies set in the past, as well; some movies set in the past make such references in sort of a winky-winky way (again, for lack of a better term), like, "Oh, hey, remember when everyone was really into Harry Potter?  Remember when Facebook became a thing?  Remember when Obama was running for President?" Such references don't feel that way here; they seem like genuine reminders of what the world was like in 2002...and 2008...and so on.  I also like that we see some of the "big" moments in Mason's life (his graduation party, for example) but not all; we also see a fair number of days that are not necessarily ordinary, but that wouldn't necessarily appear in any photo album.  Because, after all, that's how most days are.

thoughts on Sex Tape (spoilers)

So...this was an awfully thin premise to base a movie around, and the only reason they're able to even get a whole movie out of this concept is that Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz's characters don't really understand how the Internet works, which doesn't make any sense, given that she is about to break a deal to become a professional blogger and he has some sort of DJ job that seems to involve uploading and sharing a crap ton of music.  Like, the events of this movie would have only been believable if we did not know that the two of them use the Internet all the time in their daily lives, and if perhaps the two were older and more out of touch.  Let's just get that out there right off the bat: the whole movie is based on a flawed and somewhat stupid premise, stretched out by having characters who seem relatively intelligent do stupid and unbelievable things.

Segel and Diaz star as Jay and Annie, a married couple with two elementary school-age children with cute old-timey names, Clive and Nell (played by Sebastian Hedges Thomas and Giselle Eisenberg, respectively).  They make a point early in the movie of letting us know that Clive is adept enough with technology that he has been put in charge of his fourth grade class's video yearbook, and also that he is, in Jay's words, kind of being a dick recently.  You would think that these two qualities-- his technology skills and his dickishness-- would allow him to eventually help his parents out, and that having a child help grown-ass adults out of a sex tape mess would be the kind of humor an R-rated comedy might go for. Spoiler alert: the movie doesn't go there.  The video yearbook eventually leads to some physical comedy when Jay jumps off a balcony to keep a child from accidentally playing the sex tape at a fourth grade graduation ceremony (I know; as one character points out, why the F if fourth grade graduation a thing?), but that's it. Missed opportunity, if you ask me, though it's hardly the movie's biggest problem.

Anyway, Jay and Annie met in college and used to have tons of sex all the time, but then once they had kids, they stopped having as much time and energy for it.  This doesn't actually come across as the World's Biggest Deal.  They seem to have a good relationship and probably just need some alone time.  Also, Annie's mom lives nearby and on two separate occasions in the film agrees to watch the kids on short notice, so you would think that getting said alone time also wouldn't be the World's Biggest Deal, but if it wasn't, there would be no movie, so...  Jay and Annie decide to spice up their marriage by making a sex tape of the two of them performing all of the positions from The Joy of Sex.  We don't get to actually see any of the sex tape until the end of the film (and what we do see is hilarious, for the record-- there are costumes, and Jason Segel singing for no real reason, and Cameron Diaz's stunt double (I would assume) doing flips off the couch), but apparently it lasts for three hours (which is implausible, but kudos to them, I guess), and they both seem to have a lot of fun making it.  The fun they have isn't actually from the recording of the sex, of course, but just from spending time together and trying new things, so they wouldn't have had to tape it to achieve the same result, but again, if they hadn't, no movie.

Jay promises to delete the movie after they're finished, but he doesn't, and it winds up getting uploaded to some sort of Cloud/Dropbox-like app that he has installed on the iPad they used to make the video.  We also learned earlier in the movie that Jay replaces his iPads pretty much any time a new model comes out and gives the older ones away as gifts, so Jay and Annie set out to find each individual iPad and delete the movies.  "Hey wait," you think to yourself even as you kind of enjoy the scenes where they go about getting the iPads back.  "This app he has installed is probably made up and I don't know exactly how it works, but if you delete the movie from the app itself, shouldn't it disappear on all of the iPads, unless people have already downloaded it to their hard drives?" The answer to this question is yes, but Jay and Annie don't find out you can do this until later.

