When Erik Lilleby provides his "Community" recaps, you know that it will always be a Good Friday.
Pillows and Blankets. Pillows and Blankets. Never has war been so comfy. Or funny. People reading tweets, Facebook statuses, text messages and e-mails like letters of correspondence from a by gone era. The documentary style is brought back, hurrah! PBS rip-off and some guy's name I can't remember cause it sounds like someone else who is more famous . . .Ken Burns! Thanks, Google. I guess Ed Burns was the other guy I was thinking of.
Anyway, a farce of a Civil War documentary plays right into Community’s wheelhouse. The biggest laughs were because of the war documentary theme, as aforementioned in my letter reading comment; each character giving a voiceover for their letter as they are writing them. It's classic everything! Like war time speeches a la The King's Speech and war maps and stuff. Kind of shows you how a war will be documented electronically, in texts and phone videos; and future people will actually make documentaries using cell phone footage. With the voice-overs, the writers covered their tails at the end by, again, adding a bit of exposition. Last week it was the locker comment; here it was Jeff telling the camera crew he'd do the voice-over for them. The writers read my mind again, because I was wondering about that exact same thing. Like, "How did all the characters do these voice-overs if Abed isn't running the documentary?" But I guess there are other film students who do things on their own. . . anyway, again.
The few “best” moments are hard to gauge, just hearing serious recitations of texts really got to me, like hardcore, bro. Overall though, the juxtaposition of the seriousness of the war for some people against people like Jeff, simply nudging a fighting person away with his phone, was great—constant laugh factory. I guess the people who took it seriously made it better. If I were to pick favorite moments, Pierce's pillow-man, Officer Chang's army of pre-teens, Annie, and of course Abed and Troy (Abed's email about Troy's weaknesses and Troy's text MADE IT REAL, MAN. . .tears) all had to be at the top. And the friendship hats thing was just enough to tie the episode into a nice bundle.
And of course:
"Were you in The Cape?"
"Err. . . No."
Scene.
No comments:
Post a Comment