Am I The Only One In The World Who Did Not Enjoy Anger Management?!

The Good: Moments of humor, Generally good performances
The Bad: Agonizing tone, Predictable plot, Irksome character development
The Basics: When Dave Buznik is sentenced to 20 hours of anger management therapy, he ends up getting more than he bargained for when noted author and expert Dr. Buddy Rydell antagonizes him.


There are a number of movies that came and went in their theatrical run that I had absolutely no interest in watching that I now find myself catching thanks to my wife. Pretty much any film featuring Adam Sandler falls into that category; my wife is a fan and I’m not a huge fan – though there are some that I have enjoyed. Despite the presence of Jack Nicholson in it, I never had the urge to watch the Adam Sandler film Anger Management. That avoidance ended last night when my wife and mother-in-law were in the mood to watch Anger Management and I was in the mood to hang out with them.

Hated it.

The thing is, I don’t recall what I knew about Anger Management going into it, but from the outset the movie set me off because the protagonist seemed woefully misdiagnosed with anger issues. Adam Sandler is possibly the ultimate actor for portraying seething rage beneath a good-guy persona. He did it masterfully in Punch-Drunk Love (reviewed here!), so Sandler has abilities. For sure, there are many different ways people who have anger under the surface might act, but in Anger Management, Sandler’s character of Dave Buznik exhibits no recognizable traits of someone who is truly angry and struggles to deal with that. Instead, in Anger Management, Dave is constantly provoked and he is surrounded by angry people who overact to his calm rejections of their behavior.

Dave Buznik has been dating Linda for years and he remains too timid to commit to her, despite the fact that she pals around with Andrew, an ex who shows no respect for her relationship with Dave. Dave has a great idea that his boss takes credit for. That leads to Dave traveling for his boss and on the plane, he moves seats to sit next to Dr. Buddy Rydell. In asking for headphones, Dave is forced to wait and when he gently puts his hand on the stewardess’s elbow, the plane lands and he is charged with assault. He is sentenced to twenty hours of anger management therapy . . . with Dr. Rydell.

Rydell begins almost immediately making offers to Dave and then betraying him. Dave’s sentence is expanded to forty hours and the group sessions Dave attends include the legitimately violent Chuck, a porn star couple, and a guy who is far long in Rydell’s program, Lou. Traveling together, Dave and Rydell go through a number of exercises, like Rydell having Dave pick up a woman at a bar, then telling Linda about it. Rydell has Dave confront his childhood tormenter and then starts dating Linda himself. In the process of Rydell agitating Dave, Dave comes to stand up for himself and his relationship with Linda.

Anger Management is unpleasant to watch because almost immediately, the viewer has the sense that Dave is being played. Watching a generally nice guy get railroaded by an erratic manipulator is not my idea of entertaining. As a result of the transparent way that Rydell works Dave, the “surprise” twist near the end is more obvious than audacious. Anger Management telegraphs itself and it is frustrating to watch a film where the protagonist is so far behind the curve.

That said, Anger Management has an impressive cast that is utilized remarkably well . . . outside Sandler. Sandler’s Dave is not written to be particularly angry, clever or distinct and that leaves Sandler with remarkably little to play. Anger Management does not give Adam Sandler one of his interesting or quirky characters to play and the result is that much of the movie has the viewer watching an indistinct tool.

The rest of the cast of Anger Management is impressively utilized. Jack Nicholson plays Dr. Rydell with an energetic quality that borders on the sadistic and makes the role instantly credible. Nicholson gets through the psychobabble with a brilliant straight face and when his character turns toward the charming and erratic, he lends some continuity to the performance that makes it seem like it is the same character going through everything. Nicholson has amazing facial acting and director Peter Segal captures that wonderfully. The supplemental cast of Marisa Tomei, Luiz Guzman, Kurt Fuller, Woody Harrelson, John Turturro, Heather Graham and John C. Riley flesh out the world around Dave and Rydell to keep Sandler playing off an intriguing number of other talents.

Unfortunately, the humor in Anger Management is slapstick and not at all shocking. Telegraphed well in advance, much of the film has mediocre jokes broke up by long stretches of Rydell antagonizing Dave. Anger Management is like watching torment on film and for as much as Dave is tormented, so is the viewer.

For other works with January Jones, please visit my reviews of:
X-Men: First Class
Unknown
Love Actually
Bandits

4/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Rapidly Diminishing Returns: Why Weeds Isn’t Worth It!

The Good: Moments of character, Moments of humor
The Bad: Repetitive, Terrible protagonist, Ridiculous plot
The Basics: In a story that does little more than prove that enough is never enough, Weeds (the complete series) wears out its welcome long before all eight seasons are viewed.


There are few television series’s that I continued with based on inertia alone the way I did with Weeds. Weeds is a 102 episode (roughly a half hour each) television series that has an immediately original concept that is quickly milked to death and then extended for about six more seasons. The show, which aired on Showtime, won awards for the acting of Mary-Louise Parker (for no discernable reason that I can find given how poorly she acts and differentiates her character of Nancy Botwin from, for example, her character of Amy Gardner on The West Wing, reviewed here!) and writing (from series creator Jenji Kohan), but otherwise was a frequently-nominated strike out for comedy on the awards circuit. The thing is, outside the premium cable amount of drugs and nudity presented, Weeds has shockingly little going for it and that is never more clear than when one sits down and watches Weeds The Complete Series.

The full-series boxed set has all of the content of the previously released DVD (or Blu-Ray) sets of:
Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
Season 4
Season 5
Season 6
Season 7
and Season 8.

While I usually do an intensive analysis of a television series’s plot and characters, I find that with Weeds, I am unable to muster up the enthusiasm. What is the show about? Nancy Botwin and her family and the people she uses. Who is Nancy Botwin? Nancy Botwin is a high-functioning sociopath whose husband dies in the series premiere. Botwin and her two children live in Agrestic, a gated community for the wealthy and privileged. When her husband dies, Nancy is forced to acknowledge that she has no marketable skills and so in order to maintain her standard of living, she becomes a pot dealer in the suburbs.

What follows is the story of Nancy Botwin and her descent into crime. Nancy, accompanied by her brother-in-law who lusts after her, her two children and various sidekicks dimwitted (Doug and Dean) and treacherous (Heylia and Celia) gets into trouble with rival dealers and suppliers, local law enforcement and the DEA. She gets out of her troubles by lying to, having sex with or marrying her adversaries when simply setting her enemies against one another or burning a place to the ground does not work. And then she runs away. Dragging her family, Doug, and whichever other lackey is around at the time with her, Nancy relocates to San Diego, Dearborn (Michigan), New York City and Connecticut over the course of the series. So, Weeds is a simple idea relocated repeatedly in an attempt to stay fresh, but utterly failing after its first two seasons to engage the viewers sufficiently to be worth the investment of time and money.

What is so bad about Nancy Botwin? Nancy shows no real regard for anyone in her life. She uses her children as an excuse to do horrible things and she is willing to turn on even her kids when the situation calls for it. In fact, outside protecting her son Shane from a murder charge after he kills a woman in defense of Nancy, Nancy shows no real regard for even her children (whom she claims to be doing everything for). Moreover, Nancy drags Andy around and constantly uses him, even after she learns that he is hopelessly in love with her. She has no qualms about using his love for her to get what she wants from him and then abandoning or betraying him. She is, literally, a sociopath the way she betrays everyone with her single-minded focus on her own survival. As a result, she is neither an empathetic character, nor one who is particularly enjoyable to watch.

