In Which The Memory Of Jane Fonda Remains With Us Still

Puns About Age Disgust Me

by DICK CHENEY

Grace and Frankie
creators Marta Kauffman & Howard J. Morris

You know who should play an innocent grandmother who can barely do anything for herself now that her husband left her? Jane Fonda.

Headphones were invented in 2011, by Dr. Dre if I'm not mistaken.

The concept of Jane Fonda being a helpless woman for more than five minutes irritates the very fabric of my being. I once saw Jane Fonda execute two men in cold blood because they touted the virtues of capitalism. Now I have to listen to her make jokes about she's not very good at texting, even though texting is only typing.

It used to be that women were relegated to jobs where the only skill they were permitted to display was their typing acumen. Now we are making jokes about women not even being able to type. This is absurd; every woman can type — they are born knowing how.

Putting June Raphael in a mumu should be illegal.

Comedy about how older people are helpless about technology is the lowest kind of humor. Actually, it is the second lowest, after jokes about how African-Americans appear white if they live in the suburbs. This bargain-bin brand of satire gives me a headache, and if I am being honest, there is no one more responsible than the people doing long lasting harm to the idea of homosexual parenting: the show-runners of Modern Family.

Here Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston are also playing against type, as gay law partners who end their marriages to their wives. The only person not playing against type is Lily Tomlin, who portrays the dumb stereotype of the hippie woman so lazily that you could be forgiven for thinking Grace and Frankie is just a Saturday Night Live sketch someone found in Lorne Michaels' basement.

God forbid we show a penis.

Tomlin has never been much of an actress, but she is especially execrable on Grace and Frankie. She burns incense and takes peyote in what would seem like a bad parody of Meet the Parents if you didn't know show creators Marta Kauffman and Howard J. Morris were utterly serious about this offensive tripe. Showtime has presented their own version of a comedy based around the idea that older people are out of touch in the tragically bad Happyish, which depicts Steve Coogan as unable to fathom twitter, as if it's a concept so wild to send a grown man running in circles.

Brooklyn Decker plans to take acting lessons next year, but it will be too late for this shitshow.

It's almost worse in Grace and Frankie. The older men — Waterston's face looks like a crumpled up candy bar wrapper - can easily navigate the new waters of technology. After all, the men managed the family finances for decades. One episode of Grace and Frankie concerns Waterston and Sheen cutting off their wives' credit cards in other to discourage them from making large purchases. Waterston implies that at one point Lily Tomlin purchased a boat without his permission, which seems like it would end any marriage. But you know women!

Whoever is dressing Jane Fonda on this show has my respect and admiration.

Don't worry that Grace and Frankie is just about white people and how darn silly they can be at times, especially when they are coming out of the closet. After all, around thirty five years ago, Frankie adopted a black child, who she named Nwabudike Bergstein. It is impossible to know exactly who this is most offensive to: Jews, African-Americans or comedy.

Why couldn't they just make this show about a beautiful romance between June Raphael and Ben Kingsley?

Nwabudike is the more responsible of Waterston and Tomlin's children. Their other son Coyote Bergstein (an absolutely wretched Ethan Embry) is a recovering drug addict whose driver's license has been suspended by the state of California. None of the children are very likeable, perhaps because if they were it would take attention away from the real stars here.

I want to go to there.

Fonda and Sheen have good chemistry together as a married couple, and they are the best performers on the show. Unfortunately they barely ever occupy the same space, being divorced as they are.

I just want to enjoy watching two guys with ample grey hair kissing each other, but this doesn't happen often on Grace and Frankie, because deep inside your heart you know Sam Waterson and Martin Sheen are straight. And you know Jane Fonda is strong, feminine alpha woman. And you know Lily Tomlin belongs in a community theater.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"First" - Cold War Kids (mp3)

"Hot Coals" - Cold War Kids (mp3)

In Which Our Loving Romance Gets Arrested

White Flight

by DICK CHENEY

This Is Where I Leave You
dir. Shawn Levy
103 minutes

"Love causes cancer like everything else," Wendy Altman (Tina Fey) explains during a very weird scene in Shawn Levy's This Is Where I Leave You. "But it still has its moments." Her brother Judd (Jason Bateman) gives her a squeeze as they sit on the roof of their house, the place where every white suburbanite worth his salt goes to think. Things are unexpectedly romantic between this brother and sister, but it is never consummated for obvious reasons - despite being married to a workaholic named Barry, the only man that Tina can attract in this movie is a mentally disabled neighbor.

