In Which We Move Our Base Of Operations

Credit Where It Is Due

by ELEANOR MORROW

Ozark
creators Bill Dubuque & Mark Williams
Netflix

Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) has perfected the art of the diet, and here is his secret. He never eats, not once in Ozark, but there is a good reason for this. He never sleeps either, which is maybe the easiest weapon Americans have against obesity. He can't feasibly do either of these things, because he is very afraid of his employer, a Mexican drug dealer named Del (Esai Morales).

His wife Wendy (Laura Linney) becomes aware of this situation relatively early on in Ozark. Quite naively, she attempts to empty their joint checking account and bail on her husband with about $30,000. (She also counts on the financial support of a lover who is later out of the picture.) Linney and Bateman have very little in the way of sexual chemistry, but that is no problem, because once Marty finds out about his wife's move against him, he dissolves their marriage in favor of a financial partnership intended to raise their two children, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skyler Gaertner).

Everything in Ozark is generally gloamed in a somewhat annoying blue light, but not even less than stellar cinematography can take away the charm of this Missouri region. The Byrdes are forced to relocate out of Chicago because of a long monologue in which Marty saves himself from a bullet in the head, and they could not have selected a more lovely place. Wendy is designated with the task of finding the nuclear family an inexpensive home to house their belongings, and she chooses a gorgeous mansion directly on the water.

It is there that Marty spends a lot of time observing his children. He no longer has a day-to-day straight job that keeps him away from his kids. On an impulse, Wendy informs the teenagers that their father launders money for a living, and they generally take this news in good humor. During an extensive voiceover where Marty explains how tarnished cash can be magically transformed into useful assets, he makes it seem like the violent and evil business of which he is such a massive part is no more than the actions of a typical accountant.

In fact, Ozark does a great deal to convince its audience that this family is has only been placed in an untenable situation. Early on, an FBI agent named Trevor (McKinley Belcher III) oftens Marty immunity against prosecution from the government. This is a pretty heady possibility, since Marty seems to know very little of his boss' operation and basically only has $8 million in three suitcases that indicates he is on the other side of the law.

Watching him work that $8m is the primary fun of Ozark. He quickly employs a mendacious local woman, Ruth Langmore (the astonishingly talented Julia Garner), to rob a local strip club for him, and watching him interact with people who lack the income and power to resist the charms of his financial acumen is terribly enjoyable. Bateman has always been a disciplined and engaging actor, and this role, where all his comedy is bound up in verboseness without turning that way of speaking into something silly, suits him completely.

Linney has a somewhat broader challenge here, because she is the most unsympathetic member of the family with the least realistic character. Unsurprisingly, she turns Wendy into a much more multifaceted person than is ever evident in Bill Dubuque's fast-paced, thrilling scripts for Ozark. Watching her work as a local realtor is perhaps too familiar of storyline, but on the plus side, it allows us to see the local poverty from a unique vantage.

Netflix has been missing on so many of its original offerings lately, that it is exciting to see something of Ozark's quality emerge onto the scene. Sadly, enduring repeated seasons of this milieu would probably be more trial than godsend. There is a fun, brisk comedy to this fish-out-of-water story that keeps us engaged in the action. The second the heat falls down and lingers on any of the stiffer characters, we feel considerably more bored. There is not really too much depth to this Breaking Bad-clone, but that is all right.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording.

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)

In Which We Gather Our Angels and Diablos

Things Have Changed

by DICK CHENEY

Arrested Development
creator Mitchell Hurwitz

A lot of the time I secretly believe my wife Lynne does not actually know if something is funny, and that she only laughs because she presumes it humors others or reminds her of something genuinely funny. Last night in a moody fit of rage reminiscent of how I first binged on Oreos and pork rinds at the age of seven, I viewed the entire Netflix-exclusive season of Mitchell Hurwitz's Arrested Development. The first thing my wife said was, "Isn't Ron Howard embarrassed to go on television looking like that?" and the second thing she said was, "You actually find this type of humor appealing?"

you know what this show needed? More of a ginger who can't act

I responded only with a flip remark, as has always been my metier, telling her, "You're ruining this for me." Some people only want to relive experiences they had in the past; others are comfortable in an uncertain future. For obvious reasons none of the members of the Bluth family were able to shoot any scenes together. (Except for Will Arnett because he's being blackballed by the rest of the industry for cheating on Amy Poehler.)

The clear decision should have been: we cannot have a show if people only interact with their friends and family on the phone, right? Let's forget a new season and focus on distributing our old episodes in Korea, where the kid who played Annyong Bluth can become the superstar he was destined to be.

they should have gotten the telephone industry to fund this

When I really think of what the jokes in Arrested Development are about, I start to sympathize with Lynne. After all, she does not complain when I jerk off and rewatch Millennium, all the while dropping pertinent facts like, "Did you know Lance Hendrikson is illiterate?" or "Jesus Chris Carter was a fucking hack POS."

Jeffrey Tambor hasn't had material this bad since...I forgot what I was going to say
Here is an early list of what all the jokes in Arrested Development are about:

Lucille drinks too much.

Michael's relationship with his son is too suffocating.

