Courtney B. Vance – Podcasting Them Softly

There’s something about a bitchy Jennifer Aniston telling an eight year old girl to fuck off in an airport lounge that puts me in the Christmas spirit. She also fake calls Santa on her cell and tells him to put her on the naughty list. Such is the stuff of Office Christmas Party, one of those improv heavy, uber raunchy, disposable comedies with a disposable title and a whole host of ‘flavour of the month’ standup talent that despite itself, actually turns out pretty great. Aniston and TJ Miller play rival siblings who squabble over the corporate syndicate they’ve inherited, he wants to have an epic, balls out holiday fiesta and she won’t have any of it. The party does happen, complete with hookers, blow shot through a snow machine, rampant destruction of corporate property, ice sculpture penises and more. And.. that’s the plot, but what more could you ask for in a flick called Office Christmas Party. Jason Bateman plays yet another beta dude who sort of hovers on the cusp of being an alpha, he could probably do the shtick in his sleep by now but is charming enough. Mad Max’s Abby Lee is a persnickety escort, Jillian Bell her pimp with major anger issues, Randall Park another office drone with a kinky fetish, while Olivia Munn and Rob Cordry run about as well. Courtney B. Vance doesn’t so much run as dangerously swing on a Christmas light Tarzan rope when he’s given a Santa sized dose of blow by accident, and Kate McKinnon plays hilariously against type as the prudish HR manager. The film doesn’t have much to say other than ‘lets gets fucked up into oblivion’ (who can argue that this time of year), plus a vague underdog subplot that’s lobbed in and a few notes about taking a stand to save the company from going under, a prospect that Aniston’s cunty pessimist readily embraces. Most of it is just wanton debauchery though, which is what these comedies do best. I enjoyed Fortune Feimster as an Uber driver with some trouble reading social cues, McKinnon scaring the shit out of Vance with by singing a German nursery rhyme out of nowhere and other funny bits. It has that distinctly self aware vibe that R rated comedies often do these days, following the genre pioneering trickle down effect of Seth Rogen and others, which can work or can run amok and feel straight up dumb sometimes. Here it’s a loosely plotted throwaway flick about a party anyways, so it works great and the film is highly enjoyable.

-Nate Hill

ABC’s Flashforwad was a gripping psychological/supernatural epic with potential to run many seasons and provide us with solid entertainment for a long time a lá Lost (which it bears some similarities with), but the network mysteriously axed it after a single season, leaving a vacuum in the air as far as it’s story, and many viewers left stranded, wanting more. The show was built around a wicked concept: one day, every human being on planet earth simultaneously blacks out for a few minutes, and in that time has a precognitive vision of the future some months away from their present time, then promptly wakes up. This of course causes sheer chaos all over the globe, initially with millions of car crashes, disasters and planes falling out of the sky, and eventually the uncertainty, paranoia and confusion as to just what these flash-forwards are all about, and if it will happen again. An FBI task force spearheaded by the likes of Joseph Fiennes and Courtney B. Vance is commissioned to investigate the matter, and their mission takes them to some truly weird places, both geographically and thematically. There’s strange forces at work with this one, secrets that are kept close to the chest and gradually doled out over the expansive twenty three episode arc, a great length of run that should really be the standard for television. It’s similar to Lost in the sense that every week the mystery deepened as opposed to circling a resolution, clues and questions piled on top of the previous ones without a hint of finality or exposition to light the way, an audience tested, surefire way to keep people from flipping the channels mid episode and a great of garnering new viewers via word of mouth. The trick is to also add rhyme and reason to your bag of mysteries, provide a modicum of answers to keep the frustration just at bay, a formula which this one actually succeeds better at than Lost ever did. The scope and budget here are both enormous, giving new meaning to both the terms ‘globetrotting’ and ‘ensemble piece’, a truly vast attempt at long form storytelling. The cast is eclectic, other leads including John Cho as another hard-nosed Fed, Zachary Knighton as a doctor whose life is perhaps affected most by the incident, and brilliant turns from Jack Davenport, Sonya Walger, Peyton List, Dominic Monaghan, Brian F. O’Byrne and the late Michael Massee as nefarious, shadowy ultra-villain Dyson Frost, who serves as a sort of mcguffin during the first act of the show. Guest arcs included James Remar, Thomas Kretschmann, Rachel Roberts, Gabrielle Union, Shohreh Ahgdashloo, Annabeth Gish, Callum Keith Rennie, James Frain, Peter Coyote as the US President and so many more. The show looks amazing too, a brightly lit, well oiled mystery machine with all sorts of storytelling wizardry including nifty slow motion musical montages, trippy time jumps, non linear what-have-you and all manner of neat stuff. Gone way, way before it’s time, this one is well worth a watch and shouldn’t have been written off so soon. And remember: D. Gibbons is a bad man.

-Nate Hill