Even so, it's clear that getting the iPads back should be simple, since they gave them all to people they know and see regularly in their daily lives, but the movie manages to stretch this out by having Jay and Annie do more stupid shit.  They find out Annie's boss's address and show up on his doorstep.  "Oh, hey," they do not say.  "You know that iPad we gave you?  Could we maybe see it for a minute to check something?"  This is literally all they would have to do.  Instead, they pretend to be there collecting money for charity, and Annie distracts her boss (Hank, played by Rob Lowe) while Jay searches for the iPad.  This leads to Annie and Hank (who seems super square but has weird tattoos and likes listening to rap and heavy metal and owns a lot of weird paintings with himself painted into scenes from Disney movies) snorting coke and Jay getting attacked by Hank's dog.  This is all kind of funny, but again, a lot of stupid, implausible stuff has to happen to make the scene possible.

And so the movie goes on in this manner.  Jay and Annie are blackmailed by a fifth-grader.  They take their kids with them to bust into the headquarters of the porn site that they learn the fifth-grader plans to upload the video to if they don't pay him $25,000. Jay, as previously mentioned, jumps off a balcony at one point.

Many of the individual scenes are pretty funny.  Like I mentioned, when we actually see the making of the sex tape, it's humorous.  The stuff with Annie's boss is funny in a bizarre sort of way.  Segel, Diaz, Lowe, Rob Corddry and Ellie Kemper (who play friends that tag along for part of the iPad-retrieving journey), and Jack Black (who plays a porn site owner) all give good performances.  Unfortunately, all of the funny scenes and strong performances are taking place in a movie that doesn't make a lot of sense.

thoughts on Ruby Sparks (spoilers)

Paul Dano stars as Calvin Weir-Fields, a writer who is regarded a genius but can't get anywhere on the second novel he is supposed to be working on.  He seems to be in a bit of a slump, in general.  His girlfriend of five years has left him.  He doesn't really have any friends other than his brother, Harry (Chris Messina).  He got his dog, Scotty, because he thought that Scotty would help him get out and meet people; however, Scotty is scared of strangers and "pees like a girl."  One day, Calvin's therapist, Dr. Rosenthal (Elliott Gould), suggests that Calvin should write about someone who likes Scotty just as he is. 

He comes up with Ruby (Zoe Kazan), a painter from Dayton, Ohio, and finds himself really enjoying writing about her; at one point, he confesses that he thinks that he's falling in love with her, and that he looks forward to writing just so that he can spend time with her.  He lets Harry read what he has so far, and Harry tells him that the woman he has created is completely unrealistic.  Real women, Harry points out, have real flaws, not just quirks that make them endearing (Harry's wife, for example, is sometimes "mean as shit for no reason," Harry says).  Regardless, one morning when Calvin wakes up, Ruby has materialized as if out of thin air and is, for all intents and purposes, real.  Calvin is skeptical at first, but eventually he accepts that this has happened, and she becomes his girlfriend.  He only lets Harry in on the secret that he has created her; when Harry learns that Calvin can make Ruby do whatever he wants simply by writing it, he encourages Calvin to take advantage of this.  Calvin swears that he will never write about her again and will let her be, and he sticks to this for quite some time.  Eventually, though, he changes his mind, though every way he tries to change her backfires.  When she wants to spend more time apart, he writes that she is miserable without him...and she becomes so clingy that he can't even go to the bathroom or answer the phone.  He then writes that she is "effervescently happy"...but she remains so no matter what he does, whether he wants to leave her or wants to hole up in the house.

Calvin is a deeply flawed character.  This isn't to say that he's poorly written or unrealistic; however, I found him too off-putting to care about.  For example, Harry points out that he didn't give Ruby realistic flaws; I found it more disturbing that Calvin gave her no life outside of him.  She's supposedly a painter, but we never see her paint.  At one point, Calvin discourages her from going out and getting a job.  She is an orphan.  Now, he has no idea that she's going to come to life at the time he determines this detail, so it's not like he makes her an orphan so that he'll never have to meet her parents, or anything...but why, as a writer, did he not want/think to create people from her past?  Is this supposed to be a comment on how a lot of women in films aren't really well-developed or well-thought-out?  Perhaps, but Ruby isn't perfect enough or shallow enough to be a parody of the typical woman in, say, a romantic comedy (Jennifer Garner's character in The Invention of Lying comes closer to that); it just really seems like Calvin can't deal with a woman with a full life that doesn't revolve around him.  At one point, we meet his ex-girlfriend, Lila (Deborah Ann Woll), and she basically says as much-- that he had this idea of what she was supposed to be like and got upset when she didn't conform to it. 