Will Arnett is wearing the same v-neck in every episode.

Tobias doesn't know he makes puns.

Everything Michael Cera says is funny, don't try to make sense of it or note that the delivery is identical in every instance.

fortunately they shoot most of her scenes in low light or half nude

Powerful people are hypocrites.

Lindsey is an idiot.

Buster doesn't realize how powerful the hand that Army gave him is.

Ben Stiller actually married that woman and demanded she be employed before he agreed to the project.

Liza Minnelli is disgusting. (She's not.)

Isla Fisher is disgusting. (...)

the wig is not not working for you Portia

Also, for some reason the George Sr. episode only featured one of these tropes and was otherwise completely serious except for identical twin gags, known historically as the lowest comedy there is.

people complain there are no minorities on our show, so let's make them Republicans!!! that'll teach them to stop whining about white privilege

Time has changed the other Bluth family members only for the worse. Buster's compulsive behavior has reached a frightening nadir before an African-American woman slanders his lovemaking after he murders thousands; Michael is tired, sad and a dick to the most important person in his life; George Michael is a boorish, cowardly and sexual capable liar; Lindsey becomes a prostitute and cuts her fantastic hair into a mere clump; Tobias starts dating a crack addict and is designated a sex offender; same goes for Maeby; Lucille 1 goes to jail and Gob continues to pretend to be gay for some unclear reason.

love ur style maeby

Every time someone repeats that familiar and odious cliche to me, announcing as if it had never been pronounced before, "Ah think people don't change," my loins ache and my stomach grows queasy. If that's true, then how is Anthony Weiner not sexting some coed while his wife goes on and on about the NSA leaks, waiting in vain for her husband to make a semi-decent oral joke about a whistleblower? But that isn't happening, instead Mr. Weiner is running for mayor. People do change, you just only acknowledge that shift when it suits you.

The longer you spend among those who only agree with you, the bigger the bubble becomes. After seeing the President once pull Susan Rice's pants down during an innocent game of Twister, do you honestly think anyone has the balls to contradict him during a meeting? Then again, if I had access to audio recordings of Peggy Noonan around her home, you can bet I'd listen to them with this expression on my face the entire time.

So yes, it is disappointing to find the Bluths roughly where we left them. Part of the gag is that they never learn, I suppose, but that just reinforces the idea that the show is more about wacky concepts than real people, and that I was not supposed to be turned on when the boy did that to his cousin.

More than the others, it is Maeby who I found myself most disappointed in. She wasn't like them, not only because she was not genetically related to the family itself, but because she was successful in all the aspects of life the adults were not. Instead of making anything positive come from this story, she is now just fodder for jokes about women being bad at math.

tony wonder is suddenly the only thing that matters. who's that woman?

There's a really weird scene in this version of Arrested Development where magician Tony Wonder (Ben Stiller) and his real life wife, Christine Taylor are sitting on a bed together. The two discuss tricking Gob, but it is more how easy it is for the two to be together that caught my attention. For a few days I could not get this image out of my head. Even though it was not part of the scene, it is so rare to see not only actors in the same room on Arrested Development but two people genuinely comfortable in another's presence, that I started to realize what I was missing. Two seconds later Ron Howard started loudly talking again, telling a joke only he found funny.

because what everyone wanted from this new season was...Dietrich Bader

After about the fifth or so episode, a particular loathing begins to intrude on the proceedings. It's roughly the same feeling one gets after eating a bowl of ice cream. The bowl was so good you immediately want more. You start to eat the new episodes of what you have been told is the same flavor of ice cream, but the ice became warm and sour merely through the passage of time. I don't know why anybody would put yogurt in their body.

on some level was this just an excuse to give Carl Weathers some extra spending money?

For some reason Hollywood satire is the main thread through all of this. There was this William Goldman essay where he estimated that like 3/4ths of the plays on Broadway at that time were musicals about people putting on musicals. What makes Arrested Development even worse at this overwrought genre is that the only person actually purporting to be in this industry is Ron Howard, and he is not looking great these days, although to be fair it was not as bad when he sat next to Brian Grazer.

hey, it's set design that doesn't look like it took five minutes
There was a moment for this kind of self-indulgent bullshit; but just as the original run of the show took place before its chaotic style became commonplace, this iteration just reminds us of how dated the essential subject matter is. Lampooning rich people is all in good fun until it turns out we're all worse off for the comparison. Arrested Development remains the whitest show on television, and Franklin seems a lot more racist in retrospect. Even the fiery Spanish couple looks like they were cast in Santa Monica.

that's not a "joke", George Michael, that's a moustache
After I finished these little 30 minute abominations, I had this vision of an old, decrepit Veronica Mars, where the guy who played her dad, his face has rotted, and Kristen Bell's post-baby body is a mere 7/10. I don't want to live in that world. I hope that world is buried somewhere under Joss Whedon's ego.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location where Isla Fisher can never find him.

"Echo or Encore" - Eleanor Friedberger (mp3)

"You'll Never Know Me" - Eleanor Friedberger (mp3)

The new album from Eleanor Friedberg is entitled Personal Record, and it was released on June 4th from Merge Records.