What is so bad about Weeds then? In addition to having a pretty lousy protagonist, Weeds has a disturbingly limited concept that makes no real sense. Nancy Botwin is faced with a big financial crisis, like millions of Americans are every day. She makes a bad initial choice, which is to stay in Agrestic and become a pot dealer. The thing is, America is huge and there are plenty of places she could move (one garage sale would have given her more than enough money to move to a place with a lower cost-of-living) and get a job to make ends meet. So, the show starts off with a lousy decision . . .

. . . and then it just keeps making the same bad decision over and over again. There are several times in the course of Weeds where Nancy Botwin gets ahead: she is not just scraping by, she has more than enough to keep her and her family provided for for the foreseeable future. And she never quits while she is ahead. Instead, she gets into increasingly preposterous situations that force her and her family into worse (usually life-threatening) situations. And she never learns. Weeds sucks because Nancy Botwin is horrible, short-sighted, and remarkably stupid for a drug-peddling mother and she is surrounded by idiots who continue to let her use them over and over again. And the ones who manage to escape the dark cloud of Nancy’s influence . . . invariably return to her, even after they can acknowledge how abysmal she actually is!

Outside Mary-Louise Parker, the acting in Weeds is good. Justin Kirk, especially, is impressive with an uncommon amount of range and depth as Andy Botwin. Young actors Hunter Parrish (Silas Botwin), Alexander Gould (Shane Botwin) and Allie Grant (Isabelle Hodes) all grow up over the course of the eight-season series and illustrate an incredible amount of talent and performance ability, even when their characters are emotionally stunted. Like Mary-Louise Parker consistently hitting on only one note, Kevin Nealon plays Doug Wilson with a constant goofy quality one expects from anyone who saw him perform on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s or 1990s.

The end result is a simple analysis for a simple show: Weeds is not clever, not particularly original after the set-up and not enduringly great in any way, shape, or form. That makes it easy to pass up and not worth adding to one’s permanent library.

For other shows that premiered on Showtime, please visit my reviews of:
Dexter - Season 1
The L Word
Dead Like Me
Jeremiah - Season 1
An American Crime

2.5/10

For other television reviews, please visit my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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A One-Woman The Hangover: Walk Of Shame Is Entertaining (But Not Much More)!

The Good: Decent performances, Actually funny
The Bad: Very predictable plot arc
The Basics: Stereotypical Texan good girl news anchor Meghan Miles goes on the Walk Of Shame after a night of blackout drinking.


Ever since The Hangover (reviewed here!), the idea of a blockbuster comedy has been an attainable goal for movie studios and while there have been some high-grossing comedies since The Hangover, there have been few that are really memorable or enduring. As part of counterprogramming, Focus is betting on their comedy Walk Of Shame this weekend. Walk Of Shame is not likely to be this year’s The Love Letter (The Love Letter was, to the best of my knowledge, the only major studio film to be released opposite The Phantom Menace and it, predictably, bombed), but as counterprogramming to The Amazing Spider-Man 2, odds are it will not make a box office dent.

That said, Walk Of Shame is a pretty entertaining (if largely familiar) comedy that features Elizabeth Banks and James Marsden. The film is largely a fish-out-of-water comedy with a plot that is actually similar to that of The Hangover, save that it involves one woman and focuses on the day after the drunken revelry which is when the chaos happens (as opposed to trying to figure out what mayhem occurred). For a film I had not heard of until I actually saw it, Walk Of Shame is actually funny and surprisingly memorable. Packed with an extraordinary cast of comedic talent, Walk Of Shame actually offers exactly what it promises; the comedy is decent entertainment for moviegoers who want a legitimate option outside the barrage of superhero films and obvious blockbusters gracing the screens today.

Having been mauled by cats on camera, during a report she was doing for a local television station, KZLA5 news anchor Meghan Miles gives a pretty terrible job interview, but is one of the two anchors who could be getting a prestigious anchor job at the network. On the day that she will find out whether or not she got the job, her fiancé Kyle abandons her (taking most of her possessions) and Wendy Chang gets the network position. Meghan’s friends Rose and Denise take her out to a club where she gets incredibly drunk. Rescued from a fire escape by the good-looking Gordon, the very drunk Meghan abandons her friends and goes back to Gordon’s loft where they both get blackout drunk.

Waking up without her purse (or any possessions, including her cell phone), Meghan checks her voice mail to find a message from her agent, Dan (using Gordon’s phone). Wendy Chang has been disqualified for the CNB job, so the executives are coming to Meghan’s work that night to meet with her and watch the broadcast live. With her car towed and now locked out of Gordon’s building, Meghan spends the day trying to get to work. Threatened by cops who think she is a prostitute, aided by a trio of men living hood-adjacent (one of whom gives her a vial of crack), and knowing only Kyle’s number, Meghan struggles to get uptown.

Incidents in Walk Of Shame include Meghan getting caught in a gangland shootout, getting yelled at by a crack dealer, pepper sprayed by a bus driver and finding herself in a conservative Jewish temple’s garden where she is perceived as a temptress by the student there. Walk Of Shame bears a number of similarities to The Hangover; there is a cat with crazy cg eyes that takes the place of the tiger, there is an impounded car, friends who are trying to track down the hungover protagonist and the police pursue Meghan much like the gangsters in The Hangover. Like most fish-out-of-water comedies, Walk Of Shame suffers most from its feelings of familiarity.

Walk Of Shame actually has some of its funniest moments without Meghan Miles. While the recurring thread of the Carpocalypse seems only to exist to give Kevin Nealon some wacky lines, the police officers played by Bill Burr and Ethan Suplee are legitimately hilarious. Elizabeth Banks performs convincingly as Meghan Miles and while much of the movie simply requires her to run around in a bright yellow dress and react to ridiculous characters, she pulls it off well. The character’s journey from archetypal “good girl” to car thief is presented in a surprisingly realistic fashion.

For light fare, Walk Of Shame is enjoyable, but not terribly substantive. There are far worse forms of entertainment, even this weekend. But will Focus have a blockbuster comedy? Not with Walk Of Shame. This is a movie that is entirely enjoyable to watch, but largely forgettable once it is over.

For other works with James Marsden, be sure to visit my reviews of:X-Men: Days Of Future Past
30 Rock
The Box
Sex Drive
27 Dresses
Superman Returns
X-Men: The Last Stand
X2: X-Men United
Ally McBeal
Zoolander
X-Men

6/10

For other movie reviews, please check out my Film Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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An Unremarkable End Comes To Weeds With Season Eight!

The Good: Moments of character, Sense of resolution to the story
The Bad: Repetitive, No great performances, Lousy resolution for most characters
The Basics: Weeds ends its run with a thirteen-episode season that unremarkably repositions the characters from the Botwin family.


Perhaps the irony of the final – eighth – season of Weeds is that long before the final (two-part) episode, “It’s Time” comes up, it is clear that it is well past time for the show to have ended. The final season of Weeds is packed with political messages and innuendo, but on the character front, it wanders in much the same way virtually every other season has; the protagonist of the show, Nancy Botwin, does what she can to pay her bills legitimately, but lacking any real life experience that is marketable, she ends up falling back into the crime-filled lifestyle of a pot dealer. Long before the season takes a turn back to having Nancy’s usual character reassert itself, the formulaic nature of the show is evident and executive producer and head writer Jenji Kohan does not disappoint (or surprise).

