ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: The Story of a Wealthy Family Who Lost (Not Quite) Everything

Arrested Development (2003 – 2006): The Complete Series – Starring Jason Bateman, Portia de Rossi, Jeffrey Tambor, Will Arnett, Michael Cera, Alia Shawkat, Tony Hale, David Cross, Jessica Walter, and Ron Howard.

Regular readers here at the Anxiety will notice it’s been rather quiet here of late. Partly this is a result of me getting ready for the Pertwee re-watch/review that will start as soon as the Stanley Cup is finished. Partly this is a result of me getting my next book ready for publication (the proof arrived today). And partly this is a result of me having just watched the entire 53-episode run of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.

I try to stay away from “Best of” lists and overly hyperbolic statements like, “This is the funniest show ever,” but ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT would definitely be on the former and could make a claim on the latter.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT focuses on the Bluth family, a dysfunctional, wealthy family that’s just seen the family patriarch arrested for a whole slew of crimes (everything from embezzlement to treason) related to his real estate development company. Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) is the middle son and prior to his father’s arrest had expected to be named CEO of the company; when he’s passed over, he decides he’s going to take his son, George Michael (Michael Cera), and leave, but he ends up staying in order to keep the company afloat and the family together.

What makes ARRESTED so good is that all of the characters have both admirable and deplorable characteristics, running across a spectrum from George Michael (the most innocent) to Lucille (the most manipulative). Mitchell Hurwitz and his team of writers do an excellent job working the characters’ admirable and deplorable characteristics against one another, and while Michael is the star of the show and the “good son,” he’s far from perfect. Michael is the most self-aware of what his own father (Jeffrey Tambor) did to him and his older brother Gob (pronounced like the Biblical Job), and he’s determined to have a close, loving relationship with George Michael instead of one based on manipulation and lies. And he does, but he misses the larger picture and in his own way, Michael is just as smothering, continually attempting to balance his focus on work and handling the rest of the family by forcing George Michael to continue to do things they did when they were younger.

Jason Bateman is fantastic as the mostly decent would-be savior who loves his family despite his continual contempt for their behavior. He wants to be wanted, and it’s to the credit of the show that they eventually call him on this point, mocking his repeated insistence that he’s leaving them behind and taking George Michael away to live someplace else. It’s a really brilliant narrative move – had we known this at the start, of course, the whole tenor of those opening episodes changes, but when it gets revealed later on that he’s done this over and over again, it makes the character seem all the more complex and flawed.

Unlike most sitcoms, where every character has a function to play, in ARRESTED everyone has an arc to undertake. The result is that even though the characters typically generate the same kind of humor from episode to episode (George Michael’s awkwardness, Gob’s ego, Buster’s mother issues, etc.), the show can do quite a bit with them as they take that comedy through some actual … wait for it … development. We see George Michael’s awkwardness with his dad and with girls as he grows away from the first and towards the latter as he tries to become his own man. Likewise, Buster (Tony Hale) is constantly trying to grow away from his mother and towards any sense of self-individuation. Gob is constantly looking for his father’s approval, which has resulted in him having an ego that far outstrips his abilities as a son and a magician.

The show also wrings a tremendous amount of humor out of its use of a narrator. Ron Howard does the uncredited duty (though he does make an appearance in the final episode) and he’s the most likable character on the show. His almost folksy approach helps to balance the acidity of the characters which is needed because these really aren’t very likable characters. Almost all of them struggle with issues related to self-esteem and so it’s a brilliant decision to have Howard, who has always seemed to be completely comfortable with who “he” is (meaning, his characters).

The show isn’t perfect, because what could be perfect over 53 episodes? You do have to at least question any show that doesn’t take full advantage of its greatest talent, and even though they give him two roles to play (George, Sr., and George’s twin brother, Oscar), I wish the show could have found more to do with Jeffrey Tambor. George spends the first season in prison and the second living in the attic, and while the show needs to keep him locked up, he’s the one character that doesn’t really get an arc to fulfill. He’s in jail, he wants out, but when he gets out he has to stay hidden in the attic. Oscar just doesn’t match up with George as a character; he’s a stoner in love with his brother’s wife and the weakest character on the show. It’s to Tambor’s immense talent, however, that he makes these two brothers so completely different.

