Travel Man season 2 (2016)
– Vienna with Chris O’Dowd (they eat sausage and break a snow globe)
– Paris with British Bake Off host Mel Giedroyc (on snails: “the color of this is something I need to ignore”)
– Copenhagen with Noel Fielding (the first guest to out-joke Ayoade)
– Moscow with BBC star Greg Davies
W/ Bob & David (2015)
Haven’t seen this in a decade… wrote nothing last time… let’s rewatch it.
1. The guys travel through time… Bob becomes a work-from-home Pope… filmmaker David redefines slavery as “helperism” and lets Jay pretend to whip a Black man, which he must have enjoyed.
2. Not-great opening sketch about appeasing the Islamic heads of the network, but its final payoff mocking their own fans is worth it. B+D’s good/bad cop routine gets out of hand while Jay is a criminal (this part I believe). David plays Einstein in a biopic. Ennis has a bad experience at a dry cleaners and ends up cowriting a hit musical.
3. Bob flails on a cooking show, David flails as a consumer rights streamer at a traffic stop (Jay plays a violent authority-abuser), and David has the ability to summon people by insulting them.
4. Bob is the world’s worst bible salesman, and his one-man show mashing-up Seinfeld and Star Wars is a hit. A kid who looks upsettingly like me describes the murderers he met in heaven. Jay plays a klansman, I’m not making this up.
Since the show, director Jason Woliner did some Last Man on Earth and the second Borat movie. Scott Aukerman did Between Two Ferns. The composer worked with Mel Brooks and Bobcat Goldthwait.
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The Show About The Show season 1 (2015-2017)
Caveh (KAH-vay) pitches a show where BPB and Alex Karpovsky do drugs with him, but it doesn’t fly, so he pitches a show about pitching that show, then the next episode will be about making the first episode, and so on. It’s documentary, then re-enactments, then the making-of the re-enactments, sometimes with people playing themselves and sometimes with actors, so you’re never sure what layer of reality you’re on. Caveh is neurotic and annoying and cruel, and the show is twisted and brilliant – he must have inspired Nathan Fielder. For some reason I crack up whenever Dustin Guy Defa (writer of The Mountain) is onscreen, playing Caveh’s studio boss (and rarely Terence Nance appears playing Dustin’s boss).
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Uzumaki (2024)
Doomed animation miniseries from the same graphic novel as the beloved (by me alone) live-action film. The first couple episodes are more-or-less the movie’s story, with young couple Kirie and her more manic friend Shuichi. This time his dad spirals himself with no help from the washing machine, the Boy Who Likes Surprises comes back from his car crash as a zombie jack-in-the-box, and the news crew doesn’t arrive in spiral town until typhoons have driven the whole town into a massive spiral rowhouse.
The second half mostly introduces craziness that was too large-scale or wildly gruesome for the film. Kirie’s friend black-holes herself with her own spiral forehead. Mosquito swarms turn hospital patients into blood-draining zombies, while newborns are growing placenta-mushrooms. Kirie gets stalked by a whispering typhoon, and also by a neighbor transformed into a rat-eating spike monster, and the boy destroys a pottery kiln that has trapped his parents’ souls. Finally the town is leveled and our couple discovers the ancient subterranean spiral structures fueling the overground apocalypse.
One of the many credited directors worked on Ergo Proxy, which I just found out about. Music by a guy I saw play at Big Ears.
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Archer season 10 (2019)
The outer space Firefly season. They meet interdimensional beings and doppelgangers, rescue various creatures, get into gladiator fights, and fight Robot Barry.
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Space Ghost Coast to Coast season 1 (1994)
Really holds up.
RIP George and Clay.
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Hari Kondabolu – Vacation Baby (2023)
Good, with surprisingly few gross baby jokes considering he became a dad during the pandemic.
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Melomaniac (2023, Katlin Schneider)
Guy who enjoys live music becomes obsessed with recording it.
Sadly, I cannot relate.