You know, people gave Reese Witherspoon a lot of shit for pretending to save those Sudanese refugees, but at least there was a person of color peripherally involved in the story, while sexism and ageism never really came into play. This Is Where I Leave You is about as socially progressive as Birth of a Nation.

What is so rewarding about being a white man is that when your wife cheats on you with Dax Shepard, you meet another woman the next week. You get fired from your job, but who cares? You're Caucasian, you'll find another one.

that's a weirdly intimate greeting for brother and sister, but I can't look away

Jason Bateman's constant portrayal of Michael Bluth in every one of his roles at first seemed like a moving tribute to the memory of Mitchell Hurwitz. Now his stuttering and constant clipped one-liners has tread on my last nerve. I can't even look at George Michael anymore, and when I think about him in my mind, he is played by Jesse Eisenberg.

If not for Jane Fonda, This Is Where I Leave You would have been an unmitigated disaster. At one point she makes up her son's bed in a revealing robe. It's not exactly the attire you expect to see when someone's husband dies, but it did the trick:

Get me that plastic surgeon's number, I want him to do the big toe on my left foot.

Judd's brothers are played by Corey Stoll and Adam Driver. The former plays a cranky man who runs a sporting goods store; the latter is constantly dropping bon mots like, "Guys, look how wacky I am? See?" "Even I think this is crazy, and I'm CRAZY!" The wackiest thing Driver does in This Is Where I Leave You is pursue a relationship with his therapist (Connie Britton). Oh, he also drives above the speed limit. What a quirky gentleman.

He cheats on her the day after his father's funeral. She says, "I'm an enabler!" and takes off in her Mercedes.

You have to feel for Connie because she looks fantastic, kind of like what I hope Amy Schumer evolves into at some point, and yet the entire cast treats her like some ancient crone who came to suck Adam Driver's life force/Star Wars royalties from his desiccated corpse.

The age difference between Britton and Adam Driver is really not that much larger than the age difference between Bateman and his love interest, Penny (Rose Byrne), but the two situations are treated in an entirely opposite way, for reasons. God this was fucking lame:

"Does our song have to be Cyndi Lauper?" Bateman whines. Like, fuck off dude, Cyndi Lauper accomplished more in one year than you did in your entire life. God, I hate it when people put down Cyndi.

I guess on some level I expected racism and sexism to disappear completely once everyone got on tumblr and these problems were exposed for what they were. I mean, I assumed we all shared common values: for example, that lying is bad, cheating is worse, cheating with Dax Shepard worse yet, and Chelsea Handler is a delightful young woman.

In This Is Where I Leave You, it is like we have time travelled back to the 1950s. None of the children feel comfortable talking about wintercourse at all, despite the fact that their mother is the author of a sex manual for teens. This Is Where I Leave You is either dated or remarkably current depending on how disorienting you find it when Jane Fonda moves onto her next relationship while still sitting shiva for her dead husband.

in the right light, she looks like a savory pot roast

"None of us are happy," Bateman moans at one point during this terrible movie, in a house that looks like it cost in the $750,000 range. Tina Fey explains the reason that Bateman is so unhappy - his life is too predictable - and then spends the following day ignoring her husband and child and sleeping with the mentally disabled Horry (Timothy Olyphant) who calls her 'Sunflower.'

I'm either offended or jealous of the headband. No, I'm offended.

Clearly, Tina has not been reading any of the scripts she has selected beforehand. To be fair, IRL she is married to a man who resembles Samwise Gamgee, so she probably had a lot more important dilemmas on her mind, like "Did that hobbit eat all the cheerios again?" or "When is Gandalf getting here?" On the plus side, it is finally revealed where Tina got her facial scar: car accident.

Their house looks like a plantation.

In hindsight, the critical success of Arrested Development was the worst thing to happen to the entire cast. For one, Hurwitz made them all seem a lot more clever than they were. (Burn the negative of that final season on Netflix.)

Secondly, Arrested Development made people everywhere believe that the world was still interested in the problems of rich white Americans. If I could tell the people who made this piece of trash one thing, it is that I am only interested in media where white people are saving blacks, hispanics and Asians from natural disasters, terrorist attacks and the constant, everpresent allure of incest.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"Transfer" - Junes (mp3)