Film Perfection

it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

As a 50 something advertising copywriter I laughed and squirmed at the ad agency scenes, all so very true sadly.We've all seen 20 something creatives talking crap and getting away with it because the elder bosses are running scared in a digital world.However aside from that the whole thing was a bit of a mish mash with the writer often putting speeches in the characters' mouths when they didn't gel with the character. A strong show runner would have deleted much of the script and tightened up the rest.No one seems to have dared confront the writer on anything.I watched it all, to see how Thom would get on, but it was an uphill struggle against show off scriptwriting, ideas that should have been left on the cutting room floor and characters that were all universally unlikeable.

worst liberal self hating selfish ,me,me,me,me bull crap. everything wrong with America all wrapped up into one show. please let it end. horrible mother in the show. the character of the mom is hopefully just a character and not the actress view of what being a mother is. why is it that liberals hate anything that grounds people? not every one is a creative person that doesn't need the direction you get from god and country. please let people be them selves and stop hating everything that other people do. did i mention this show is is horrible?i am a artist not a writer and i rarely like to comment on bad things but i just saw the last show and i had to say something excuse any typos.

I was impressed that memoirist Shalom Auslander ("Foreskin's Lament"!) had persuaded Showtime to turn his random reflections—on human existence, the mercy of God (or lack thereof), parenting, advertising, sex and Jewishness—into a cable sitcom, but we could only stay with it for six episodes. Steve Coogan and adorable Kathryn Hahn do their best, and there are some funny bits, but I'm guessing a lot of it will seem like you've heard it before, more than once (maybe starting with the first time you got stoned with your freshman year roommate).I'm also guessing this is one of those shows, like "Frankie and Grace" on Netflix, that gets extra points from TV execs because it fills a demographic niche—in this case, forty-somethings who have ambivalent feelings about millennials and are afraid they'll never be cool again Would have been interesting to see what Philip Seymour Hoffman (!עליו השלום), who had originally signed on to play the Coogan part, would have done with it, I admit. On the + side, "Happyish" has a strong supporting cast (Bradley Whitford! Carrie Preston!), some cute animated sequences (not including IMHO the one where Coogan's character—"Thom Payne"!—schtups a Keebler elf), and a convenient time slot (between "Nurse Jackie" and "Veep") for oldsters who still watch scheduled programming on cable, but we still found it fairly tedious, unoriginal and kind of depressing after a while. Btw, Noah Baumbach's "While We're Young" (available on disk from N'flix) explores some of the same boomer-vs.-millennial themes in a much subtler and more entertaining way, IMHO.

Originally planned with the late and great Phil Hoffman in mind, Steven Coogan has taken up the mantle of the impotent and increasingly overqualified, if self- entitled main character. We are immediately thrust into the life of Thom Payne, a British (of course) shill for the advertising industry desperately clinging to relevance in a world that is leaving him behind.After a baffling and somewhat incoherent opening rant against Mount Rushmore we find out that Thom's winter of discontent comes at the hands of his new corporate overlords, half his age, and of course they are portrayed as 20 something, Scandinavian, euro- hipster clones who maliciously forsake everything Thom holds dear in the name of Twitter feeds, YouTube posts and Facebook updates.Jammed between whimsical scenes of Kathryn Hahn having arguments with her overbearing Yiddish mother (personified by a talking ups package) and a weird scene with Coogan having aggressive sex with an animated keebler elf (yes both of those things actually happen), the breath of fresh air, Bradley Whitford, emerges as Coogan's direct supervisor and voice of reason to Coogan's outlandish antics and tantrums.The show works, just not the way the creators intended. Rather than a referendum against the Internet age and millennial hipsterism, the show turned out to be the examination of aging Gen-Xers, desperately clinging to relevancy and resisting a world of their own creation.