In fact, the final season of Weeds, which picks up with the moment that the seventh season (reviewed here!) unremarkably ended, starts with a lack of surprises and plods along in a repetitive and familiar way for most of the twelve episodes (the final episode is a double-long series finale, so there are technically thirteen episodes in the DVD boxed set). The plot device which concluded the seventh season and seemed to force Showtime to produce an eighth season was a shooting that was so unsurprising that it is laughable that the producers tried to create any doubt as to who the target of the shooting was. At the end of the season - and the series – the show leaps ahead seven years and the device works well only so long as one forgets how the prior seven seasons have gone; the entire series finale is predicated on the concept that the Botwin family, which has spent almost a decade on the run, moving constantly, and getting into more trouble than was ever truly worth it, remained uncharacteristically stable in the seven year gap in order to establish the business empire they have at the climax of the series. More than any other conceit in the series, this might well be the most preposterous.

When the inauguration of the new Botwin family compound in Connecticut is interrupted by Nancy getting shot in the head, the brief family peace is broken. While Shane starts hunting for the shooter, Andy has sex with Nancy’s sister and meets with the hospital chaplain for an intriguing conversation. After seventy-seven days in the hospital, Nancy is conscious and has racked up a bill of almost half a million dollars. After leaving the hospital, Silas sets up with a new pot grower and Shane hunts down the guy who shot Nancy. Nancy decides to have Kiku buy her out.

As Nancy begins swimming therapy in her neighbor’s, Rabbi Dave, pool at night, she begins to divest herself of the pot business and becomes committed to helping people. That takes the form of actively resisting people like Kiku – who pays her off in product – and busting a drug-dispensing clown at the hospital. When Nancy and Silas both start working legitimately for a pharmaceutical company, Nancy once again proves she’ll do anything to sell and Silas finds happiness growing weed legally. While Shane finds himself graduating the police academy and falling in with corrupt cops and Andy continues to search for real love while avoiding romantic entanglements with Nancy, Doug finds his true calling by creating a fake charity and then a cult. With Nancy rededicating her life to Stevie, Silas is given an offer that he might not refuse, which is bound to change the Botwin family forever.

The set-ups in Weeds Season Eight are designed to surprise viewers, but they seldom work. Nancy Botwin has, since pretty much the middle of the first season, made the premise of the show invalid. Botwin became a drug dealer to provide for her family and at various points in the series, she has had more than enough money to do that. In the eighth season, she has rededicated herself to getting custody of Stevie from her sister and she genuinely seems committed to that. But how she goes about getting Stevie and keeping him is much more predictable than audacious. While she gives up the pot selling, she is still ruthless in her pursuit of money, prostituting herself to a doctor in order to get the drug samples she needs to unload out and continuing to use people around her. It is, however, hardly surprising when she sends the drugs Kiku brings around through the wood chipper, just as it is unsurprising how she uses intimidation and threats to get her what she wants.

The heart of the show remains Andy or Silas. Andy actively works to push aside his feelings for Nancy, but in the eighth season of Weeds he finds his usual, formulaic sense of love and heartbreak. Andy pursues Nancy’s sister, Jill, and he becomes an integral member of her family . . . until her estranged husband returns and she (and her daughters) then rejects Andy. Andy manages to further distance himself from his feelings for Nancy by advising Rabbi Dave on how he can pursue Nancy most effectively. Silas essentially found his purpose in the prior season, but when the grower he teams up with in the beginning of season eight has a mental breakdown and destroys his crop, Silas is once again adrift. However, because Silas already has truly found himself (he’s a pot farmer!), his arc is largely just re-establishing his crop and then finding personal satisfaction. To that end, his deaf girlfriend Megan (from the earliest seasons of the show) pops back up and they rekindle their relationship. This is an entirely inorganic relationship and it is almost like actor Hunter Parrish was asked, “Who did you like working with the best?” and they designed the character arc around that.

As the series winds to a close, it is worth knowing who the essential characters are. In the final season of Weeds, the cast is comprised of:

Nancy Botwin – Having been shot in the head after just making peace with her family, she racks up incredible medical bills (in a plotline that is almost entirely dropped). Determined to keep Stevie, she stops a corrupt drug-pushing clown from profiting off the suffering of dying hospital patients and when she is released from the hospital, she begins to work on herself. Trying to stay on the straight and narrow, she befriends Rabbi Dave, divests herself of the bad influences in her life and gets a legitimate job. In order to keep the job and succeed at pushing legitimate prescription drugs, she sleeps around and backstabs. She also bribes the locals to get Stevie onto the soccer team. She sets up as an entrepreneur to profit from the legalization of marijuana,

Silas Botwin – After Kiku falls apart and his happiness as a pot grower is disrupted by getting involved with a mentally unstable grower, he finds joy in making new strains of weed for Big Pharma. After rekindling his past relationship with Megan and having a few scuffs with Shane, he gets an offer from Big Tobacco that might allow him to realize all his dreams and get him out from under his mother’s thumb,

Shane Botwin – Secretly attending the police academy, he graduates around the same time as Nancy gets out of the hospital. He successfully hunts down the shooter and tries to impress Nancy by busting him legally while Nancy tries the vigilante route. He develops a relationship with Angela Mullen, a fellow police academy graduate, who is offered a much better position than he is upon graduation. While he profits off an impound lot scam run by his father figure and another corrupt cop, he stagnates,

Doug – When the corporate scheme that he and his firm bankrolled goes bust, he abandons Whit and goes solo. Scamming the system with a “charity” he set up to skim corporate profits, he starts using the homeless as a write-off and then as a labor force for a cult he forms,

and Andy Botwin – After his relationship with Jill flounders, he leaps into a relationship with Shannon, a college student. Abruptly marrying her – despite pining for one of his ex’s – he finds a great deal of happiness teaching at a Jewish school and moving on from his feelings for Nancy, despite the pull she exerts on him.

The final season of Weeds is unremarkable on the acting front, though there are no truly bad performances either. The fundamental problem with the season is that the movement that happens occurs more in the form of an ever widening circle as opposed to characters tacking off in a new direction, truly challenging themselves and growing. Instead, the characters just keep going round and round and given how unlikable Nancy Botwin is as the primary focus of the season, it is very hard to get invested.

That said, the actual finale is a good one to the series and while it might not be the most exciting, it does leave one feeling like they never have to look in on the lives of the Botwins ever again. Only the die-hard fans will really need to tune in to the final season to watch the characters flounder around through menaces, relationships, emotionless sex, and crime peripheral to the drug trade; the rest can be content with the idea that Nancy Botwin was shot at the climax of the prior season and leave it at that.

For other works with Mary-Louise Parker, please visit my reviews of:
R.I.P.D.
The West Wing
Saved!

4/10

For other television reviews, please visit my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Messing With You Don’t Mess With The Zohan On DVD Is A Waste Of Time.

The Good: Moments of message
The Bad: Not funny, Wastes good cast members, Predictable, Lame character development, Moments of message
The Basics: A terrible film not worth anyone's time or attention, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan is not funny, not clever and certainly not constructive.


