The Purple Rose of Cairo

A great deal of the reason that I love Woody Allen is that the man loves to feel down. Hell, how many other directors can so routinely refuse to give the audience what they want and keep his endings original almost every time? Imagine my surprise, then, when I popped The Purple Rose of Cairo and discovered a magical (and extremely underrated) gem. For a man who never seems to smile, Allen knows how good he has it, and what starts as his usual, depressing fare transforms into one of the all-time great love letters to cinema.

Appropriately for Allen, the film is set in the Great Depression. Cecilia (Mia Farrow) desperately clings to a job as a waitress and spends more time trying not to lose the gig than serve people. Her boss knows that in these times, he can fire anyone and have a replacement immediately, and he terrorizes his employees into complete servitude. Her home life is even worse: her abusive husband (Danny Aiello) lost his job and seems content to let Cecilia provide for him while he whiles away the time gambling, drinking and cavorting with friends. Often she speaks of leaving him, but even if she gets out of the house she never gets more than a few steps out the door before she returns.

So, like all those who hate their lot in life, Cecilia tries to escape it. She spends all her free time at the local cinema, where the same film plays for weeks. She enters a broken-down mess, but for an hour and a half she's on cloud nine. One film, The Purple Rose of Cairo, plays for weeks on end, and Cecilia watches it frequently. She sees it so many times that, during a scene in the film, dashing supporting character Tom Baxter suddenly looks towards the audience and speaks directly to her. Then, he steps out of the screen as if was always possible, and suddenly you know you're watching something special.

Tom (Jeff Daniels) tells Cecilia that he and the other characters must act out the same dull routines endlessly, but through constantly seeing her he fell in love, giving him the courage to break out of his celluloid prison. Tom acts just a like a movie character would: he's chivalric, intelligent, loving, and utterly clueless when it comes to the real world. A great deal of the film's comedy comes from this naïveté: Tom takes Cecilia to a high end restaurant, only to realize his stage money isn't real. So he and Cecilia make a run for it, only for him to leap in a car and be utterly bewildered when it doesn't start. "You need a key," Cecilia timidly whispers. "They always just go in the movies," Tom replies exasperated.

Meanwhile, the other characters on the screen must sit around and wait for Tom to return. Audiences heckle them for not getting on with the show, but Tom, supporting character that he may be, is instrumental to the plot. The patrons initially demand refunds, but some people filter in just to watch the spectacle of characters playing cards. Word gets back to Hollywood, and Gil Shepherd, the actor who portrayed Tom, travels to Jersey to ensure that his rogue character does not ruin his budding career.

Gil initially presents himself as your typical egomaniacal actor: he blames himself for his character escaping because he "played him so real." Then he too meets Cecilia and falls for her innocence and her love of film. It probably doesn't hurt that she's a big fan and thinks he could be the next big thing. So now she's involved in a love triangle (technically a quadrilateral, but the husband really only factors in when he tries to prevent her from leaving) with a man and his doppelganger. Jeff Daniels has to walk a fine line here, but he does a magnificent job of explore the comedic exaggerations of both his characters without letting them slip into two-dimensionality. In fact, the only downside of his performances is that they can overshadow Mia Farrow's work, which is stellar: she doesn't seem like the person who could pull off being a cinephile archetype, but watching her sit down in a theater crying about the way of the world, only to slowly break out into an ecstatic smile when the power of film hits her is a sight to behold.

Despite the whimsy and purity of the film, Allen does let his typical gloom slip in near the end, it only reminds us that the real romance of this rom-com is our relationship with movies. The majority of films about film take us behind the scenes, onto tumultuous sets and inside shady business dealings. But The Purple Rose of Cairo sits in the audience with us and reflects what true film lovers feel when the lights go down and the screen flickers to life. I have never seen a film that so proves the maxim that to see the greatest film, one need only stand at the front of the theater and look back at everyone's upturned faces.

The Wire — Season 3

[WARNING- Contains spoilers for previous seasons.]

Oh, The Wire, how I've missed thee. When I last left the streets of Baltimore, everything was, as usual, in disarray. Frank Sobotka's dealings with the Greek drug smugglers in order to keep the stevedores afloat back-fired in their inevitable way: the cops cracked down on the corrupt union, the real villains escape from U.S. jurisdiction, politicians sealed the fate of the dock workers forever, and poor Frank himself turned up face-down in the bay. I didn't know where they could go with all the new characters now scattered to the wind, but I couldn't wait to find out Unfortunately, school work got in the way, and I can't watch this show unless I'm solely focused on it. Well, the semester is ending, so I returned to my beloved crime drama to see where the Barksdales, the cops, and the stevedores would go from here.

As it turns out, I only needed to worry about the dealers and the cops. The stevedores, ripped apart by the death of their leader, the crackdown on their union and the certainty of job loss that came with the permanent closing of the grain pier, do not return this season, giving the last one a stand-alone quality that now makes me question my feelings for it. After all, the scope and connection of the show is what drew me to it in the first place. Nevertheless, if you think the abandonment of the characters of the second season signals a step backwards, boy are you mistaken.

For his part in solving the various cases related to the dock corruption, McNulty escaped his personal hell of the marine unit and found a slot on Daniels' newly-formed Major Case Unit. Partnered back with Kima Greggs, Prez and Lestor Freamon, he renews his attempts to dismantle the Barksdale organization with vigor.

However, his efforts might be wasted. With leader Avon in prison and Stringer Bell looking to escape the drug trade in favor of legitimate business, the Barksdales are starting to suffer. Still reeling from the closure of the 221 tower that served as their main hub, the dealers attempt to locate new territory to push their wares without violating Stringer's sterns views against using violence. We've seen him apply his business school acumen to the drug trade before, but now he seems to have slipped into a delusion that treating drugs like a real business will somehow provide him bridge to legitimacy.