There’s a weak set of stories in season 3 involving the British. George Sr. tells Michael the Brits have set him up and made him a patsy, and Michael ends up involved with a British woman (Charlize Theron) and her uncle (Dave Thomas). He falls for the woman, but then thinks she’s involved in what’s going on with his dad and things blow up. Then they get together and he realizes she’s mentally challenged. It’s not bad, and Theron and Thomas are good, but the story just doesn’t work as well as what surrounds it.

On the other hand, it contains one of the absolute funniest moments in TV history when we learn, via flashback, that Buster once destroyed the family kitchen because he was mad at the Bluth’s housekeeper and he thought that’s where Lupe lived. Later, we see his throwing a dust buster at a public transit bus, and we’re told that Buster thinks he’s throwing Lupe’s favorite toy at her car.

There’s several great guest shots over the course of the show, with Henry Winkler chief among them. Playing the Bluth’s hapless attorney, Winkler is tremendous in his ineffectualness.

In-jokes are all over the place, too, such as Justine Batmeman appearing in the episode “Family Ties,” a reference both to her being Jason’s real life sister as well as “Family Ties” being the name of her former show. There’s a few Fonzie references for Winkler, and Will Arnett’s real life wife shows up to play his in-show wife.

It’s the variety of humor – sometimes clever, sometimes absurd, sometimes referencing the internal narrative and other times referencing the external world – that really sets ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT apart. This is a fantastic show that cleverly rips on its own characters. What the creators know is that they’ve got some unlikable and shallow characters here and it skewers them for us, and it humanizes them by making their faults real. They’re a family of selfish people that love each other because they’re stuck with each other.

JONAH HEX: The Rest of Him Was Too Fat for My Horse

Jonah Hex (2010) – Adapted from DC Comics; Directed by Jimmy Hayward – Starring Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malcovich, Michael Fassbender, Lance Reddick, Will Arnett, Aidan Quinn, Tom Wopat, Wes Bentley, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

Yeah, Tom F*cking Wopat. Still alive, still acting, still playing a Confederate.

This is going to be one of those reviews where I just look for ways to tell this movie is terrible. So if that’s all you wanted, there it is – JONAH HEX is terrible. Josh Brolin is pretty good in a really bad movie, but the rest of this too-slick, too-stupid western is just barely passable entertainment.

Have you ever been caught in a situation where you had to do something and knew you were terrible at it, so you just tried to get through it as quickly as possible? Because that’s what JONAH HEX tries to do. It literally plays out like it’s embarrassed by what it is, so it just tries to get through it as fast as it can so neither you or it has to make the experience anymore awkward.

It’s kinda like running into that girl you randomly hooked up with last year when you were both smashed and she just wanted to forget about her loser ex-boyfriend and you just wanted to kill some time before you sobered up enough to remember your own name, and now you run into each other at a Target and she’s standing there with the still-a-loser but no-longer-ex boyfriend and you’ve got on sweatpants and a too-big sweatshirt so you can pretend you’re water bloated and not fat and you’re like, “How’s it going?” and she’s like, “Oh my gawd, I haven’t seen you since-” and then she stops because she just remembered and you just remembered that you haven’t seen each other since you told her to “please stop f*cking crying and help me find my missing sock,” and maybe you could laugh about it, but the boyfriend is standing there chuckling like he should get punched in the face, so you go through the motions of catching up as quickly as possible so you can both go back to shopping.

Or a close proximity of that if, you know, you haven’t had that exact experience.

When you write about bad movies, you can usually say things like, “It seemed to go on forever. I mean, it felt like it went on for three hours.” You can’t really say that with JONAH HEX because they’re in such a hurry to get to the end. It’s just scene, scene, scene, scene with little build-up or pay-off.

Everything looks too slick, too. When watching a Western, I want to feel the sun and dirt, but HEX sanitizes everything to the point where they might as well have filmed everything on a sound stage.

It’s perfectly okay for a movie not to conform to the expectations of a genre, but it’s usually best if you follow through on it. For instance, there’s an early scene where Hex has killed a bunch of men wanted by a town. He shows up with three bodies. The town leaders, who are rendered so over-the-top that they are caricatures of caricatures tell him they’re not inclined to pay because the deal was for four men, not three. Hex tosses them a bag with the fourth man’s head in it.