Sometimes, it is only in assembling lists that I discover I have overlooked something I thought I had reviewed. For example, when I was making my list of the "Worst Films Of 2008,” I discovered that I had never actually penned a review of the film You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, even though it easily made that list. Now on DVD, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan is just as bad and a film I loathed having to suffer through again.

Whenever people pitch the "worst movie of the year" or make grandiose claims that certain films are the worst film of a certain time frame, I suspect they forget about works like You Don’t Mess With The Zohan. So, for example, for all of the problems some reviewers had with Twilight, it is hard to take them seriously when they declare that film to be worse than You Don’t Mess With The Zohan or The Love Guru. Similarly, when people claim that 2008 wasn't all that bad in the theaters, my first questions tend to be "Did you see Disaster Movie or (Stupid) Quarantine?" I preface my considerations of You Don’t Mess With The Zohan with these thoughts because it is an utter waste of time, talent and the DVD medium. And sitting through it twice now just left me feeling robbed of time and life.

Zohan is an Israeli secret agent who has no greater ambitions than to cut hair. A superstar in Israel, he dances, plays hackey sack, has sex with many women and catches numerous things - like a fish - in his butt. As the violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians escalates, Zohan sees no potential end to the violence and the rise of an equally powerful adversary, the Phantom, leaves him wishing for more.

So, Zohan fakes his own death by appearing to let the Phantom defeat him in hand-to-hand combat. As many women mourn the loss of Zohan, he escapes to the United States where he assumes an alter ego as a hairdresser. As a corrupt real estate developer moves in on a New York City neighborhood, Zohan raises business at Dahlia's boutique by cutting hair and having sex with all of her clients. Soon, though, Zohan is spotted by a man he once wronged, Salim, who is furious over Zohan taking his goat some years before. Salim threatens to expose the Phantom as a fraud for not killing the Zohan and they converge upon Zohan at a sham hackey sack tournament as the real estate developer hires some white supremacists to burn everything down.

Every now and then, there is a movie that just makes one sit up and say "wow, this is a stupid movie." You Don’t Mess With The Zohan is one such stupid movie, but not for all of the reasons one might think. For example, a comedy about Arab and Israeli relations is about due. The fundamental concept of this flick is not a bad one. The problem is in the execution. So, for example, watching Adam Sandler as the Zohan grill naked and shoot a fish out of his butt has no real redeeming value. And by the time that the viewer gets to more telling, quirky funny bits like Salim's obsession with the goat Zohan once took, the viewer already does not care. Why? In between there are a slew of jokes that virtually all boil down to the idea that it is somehow funny that Zohan has sex with middle aged women or senior citizens of all body types.

Moreover, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan is so forced with its generic and stupid form of humor that it has to telegraph it. This is essentially the function of Gail's son. Gail takes the Zohan in and her son walks in on Zohan and her repeatedly having sex. The joke then is about the son's revulsion and as most of the things with that character, the lines he delivers are essentially saying, "this is what you ought to be laughing at." The problem is, this type of humor is likely to only appeal to the 13 year-old members of the PG-13 audience. And of those, it's not even the brightest and certainly not the most mature 13 year-olds that will find it funny.

By the time the humor gets around to actually being political, it is far too late and hardly funny. So, when Zohan's friends in New York City begin talking politics, the conversation soon degenerates into a conversation on which politician's wives each of the men would be willing to have sex with.

Far more insidious in the film is the equation of Israelis and Arabs with terrorists, though to be fair to Sandler, Smigel and the other writers, they are indiscriminate in their prejudice. Both the Israeli characters and the Palestinian ones are heavily armed and have all sorts of weapons just laying around. This - even in the context of a comedy - reinforces the prejudice that "they" are all terrorists. And it is in that regard that the film has its one decent exchange of dialogue. One Arab character says "People hate us because they think we are terrorists!" to which an Israeli character notes, "People hate us because they think we are you!" There is plenty of hate to go around in You Don’t Mess With The Zohan and unfortunately, when it is not overtly combating the hate, it is subversively reinforcing the worst prejudices about the Israelis and the Palestinians.

At least as offensive is the sheer amount of talent that You Don’t Mess With The Zohan wastes. Talented comedians show up for quick appearances that do not utilize their talents or make them the butt of jokes pertaining to one aspect of their personality. So, for example, Chris Rock's appearance as a cab driver is short and disappointing. That George Takei, Dave Allen and Kevin Nealon went anywhere near this movie is unfortunate.

And of the principles, one tends to expect what they get from both Adam Sandler (who plays Zohan) and Rob Schneider, who is "disguised" as the Arab Salim, but that John Turturro gets sucked into this crapfest is just offensive. Turturro has a great ability to play comedic as well as dramatic. And I had to watch Cradle Will Rock (reviewed here!) after seeing this movie on DVD just to cleanse my palate because Turturro plays a character of such integrity in that film. But in You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, Turturro is wasted, even with his sense of comedy. As the Phantom, he flops with the physical comedy and the verbal gags are hardly funny enough to waste his abilities on.

Now on DVD, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan includes a bevy of deleted scenes which add nothing to the movie, featurettes on the behind-the-scenes antics and development of the movie and commentary tracks that are not funny either. Those who find this movie funny are hardly the type who will enjoy commentary tracks and Sandler and Schneider, who both appear on the commentary track, are particularly unenlightening about anything in regards to the movie.

For those even considering You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, just ask yourself if there isn't some better way to waste two hours of your life. Having wasted over four hours on this insipid "comedy," I can tell you: there are better uses of your time!

For other works with Nick Swardson, please be sure to visit my reviews of:
Jack And Jill
30 Minutes Or Less
Just Go With It
Bolt
I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry
Almost Famous

1.5/10

For other movie reviews, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

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Picking Up For A Much More Engaging Season, Weeds Season Seven Actually Justifies Itself!

The Good: Interesting character directions, Very funny, Great acting, Surprisingly decent plotlines
The Bad: The characters all keep making the exact same mistake!
The Basics: In its seventh season, Weeds rebounds into a show that makes the old, very stale, formula work again!


I picked up the seventh season of Weeds solely based upon inertia. I, honestly, had no real desire to watch it. I recall being disappointed even when I heard that Weeds was not cancelled after its seventh season, that it was being renewed for an eighth season. My thought and feeling at the time was “why bother? What haven’t they done already?!” So, I sat down to the three-disc set of Weeds Season 7 with remarkably low expectations.

It’s nice that I can still be surprised.

The seventh season of Weeds is an odd mix of a course correction and a re-establishment of the same, old, familiar thing. The result is a show that feels very familiar – which has been a real weakness in the past seasons – but manages to still feel fresh and, mostly, funny. In its seventh season, Weeds actually seems to actually mortgage the humor more often than not in order to expose the characters for exactly who they are. That makes the seventh season feel surprisingly raw and it works.

In fact, the seventh season of Weeds works very well in all aspects, except the concept. While very early in the season, Nancy Botwin is told not to try reforming, it seems like exactly what it is, a cheap excuse not to move the character forward and allow her to return to her life as a pot-selling mother. Therefore, the fundamental problem with the seventh season of Weeds is that the concept is so stale as to be annoying. In fact, as the Botwin family reunites around Nancy, more often than not the feeling I felt was annoyance. But aspects like the unabashed way Shane is referenced as a killer and how Andy once again makes a serious attempt to go legitimate. Weeds Season Seven would be worth watching even if Nancy never appeared in it.