He seems to impose this on everyone in his life, from Scotty to his mother (Annette Bening), who has apparently changed a lot since Calvin's father's death, but who seems happy, and whose new husband (Antonio Banderas) seems like a nice enough guy, if a bit new-agey.  It's a very unattractive character trait, though I wonder if it could have been made more understandable with a different actor or with more backstory.  It seems that this need to control everyone around him might have developed with his father's death, but since we're seeing everything from Calvin's perspective, we don't get any scenes where other characters discuss whether this is a recent change.  Or maybe Ruby could have asked him some questions about his past and pulled this out of him...but Calvin doesn't seem interested in having deep conversations with her or getting to know her, just in having her behave exactly as he wants her to.  It's frustrating.  Calvin does eventually set Ruby free, but it's unclear whether he really learns anything from the experience, or if the whole thing just gives him fodder to finish his novel.

I didn't particularly care for it.  It's kind of an interesting idea, and I always like Chris Messina; however, I just had too many problems with Calvin as a character.

thoughts on Party Down (spoilers)

First of all, the way I was introduced to this series (which originally ran on Starz from 2009-2010) is pretty funny.  I posted this article about why you should be watching the show Masters of Sex to Facebook; the article included a clip from Party Down that was funny and included some familiar faces.  I asked my Facebook friends what this show was and why I had never heard of it, and immediately received several responses about how great and funny it was.  Since I got the discs from Netflix and started watching the series, I've found myself bringing the show up in in-person conversations quite a bit, and inevitably someone will say, "Oh, I love Party Down!" The best is when someone specifically mentions the Steve Guttenberg episode, because that one's my favorite.  Anyway, I love that it's a show that apparently many people besides me have already heard of, yet I'm just finding out about it now thanks to the wonders that are Masters of Sex and Facebook.

Anyway, Adam Scott stars as Henry Pollard, a failed actor whose claim to fame is that he once starred in a beer commercial in which he uttered the line, "Are we having fun yet?!" People constantly recognize him from this; initially, they can't quite place where they know him from, and he always tries to say that he just has "one of those faces." Inevitably, they figure it out, and talk him into saying the line.  He worked at Party Down Catering years ago and finds himself back there after he decides to give up acting for good.  He is the most down-to-earth and likable person on the catering crew while also, in some ways, the saddest.  He's given up on his acting career even though there are hints that he is probably actually a very good actor.  He considers moving back in with his parents at one point.  At the end of the first season, he is promoted to Team Leader of the catering crew, but winds up giving it up several episodes into the second season because he doesn't want even the small amount of responsibility the job involves.  He winds up getting more heartbreak than joy from his "casual hook-up thing" with fellow caterer Casey (Lizzy Caplan), then falls into a relationship with rival caterer Uda Bengt (Kristen Bell).  He seems to have given up all hope and ambition...but there are hints, toward the end of the series, that maybe he's getting those things back.  He "rolls the dice" in a late episode by deciding to end things with Uda (though she breaks up with him before he gets the chance to actually do so) and turn down a corporate job with Party Down (though again, that opportunity disappears before he gets to actually reject it) in favor of trying again with Casey.  At the very end of the last episode, we see him going on an audition for a part he really wants.  We're meeting this character at a weird transitional time in his life, but it seems like things are going to be okay for him.

That's one thing that's fairly brilliant about this show. Many of the members of the Party Down crew are trying to break into show business, but because we mostly see them at their "day job," we don't often get to see a lot of the particulars of what they actually do; we see them catering, where they seem to spend a lot of their time goofing off, drinking, hooking up, and occasionally doing drugs.  There are moments, though, where we're allowed to see that some of these people probably actually have a shot at making it.  Casey gets a small part in a Judd Apatow movie; though the part is ultimately cut, we sense that it's probably not the end for her.  Kyle (Ryan Hansen) is good-looking, charming, and really sweet; we sense that he could have a future as an actor even though his "base jumping movie" goes straight to video and he spends most of his time at work hitting on women and feuding with fellow caterer Roman (Martin Starr).  Roman, a would-be sci-fi screenwriter ("I'm a writer! I write books! And screenplays! I have a blog!"), is a very particular combination of nerd and dick that can't get laid even when he's fully disguised as a famous rock star, and that just can't stop himself from explaining in detail to a woman why dragons are fantasy, not sci-fi, even though she might be into him if he could stop being a know-it-all for five seconds.  Yet there is a moment in the aforementioned Steve Guttenberg episode where we see that he might actually have a chance as a sci-fi screenwriter if he could find the right writing partner and/or mentor to rein him in.  These people haven't made it yet, and they're not as smooth and polished as the caterers from rival Valhalla Catering (nor do they care enough about their jobs to be), but they're not hopeless, either.  We also see genuine moments of camaraderie between them, such as when they square off in kickball against Valhalla at a company picnic, or when Henry and Casey try to stop Constance (Jane Lynch) from signing an outrageous pre-nup at her series finale wedding.