“He was too fat for my horse,” Hex grumbles.

Funny. Almost overcomes the lameness of the town leaders.

Then the leaders announce they want Hex dead, and we realize that we’re going to see the payoff for this classic western set-up of our lone hero versus a mass of armed men who want him dead. Let’s see what they do with it, shall we? Let’s see Hex’s amazing gunfighting skills or maybe some of that spooky stuff with the crows. Whatcha got for me, JONAH HEX?

Machine guns.

F*cking machine guns. Or whatever the hell those big rotating guns are officially called up there on the poster. Hex has them loaded on the side of his horse and he opens fire, slaughtering all the bad guys.

Dumb.

There’s a bunch of high-tech (relative to the time) throughout HEX, but they don’t really do anything with it. When he attacks the bad guy stronghold later on with dynamite pistols (they’re guns … that shoot dynamite … that is honestly awesome) no one is like, “Holy f*ck! Jonah Hex is shooting at us with dynamite pistols!!! Where the f*ck did he get them? Get me the f*ck out of here!!!” Instead, they just all stand around and die in big explosions.

Becaue tech plays such a big role in the film, you’d expect the filmmakers to do something with it, but they don’t. Hex also has this whole American Indian, magical medicine thing going on, which, I don’t know, would maybe set up a nice contrast with the guns, but they don’t do anything with that, either.

Look, I understand someone in power probably went, “You know what, guys? Nice try and all, but this movie you gave us totally blows. Seriously, it makes me feel a little better about Miller’s Spirit movie. So let’s not make anyone have to sit through 98 minutes. Cut it down to 82 and we’ll run another 5 trailers before the movie.” Short movies can work fine – especially if the setting and tone is familiar, especially if you’re doing a formulaic genre piece - but when you’re presenting a film like HEX that attempts to twist genres, you need to get us to believe in this world. That can take time. HEX doesn’t want to bother with that. It just wants to be over as much as you want it to be over.

There’s an entirely pointless near-death-experience sequence where Hex fantasizes about killing John Malovich and they try to pair it with the actual experience. I mean, what the stupid is that? Why do I want to watch a pretend fight when I can watch the real fight? And why are you blending the pretend fight and the real fight together? We can see he’s winning the real fight, so why do we need to know he’s winning the pretend fight, too? Why is this film so stupid?

The character of Hex is poorly conceived and executed inside this film. He had a family that got killed by Malkovich as revenge for Hex turning against his Civil War regiment because he didn’t want them killing kids. So you empathize with him for his family, but then as he’s doing this he’s also hooking up with a whore that he might like, might even like like, but he’s not going to commit to her or anything silly like that.

Is this supposed to represent how far he’s fallen? That he doesn’t feel right about loving a “clean” woman so he hooks up with a “dirty” one? Why am I asking these questions when the filmmakers either didn’t ask them or didn’t answer them?

Other than Brolin, the casting here is pretty awful, too. Megan Fox is what she is. I don’t find her attractive but her trashiness almost works here. Almost. Will Arnett shows up in a serious role, but it’s gimmick casting I don’t care about. Aidan Quinn plays President Ulysses S. Grant, Lance Reddick plays Q-Smith, Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Jeb, and they all do so professionally but the words that come out of their mouths are so silly they’re performances are rendered pointless. Well, the Morgan/Brolin scene is pretty good, I’ll give the film that.

John Malkovich plays the bad guy, but after 45 minutes of trying, he almost can’t be bothered to finish the movie out. He just looks like a guy who wants to go home.

JONAH HEX completely fails to deliver the proper atmosphere or mood. Westerns often work by slow-cooking the plot; you introduce ideas and characters and let things stew and then punctuate that with big, dramatic action scenes. HEX doesn’t bother with that. Director Jimmy Haywood (who directed the wonderful HORTON HEARS A WHO! last year) just moves from one scene to the next like he’s connecting the dots. The action sequences are mostly pretty limp, too, and lacking imagination or proper execution.

This is just a bad movie, and no matter how effective Josh Brolin’s grunting is, that’s not going to change.