Nancy Botwin is paroled after serving three years in prison for the murder that Shane committed. Sent to a halfway house in New York City after Esteban is killed in prison, Nancy intends to get Stevie back and lay low from her family and friends. Outed by her sister, who is raising Stevie in California, Silas, Shane, Andy and Doug return to the United States from Copenhagen. Nancy, not keen on seeing them, flees to recover something her cellmate, Zoya, left on the outside. She discovers a suitcase full of grenades and artillery and she works out an exchange with Zoya’s brother for them. Reuniting with her family, Nancy is overwhelmed by the changes in them.

While Silas remains deeply hurt over his issues with Nancy (having learned he was fathered by a rather dim man), Shane tries to convince Nancy to go into business with him. Failing that, he takes out a massive number of college loans and begins to pursue training in criminal justice. But Andy has truly had it with Nancy’s self-centered ways. Borrowing money from Shane, Andy tries to bring a hybrid bicycle product to the United States and build a community. While Doug ends up hired back as an accountant at a powerful firm, Nancy continues to fight her sister for custody of Stevie, with mixed results.

As the season progresses, Nancy finds herself at an awkward junction between ex-military thugs, the CEO of a powerful Ponzi scheme, the S.E.C. and the Department of Corrections. The different forces tugging on her put her into awkward reunions with Heylia James, Dean Hodes and her obsessed former cellmate!

The seventh season of Weeds cleverly reinvents the wheel in a way the show has not managed to do in prior incarnations. Nancy Botwin has moved from the Agrestic suburbs to Del Mar and Mexico to Dearborn, Michigan and now ends up in New York City. Something about this particular setting with the characters where they are at in this point in their lives makes the season work. The kids are not starry-eyed, Andy seems to have a handle on his previous feelings for Nancy and Silas truly is working to become a man who has plans that are vital and interesting.

And that makes it work.

More than any of the prior seasons of Weeds, the seventh season works (when it is not simply the characters falling back into Nancy’s orbit) because it focuses on growing the characters and giving them each their own strong sense of motivation. In the seventh season of the show, the primary characters are:

Nancy Botwin – Released from prison, she immediately betrays her cellmate and starts exchanging Zoya’s weapons stash for marijuana. Timid at first with interacting with her family, she quickly starts using them to attempt to get Stevie away from her sister. She borrows money from Shane, uses Silas’s newfound marketing skills and manipulates Doug into getting a legitimate job to show the Department of Corrections. Illustrating she learned almost nothing in prison, Nancy is virtually unchanged,

Silas Botwin – Having been a male model for an obscure flower water drink in Copenhagen, Silas is reluctant to return to the U.S. and his mother’s b.s. Unable to find modeling work easily, he starts giving away weed to male models in order to start a distribution network. He soon goes into business with Nancy . . . until the local big dealers on the block, Pouncy House, come to shut their operation down,

Shane Botwin – Having spent his time in Copenhagen in the company of an older woman, puppeteering, he seems far more balanced and less menacing than he was after he killed Pilar. Figuring that Nancy took the fall for him, he rushes back to the United States to be with her. When she insists he go to college, he takes out many loans and starts on the Criminal Justice track. There, he finds a New York City detective he can manipulate in order to save Nancy’s business,

Doug Wilson – Not left behind by Shane and Andy, he leaves Copenhagen and in New York meets up with a friend who more or less forces him into a job. Doomed to play on the company softball team, he begins taking steroids. He realizes that the Feds cannot prosecute the firm without damaging their own retirement and begins sleeping with the S.E.C. agent in order to keep the company afloat,

and Andy Botwin – Tired of running and of Nancy’s issues, he strikes out with a legitimate business of his own. While Silas sells weed out of the back, he runs a legitimate bike shop trying to sell a hybrid bike product. After he saves Silas from asphyxiation, he is drawn into a relationship with an artist and her husband, which leads him to understand exactly what is most important to him.

The acting in the seventh season of Weeds is flawless and the guest stars in this season integrate with the main cast exceptionally well. Michael Harney, who had a wonderfully slimy recurring role on NYPD Blue, appears as Detective Ouellette and he and Alexander Gould play off one another expertly. Jennifer Jason Leigh makes her brief guest starring roles as Nancy’s sister very funny and memorable, as does Michelle Trachtenberg (who plays Silas’s foil).

On DVD, Weeds Season Seven includes commentary tracks on key episodes, a gag reel, deleted scenes and a few featurettes. The commentary track on the second episode, featuring Gary Anthony Williams is by far funnier than any of the episodes and is well worth listening to. The other bonus features are pretty average.

Even so, Weeds Season seven is engaging and enjoyable, even for those who have not – traditionally – been a fan of the series!

For prior seasons of Weeds, please check out my reviews of:
Weeds Season 1
Weeds Season 2
Weeds Season 3
Weeds Season 4
Weeds Season 5
Weeds Season 6

7.5/10

For other television reviews, be sure to check out my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing of all I have reviewed!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Wildly Erratic, Just Go With It Was Not All It Was Cracked Up To Be.

The Good: Moments of fun, Good beginning and end, Moments of acting.
The Bad: Very weak middle, Predictable plot, Much of the acting
The Basics: For all the hype, Just Go With It is an awkward mix of predictable, cluttered and delightfully surprising.


Lately, I've been catching up on movies I missed in their theatrical release that I think my wife or I might like. Last night, that took the form of us getting in the Adam Sandler/Jennifer Aniston comedy Just Go With It, which both of us had heard very good things about. While my wife is a big fan of Adam Sandler's works, I've enjoyed many of Jennifer Aniston's works more. Even when Aniston is in a movie that does not wow me as much, she tends to illustrate fairly impressive range, as she did in Horrible Bosses (reviewed here!). So, I was not unenthusiastic about watching Just Go With It.

To be fair to Just Go With It, the movie starts well enough. I was actually pleasantly surprised by how fast it got to its own point. In that way, Just Go With It is a very direct movie. And it lands the ending. Just Go With It arrives at a sensible, if obvious, conclusion where one feels like the characters have reached an end that is fairly fulfilling. But in between, Just Go With It is a convoluted farce that is just a mess. I love Frasier (reviewed here!) and when the show started doing farce episodes, it was a real treat. They were funny, clever and oftentimes some of the most memorable episodes of the series. But they also were not protracted and Just Go With It is. Dragging the farcical elements out makes Just Go With It tedious and surprisingly not funny in the middle portion of the movie.

Danny Maccabee is heartbroken when, on the eve of his wedding, he discovers his fiance has been cheating on him and does not truly think much of him. Ditching her, he gets plastic surgery to correct his nose and he discovers there is an entire class of young, datable women who go for married guys. So, he trolls for women by going to bars, wearing his wedding ring and letting himself get picked up by one night stands. For almost twenty years, he does this while he watches his assistant, Katherine, deal with divorce and children. But one night, Danny goes to a party and without trying finds himself in an engaging conversation with a woman, Palmer. The two hit it off, spend the night together talking on the beach and it looks like they have all the elements for a substantial relationship.