One of the most interesting characters is Ron (Ken Marino), the only Party Down crewmember to not even be tangentially involved in the entertainment industry, as well as the only one to really take his job seriously.  He is a recovering alcoholic and drug user; in a late Season One episode, he is thrilled when Party Down is hired to cater his own twenty-year high school reunion.  He can't wait to show everyone that he (who ruined his class's senior trip by chugging a bottle of whiskey and getting sent to the emergency room) is clean and sober and has a leadership position with the catering crew.  Once there, though, he winds up finding out that everyone is making fun of him for being so proud of his catering job, and he winds up pulling a repeat performance with the whiskey and emergency room.  His dream is to own a Soup or Crackers franchise, and he does for awhile...only the whole company goes bankrupt within a year.  The end of the series, though, finds him clean and sober again, and looking like he is heading towards running Party Down.  He has his own demons and failures to contend with...but still he's optimistic and hopeful and actually seems to have a chance at achieving his goals, small though those goals might seem to some.  It's pretty sweet.

I thought it was brilliant, really.  The catering premise meant that every episode found the crew in a new setting (an ill-attended Sweet Sixteen party...an NFL draft party for a closeted gay quarterback...an after party for porn industry awards) with plenty of fun guest stars (one of the producers is Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, which means that we wind up seeing a lot of Veronica Mars alum, including the aforementioned Bell, Hansen, and Marino, as well as Enrico Colantoni and Jason Dohring, among others; we also, at different times in the series, see the aforementioned Guttenberg, in addition to J.K. Simmons, Joey Lauren Adams, and Ken Jeong, just to name a few).  You also, along the way, got a fair amount of character development, as well as good chemistry among the cast.  It seems like it could have lasted awhile; Jane Lynch's exit at the end of the first season and subsequent replacement by Megan Mullally indicated that there was room for the cast to change if or when actors wanted to leave or it became realistic for the characters to move on from Party Down.  I wish that it would have lasted longer, but am glad I found what there was of it.  Thanks to all who recommended it.

thoughts on Obvious Child (spoilers)

Jenny Slate stars as Donna Stern, a comedian who, in the span of a few days, gets dumped (her boyfriend tells her that he has been sleeping with a friend of hers) and learns that the bookstore she has worked at for five years is closing down.  In the aftermath of this, she has drunken sex with a guy she meets following a particularly bad stand-up comedy performance.  They probably do not use a condom (we are shown some drunken fumbling with one; she later tells a friend that she remembers seeing a condom, but she isn't sure "what it did").  A few weeks later, she learns that she is pregnant.  She decides to get an abortion.  Though she had expected the drunken sex to be a one-night stand, she keeps running into the guy (Max, played by Jake Lacy), and he seems really sweet.  She struggles with whether to tell him about the pregnancy and upcoming abortion, then how to tell him.  Her best friend, Nellie (Gaby Hoffman), and her mom (Polly Draper) provide emotional support.

This is not the type of movie where characters make epic speeches or have huge epiphanies or get into shouting matches, or where dramatic music plays on the soundtrack underscoring how we're supposed to feel.  We're just invited into Donna's life for a few weeks and shown how she deals with things.  I cringed when she left drunken messages on her ex's answering machine, as well as when she and Max fumbled with, but probably did not use, a condom.  I was touched by a scene in which Donna climbs into bed with her mom.  I appreciated that Max showed up with flowers on the morning of her abortion even though she wound up breaking the news to him onstage as part of her stand-up comedy routine; I liked that he was able to recognize that regardless of how she told him, the most important thing was that he be there for her.  I laughed at some of the dialogue, even though it included a few too many fart jokes for my taste.  I was glad that Donna seemed to have a lot of really kind and supportive people in her life. 

Because the film is missing the aforementioned epic speeches and huge epiphanies and dramatic music playing on the soundtrack, we are left to merely observe.  We may or may not always like or approve of what we are seeing in front of us.  The point is that we can have an opinion about what happens in Donna's life, but we don't get to have a say.