Unfortunately for Danny, when he suggests Palmer take one of his business cards for his phone number, Palmer discovers the fake wedding ring in his pocket. When Palmer storms off, Danny laments to Katherine how he thinks he has blown something that could actually be wonderful. In conversing with Katherine, Danny decides that the way out of the situation is to lie to Palmer about how he and his wife are getting a divorce. That ruse comes close to working . . . until Palmer insists on meeting Danny's soon to be ex-wife. Danny has Katherine impersonate his wife, which she does in exchange for a pretty fabulous shopping spree, and the arrangement goes off without a hitch until Katherine takes a call from the babysitting and Danny is forced to lie about having children! Things spiral out of control for Danny and his lies when, during a meeting between the kids and Palmer, Katherine's son, Michael, manipulates Palmer and Danny into a Hawaiian vacation. Forced together on vacation, Danny tries to keep all of his lies from unraveling and Palmer in love with him while circumstances out of his control pull him in supposedly unexpected directions.

One of the main problems with Just Go With It is that, because it is working in a film comedy medium where virtually everything has to be squeezed into the (in this case) two hour running time, certain elements quickly become obvious to a seasoned moviegoer. As the film turns toward being a farce - arguably the moment that Danny's brother Eddie, as Dolph the man Katherine (as Devlin) allegedly had an affair with, in effect ruining the Danny/Devlin marriage - it becomes obvious that writers Allan Loeb, Timothy Dowling and I.A.L. Diamond are going with a very traditional mentality of the farce. To me, that meant that every lie would become much more complicated through the addition of more information that has the potential to complicate a lie already in play. So, for example, when Katherine tells the story about Devlin and Danny uses the name Devlin for his soon-to-be-ex-wife, I knew it was a waiting game for the actual Devlin to enter the movie. And, in Hawaii, there she is! The "magic" of the farce is in seeing how the convoluted lies are maintained or how they all fall apart. In the case of Just Go With It, there is an amusing moment when "Dolph" throws Palmer in the water to prevent her from outing "Devlin" to Devlin, but after the initial shock and humor, the scene become uncomfortable and unfunny as Dolph almost drowns Palmer!

The formulaic elements are not limited to the farce elements in Just Go With It, either. The moment Danny begins illustrating any real empathy for Katherine's children, Just Go With It becomes a weird character trivia formula story. In other words, every randomly mentioned factoid about the peripheral characters comes into play as a chance for the main protagonists to grow. So, when "Bart" (Michael's assumed identity for his interactions with Palmer) mentions that he is sad because his father is never around and that he does not know how to swim, Katherine gets a chance to be wowed by Danny actually bonding with the kids and teaching Michael to swim.

Despite the predictability and moments when Adam Sandler is recycling his performances from prior works - we get that his schtick is that high-pitched mumbling thing, but performances like in Punch-Drunk Love illustrate that he actually has exceptional range - Just Go With It actually does have some very positive elements. The opening to Just Go With It is very funny and the end has charm coming out of all orifices. The middle - especially the parts with Nicole Kidman as Devlin and a disturbingly bland Dave Matthews - go for more obvious jokes and linger annoyingly long on Eddie, Palmer's body and setting up less successful jokes that are played out in the end. Added to that, Just Go With It has one of the best flirtation scenes I have ever seen in all of film. In that scene, set in a hotel hallway, Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler deliver some great dialogue in the most convincing performances I have seen from either in quite some time. I would be even more impressed were I to learn that they actually could not stand one another, the chemistry was just that good!

Jennifer Aniston and the absolutely ridiculous Bailee Madison are the shining stars of Just Go With It. Madison, who plays Katherine's daughter Maggie (Kiki D in the deceptions), is incredibly good with the cockney accent and, to her credit, she never slips from it at any inappropriate time, putting to shame many actresses who do work with accents! While not much humor is put on her plate to dispense, she gives a decent performance. Similarly, Jennifer Aniston convincingly plays a hard-working assistant who develops through the course of the film to a reasonable epiphany. Her character does not simply feel like a reworking of Rachel or her Love Happens protagonist. Instead, Just Go With It gives her a chance to have fun and create a viable parent character put in a ridiculous situation.

Ultimately, Just Go With It had moments of amusement, but the middle was too chaotic, predictable and just not funny for me to recommend.

For other works with Nick Swardson, please be sure to visit my reviews of:
Jack And Jill
30 Minutes Or Less
Bolt

4/10

For other movies, check out my organized listing on the Movie Review Index Page!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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One Protracted Run Away From Anything We Care About, Weeds Season Six Roams Away From Likability.

The Good: The show develops, Decent character development for Andy and Silas, Good acting
The Bad: Predictable arcs, Light on DVD bonus features, Nancy becomes utterly unlikable, Doug's presence is largely pointless.
The Basics: With Weeds Season Six, Nancy Botwin mortgages any likability and the show fails to land as the Botwin family goes on the run.


It is either some form of twisted optimism or blind faith that keeps me coming back to Weeds. It is certainly not that I like the show and there is even less of a chance that it is because I either like the lead protagonist, Nancy Botwin, or the performance of Mary-Louise Parker. The ship sailed on those two aspects early on and never, respectively. I think there is the good chance that I keep getting Weeds out of the library when it comes in simply because I've gone this far with the show and I want to be able to write authoritatively about how it ends or some such nonsense. Needless to say, if I were not a reviewer, I would have given up on Weeds after the second season. Yet, when Weeds Season Six became available to me from my local library, I got it out and my wife and I did a Weeds marathon.

Cramming the thirteen episodes (averaging about twenty-five minutes per episode) into the course of twenty-four hours allows me to compliment the sixth season of Weeds thusly: it goes fast. In the sixth season, I grew from an antipathy for Nancy Botwin to outright hating her, but the episodes flow exceptionally well from one into another and the season moves quickly toward its resolution, though my wife and I called where it ended (close enough) by the second episode. For those not yet invested in the show, season six puts the Botwin family on the run from Esteban, Nancy's current husband and from the outset, I bet my wife that the season would end with Esteban catching up with Nancy. My wife bet it would be the FBI that caught her in the season finale. Either way, Weeds Season Six is all about the journey, not the destination and it almost ekes its way up to "charming" status, though it doesn't quite get there. In fact, the sixth season of Weeds is only charming for a handful of lines spread out through the thirteen episodes and it bears no real resemblance to the show as it had been, save that the least likable character, Nancy Botwin, continues to ruin the lives of those around her.

Weeds began as a show about a soccer mom dealing marijuana in the suburbs after her husband died and left her to raise two children alone. Desperate, she struggles to pay bills and get ahead of the game, while keeping her kids on the straight and narrow. But at this point, Nancy Botwin is so far from actually having to deal drugs to keep her family alive that her choice to deal at every opportunity seems more and more contrived and, frankly, idiotic. Following the events of the fifth season's finale, though, Nancy feels she must flee with her family or Esteban will kill them all. Rather sensibly, Esteban only hunts for Nancy because she fled; the cause (that's a spoiler alert because the sixth season cannot be discussed plainly without mentioning the important detail of how the fifth season ended) is tolerable for Esteban and his goons, the fleeing is not.

With Shane having murdered Pilar, Esteban's political director and rival of Nancy, to defend the family, Nancy Botwin panics and packs Shane, Stevie and Silas in the car to flee Ren Mar. Collecting Andy from Audra's house, where he has chickened out on saving her from an anti-choice protester, the Botwins flee the scene of the crime. Wandering north, Andy quickly becomes useful in getting the quintet off the grid by getting supplies and cash and an alternate ride. They shed their past identities, take new aliases as the Newman family and the gang lands in Seattle where Randy (Andy), Mike (Silas), and Nahtalie (Nancy) Newman all take up working at the same hotel. As Randy begins to thrive as a chef, Mike explores college life and even Sean finds some happiness trying to fit in with a group of mothers in the park.

But, Nahtalie is restless and sees an opportunity to make fast money, getting involved with a medicinal marijuana grower, acquiring the trimmings and making hash. Doug unwittingly leads Cesar and Esteban's other goons to the Newmans and they have to flee again. Having survived another near-fatal encounter, the Newmans buy a mobile home, end up in the wastes of Montana and when they are forced to flee there, they find their way to Dearborn. In Dearborn, Nancy's home town, the group moves in with a former teacher Nancy once hooked up with and they plan to make a big score to escape once and for all . . . to Copenhagen!

While the sixth season of Weeds might have its moments, it is more often agonizing to watch, both for its graphic nature - the severed penis in the penultimate episode was pretty gross - and for its characters who continue to make ridiculously bad choices (why Silas and Andy do not cut their losses and ditch Nancy and Shane makes no sense!). Whatever sense of pathos the audience might have once had for Nancy, it is gone now. It is so far gone, in fact that when the arguably psychopathic Shane suggests to Nancy that they leave the others to their own fate, it seems reasonable. And Nancy seems even more the monster for not going along with it.

What the sixth season of Weeds does well is develop from the little niggling ideas. Early in the season, the comment is made about how Silas does not look like Nancy or his dead father, Judah. What seems like an offhanded remark plays out with real consequences when the family arrives in Dearborn and it offers Silas a chance to truly grow as a character. And yet . . .

While that kind of character detail works and sees to conclusion any problem one might have had with the initial casting of Hunter Parrish since the beginning of the show, Weeds is not as tightly constructed as we might hope. Celia Hodes is gone, as is her daughter, and yet Doug finds his way back into the narrative. Doug is an utterly pointless character at this point and he serves only two niches: 1. To move the plot reasonably toward Esteban's people tracking the Newman family and 2. To keep Kevin Nealon on television. As one who liked a lot of Nealon's early work, it is disappointing to watch him flail through this season of Weeds. The show does not need his star power to keep going and so when he reappears it feels as unnecessary as it actually is. Moreover, Nealon is not given much in the way of opportunities to shine and play to his comedic strengths, so Doug is more annoying than funny in this season of the show.

Unfortunately, while most great television is about great characters, the sixth season of Weeds is heavily plot-based, as opposed to ripe with character growth moments. In the sixth season, this is what happens to the principle characters:

Nancy Botwin (Nahtalie) – Determined to keep Shane from going to prison for murder, she freaks out and flees Esteban. That move puts her on the road, wearing a bad wig and assuming the name Nahtalie (“French spelling”) and having anonymous sex (which feels more like contractually-obligated nudity for Mary-Louise Parker than anything organic for the show) in the middle of nowhere. Despite fearing that Shane might actually be a psychopath, she lets him play to his strengths, outside the perfect day they share in Montana. Upon returning home to Dearborn, she discovers an unlikely person following her and a resource in a crazy old, former lover,

Silas Botwin (Mike Newman) – Reluctantly running with the family, his life is turned upside down in Seattle where he discovers the joys of college and college women. He becomes determined to stay on the straight and narrow and succeeds, save for his obsession with sticking with his family. But even that changes in Dearborn when he learns a truth others only suspected about him,

Shane Botwin (Sean) – Cold and calculating, Shane shows no remorse for killing to try to save the family. He takes care of the baby Stevie more than anyone else and in Seattle, that leads him to hand out with a bunch of mothers who quickly suspect his child is being maltreated. Shane stops trying to fight his instincts and he goes toe to toe with Esteban’s goons, making him even more of a liability than before! Getting him out of the country becomes more of a priority as the chase accelerates and others suspect Shane, not Nancy, killed Esteban’s aide,

Doug – Wanders back to the Andy’s house and is captured by Cesar and is kept alive only because he believes he can lead the goons to the Botwins. Arguably saved by god, he goes in another direction after Montana and ends up fighting for a family he doesn’t even truly care about,

and Andy Botwin (Randy) – Guilt-stricken by running out on Audra when she is held hostage, he is pushed back into the house by Nancy and the fight that ensues leaves him heartbroken. With nowhere else to go, Andy helps Nancy and her family escape Ren Mar and get off the grid. In Seattle, he finds true happiness fighting an arrogant chef at the hotel for a cooking position (he is hired as a dishwasher) and no sooner does he wow the chef than the family has to run again. As Randy, he becomes a priest in the Montana wilderness to make the RV the family acquires blend and he comes up with the plan to escape the country.

While not much happens in terms of character, the acting in the sixth season of Weeds is largely wonderful. The stand-outs in this season are Hunter Parrish and Justin Kirk. While Alexander Gould does an awesome job playing Shane as a psychopath, he had that nailed in the prior season. Parrish makes Silas tortured and hurt and as the season goes on, the strength he infuses into Silas is gone and he plays vulnerability masterfully. When Silas encounters someone from Nancy’s past, Parrish acts expertly with his eyes. Justin Kirk also balances the comedic and dramatic awesomely and has a real presence when he is playing Andy seriously in the Seattle arc.

But Mary-Louise Parker brings nothing new to the role of Nancy Botwin and at this point, Nancy is utterly unlikable. Those waiting for Parker to learn to act with her mouth closed (since her performances on The West Wing, it seems directors or the actress wants everyone to see her teeth constantly and there’s something ridiculous about the look) will be disappointed as she hasn’t kicked that habit yet.

On DVD, Weeds Season six comes with minimal bonus features. The featurette on how the Botwins change their names is fairly ridiculous considering how they do not truly stick with the changed names and there is another featurette on the evolution of the season. The commentary track is not particularly enlightening, either.

Ultimately, Weeds Season Six is a season of transition, but it is virtually impossible to care about the characters and where they are going.

For prior seasons of Weeds, please check out my reviews of:
Weeds Season 1
Weeds Season 2
Weeds Season 3
Weeds Season 4
Weeds Season 5

4/10

For other television season reviews, please visit my index page on the subject by clicking here!

© 2011 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.



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Gaining Some Traction, Weeds Season Five Has Some Funny Moments, But Still Falls Flat.

The Good: Humor, Guest appearances, Moments of character
The Bad: Primary protagonist is weak, Repetitive sense of plot, Ultimate sense of a lack of purpose, Only thirteen episodes.
The Basics: While the fifth season of Weeds might not be as lackluster as some of the prior seasons, it still is below average television as revealed by the DVD set.


I have taken some heat from others for not enjoying Weeds of late. Oddly, there seem to be more people griping over the fact that I continue to give the show a try and see where it is going - and turn out to not like it - than people who actually have a problem with the fact that I think the show is well past the shark. As a reviewer, I do feel some desire to try things I am unfamiliar with and Weeds is a show I've never seen in the first run, so I've been going through the DVD sets of. I am caught up with what is on the market (season six drops on DVD very soon, though) with my viewing of Weeds Season Five. While it might seem strange for me to keep going, I keep watching the DVD sets of Weeds with a fascination of one watching a train wreck happening.

Only the fifth season is not a train wreck. Instead, in the fifth season of Weeds, the show has moments that are funny, clever and surprisingly interesting. Unfortunately, the show has a case of "too little, too late" and those who have watched the series from the beginning are far less likely to enjoy the fifth season than those picking up the show now. Indeed, if one has to watch any of the show, they might as well go with season one and then leap right to season five, as far as I am concerned. Why? Doing that leaves the viewer feeling much less like they have seen all of the good parts of Weeds Season Five before this viewing. Unfortunately, as one who has watched the prior four seasons of the show, even the moments I enjoyed most about the fifth season seem familiar and repeating the best aspects of the show's prior years. Indeed, in the finale of Season Five, Weeds actually becomes a parody of itself with Celia repeating the first season finale's ending for Nancy in an almost shot by shot recreation.

Even so, Season Five did manage to get some laughs from me, which is more than the prior two seasons evoked. It is impossible to discuss the fifth season without revealing some of the details that only come up late in the Season Four finale, so consider that a spoiler alert for those looking for a fresh viewing of the entire series. The opening to Weeds Season Five was actually humorous enough that I had to share the scene with my wife and it got her laughing, too. But even that feels like something familiar. Weeds has a tendency to put characters in remarkably dire positions and leave the viewers hanging only to return them the next season with such simple reconciliations of the conflicts that one may only feel cheated by them. In this case, Nancy enabling herself to survive turning in Esteban and Guillermo with her revelation at the end of fourth season finale, leads to even less of a sense of consequence than Celia's capture by her long-neglected daughter.

The fifth season of Weeds finds Nancy Botwin saving her life and the lives of her family members by revealing to Esteban that she is pregnant. As soon as Esteban confirms that the child is his and it is male, he moves to insure that the baby will be born healthy. Unfortunately for Nancy, that means that Esteban is becoming increasingly possessive and Andy has the reasonable fear that Esteban will have Nancy killed the moment the baby is born. Esteban's political director soon asserts her influence by creating an adverse condition for Esteban to run for governor in Mexico. While Nancy works through her baby drama, Celia discovers there is not a single person in the world who will pay the ransom her daughter and her daughter's revolutionary boyfriend demand. When they learn she cannot be killed and have her organs harvested, she is released and eventually is sent back to the States.

After a brief stint of resisting the forces attempting to act upon her, Nancy moves in with Esteban after Shane is wounded with a shot meant for her. Six months later, Nancy realizes Esteban is still planning to have her killed and she induces labor with the help of a doctor that Andy has a crush on. With the birth of the baby, Andy is put in the uncomfortable position of acting like the baby's father, which makes it difficult for him to distance himself from his feelings for Nancy. When Esteban agrees to marry her, Nancy sets her sights on eliminating the competition, Esteban's political puppeteer.

The fifth season of Weeds "reads" like a soap opera for much of the season, or like the gangster equivalent of one. The show stays mired in keeping Nancy in a position where her life is constantly threatened and in this season, she is only peripherally involved in anything drug-related. So, at this point, the main premise of the series has been mortgaged to deal with the fallout of Nancy's bad decisions in prior seasons. As a result, those who enjoy Weeds for the drug culture and references are likely to be far less entertained by it than in prior seasons. Ironically, Weeds Season Five does a decent job of illustrating the problematic relationship between drug use/dispensing and violent crime as those around Nancy experience escalations in violence and sadistic behavior. And, it comes as little surprise that Esteban's daughter - who might have only been a pothead at some prior point - is now a heroin addict.

So, while Nancy might be on maternity leave from selling or cultivating marijuana, those around her suffer. Shane is shot, Doug has his penis fractured and Andy has his heart stomped on. Whatever satire Weeds started out with, whatever social commentary that initially tried to sell viewers on the idea that there were no negative side effects to weed use or distribution is now gone. The drug running business - even for something as natural and usually nonthreatening as weed - is a dangerous one and if Nancy goes down now, she is taking more than just Celia with her. The result is a season that has comedy, but the commentary it makes is not nearly as funny.

When Weeds Season Five is not being funny, it is uncomfortable and dangerous. A lot of the discomfort for viewers comes from Andy, who is lovelorn for Nancy and is told to grow up by a doctor he is interested in (played ably by Alanis Morissette). Andy does what viewers must have wanted him to do for years; he tells Nancy off and vows not to keep bailing her out. Unfortunately, he does not stick to that sense of resolution and he is soon traipsing around in an emotionally and physically vulnerable state again. Other serious discomforts come in the form of Shane having to deal with a potential STD from the two girls he had sex with (Shane being a young teenager at this point) and even more discomfort from realizing how very long it would have been since he initially was exposed to their clemydia.

Good television is about characters and Weeds has marginally interesting characters, most of whom do no real growing in this season. The principle characters at this point are:

Nancy Botwin - Pregnant with Esteban's child, she tries to avoid Andy's unrequited love for her and occasionally reasserts herself as a parent to Shane and Silas. Her protective instinct encourages her to move in with Esteban and then to induce labor for her new son, Steven. She tries to make her marriage work by promoting Esteban's ambitions while protecting her life and the lives of her sons,

Andy Botwin - Having wrestled with his feelings for Nancy, he has sex with her sister and does his best to move on. This is complicated by suddenly finding himself sharing a bed with her as they raise Stevie together as Andy, unlikely as it is, becomes the One Who Shows Up. He falls for Audra Kitson,

Shane Botwin - With a surprisingly strong role, he becomes more edgy as his life is increasingly threatened. After he is shot, he happily moves into Esteban’s estate, where he has some issues with alcohol before becoming an unlikely savior,

Silas Botwin – He finds purpose not fleeing Ren Mar, but instead opening a legal medical marijuana store. Unfortunately, he discovers paying the bribe to local law enforcement is stifling his business,

Esteban Reyes – His secrets begin to come out at he runs for governor, reveals his daughter and juggles Nancy and his political attaché,

Doug – He pals around with Silas and tries to make himself useful. As an act of revenge, Dean slams his penis in a desk drawer,

Dean – Returns with the desire to get back into business doing more than just his work as a lawyer, putting him at odds with Dean, but in an unlikely friendship with his ex-wife, Celia,

And Celia Hodes – She evolves into the new Nancy after her abduction. She discovers selling drugs through a beauty company offers her a chance to regain her prior status in society.

Weeds Season Five features no superlative performances, though Elizabeth Perkins’ parody of Mary-Louise Parker’s performances is hilarious near the climax of the season. While Justin Kirk is good as Andy, he does not give viewers anything we haven’t seen before.

On DVD, Weeds Season Five features commentary tracks and featurettes on the evolution of the season. They are all right and seeing some of the performers out of character is enjoyable. But largely, Weeds Season Five is just a recast of Season 1, putting Nancy Botwin in less vital positions, but returning the show to an odd mix of edgy and funny.

For prior seasons of Weeds, please check out my reviews of:
Weeds Season 1
Weeds Season 2
Weeds Season 3
Weeds Season 4

4.5/10

© 2011, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.


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