But nonviolence and drugs simply don't mix, and soon Stringer and the dealers must cope with an upstart organization run by a violent and ambitious man named Marlo Stanfield. When the Barksdale clan moves into his territory and tries to stake a claim, he wastes no time asserting his authority, thrashing Bodie and his crew and igniting a war that Stringer desperately struggles to contain. Things only get worse when Avon gets paroled and immediately demands retribution. Stringer's protests fall on deaf ears: Avon tells his friend that he's "just a gangster" and doesn't understand going legit. But that's not the end of Stringer's woes: the truth about D'Angelo's "suicide" begins to get out, and now Bell must do all he can to keep Avon and Dee's mother from learning that he ordered the hit.

As the war between the Stansfields and the Barksdales escalates, Major Howard "Bunny" Colvin, now nearing retirement, receives an ultimatum from the higher-ups to reduce the murder rate in Baltimore to impossibly low levels to aid the mayor's re-election campaign, and he comes up with a shocking idea: round up all the dealers and the junkies, place them in an abandoned part of town, and essentially let them deal and use, provided they stay off the streets elsewhere. He enlists a handful of officers and detectives -- among them Herc and Carver, beefing up their roles significantly -- to not so much maintain order as ensure the occupants keep their wares within the "city" limits.

For a time, Hamsterdam indeed cleans up the streets of Baltimore; at a town council meeting, one woman remarks that things have calmed down so much she had a nice chat with a police officer like people used to do back in the good ol' days. Apart from a handful of police, no one knows about Colvin's little experiment, but the commissioners and the politicians can't help but be suspicious when he starts reporting massive drops in violence rates. Soon, the area dubbed "Hamsterdam" becomes a hell on Earth and, as David Simon tells it, a metaphor for the war in Iraq. The cleanliness of the Western District's streets is juxtaposed with the terrifying anarchy of Hamsterdam. With gun crime initially low and both organizations turning major profits, Colvin gets lax and believes his plan might work. Then the makeshift city begins to eat itself, transforming into a flaming pit that looks like a constant riot zone. It sets up the inevitability of failure, but the fallout is much bigger than anything Colvin could have predicted.

If the second season gave us a taste of city politics, this new set of episodes throws us neck-deep into the slimy machinations of those who can spew outrage on a dime when it comes to the drug problem but secretly admit that drug money lines the city's pockets and the issue itself gives them something to rail against. We chiefly follow rising star Tommy Carcetti, an ambitious councilman seeking to supplant mayor Clarence Royce. Carcetti does little to endear himself to the audience: he's a manipulative, smarmy S.O.B., somehow connected in all the right places and willing to pull as many strings as he can at once. Thankfully, the writers don't paint him or the rest of the local politicians entirely as heartless, two-dimensional villains, and Carcetti seems genuinely troubled when he must face the truths of the drug war, even if he immediately compartmentalizes that shock and turns it into campaign fodder.

The second season of The Wire, though perhaps not as astounding in retrospect, turned the show from an outstanding if familiar crime drama (the first season bore more than a passing resemblance to Simon's old program Homicide: Life on the Streets) to something completely unique. But this third season assures its greatness by depicting the horrific truth of the War on Drugs, even if it stretches reality to do so. Even without the stevedores, the scope expands past anything I've seen before and so much ground is covered in these 12 episodes that a review 5 times as large as this could not hope to cover everything worth mentioning. I still have to watch where the final two seasons take me, but at this point I almost feel no qualms at all calling The Wire just about the best program I've ever seen.

Crank: High Voltage

Too good (read: absolutely terrible) for your f**king stars

Look, I like cerebral dramas and highbrow satire as much as the next hipster, but sometimes I want to see stuff get blown up. No, scratch that, I want to see it get blowed up. There’s no time for grammar when guns are involved. And nobody provides more bangs for my buck than Jason Statham. At no point in any Statham film will I learn a thing about myself or any issue affecting society. Never will I be preached at or condescending to. No, I know when I hand over my nine bucks that bodies will hit the floor very soon.

In the case of Crank: High Voltage, that happens sooner than normal. Actually, it opens with a body hitting the ground, and it’s Statham’s no less. He reprises the role of Chev Chelios, strangely named über-killer who tore a hole through L.A. gangs in the first installment and left just enough alive to justify a sequel. This film starts at the very end of the last one, with Chelios falling from a helicopter and dying on impact. Well, maybe not. Why did he not die? Because he’s Chev Chelios, and if you can’t accept that spend your money elsewhere. He wakes up to discover that Chinese surgeons cut out his heart and replaced it with a plastic one, and he escapes before they can harvest more organs and begins hunting down the gang members who took his ticker.

My word, did I just spend a whole paragraph talking about the plot? I must be going out of my mind. Crank 2 has no real plot and subsists on a diet of pure carnage. Chelios must do what he can to keep his fake heart charged, so every few minutes he zaps himself with a taser, sticks his finger in a socket, even rubs against people for friction. As he searches for his heart, he cuts a swath through the city that makes the last film look like an ABC Family production: if it has a pulse, Chelios will beat it, kill it, or screw it (in one bizarre scene near the beginning, one could argue, he does all three).

Tailing him at various points are old girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart), now a stripper; Ria (Bai Ling), a prostitute Chev saves at the start; and Venus (Efren Ramirez), twin brother of Chelios’ murdered friend Kaylo and sufferer of something called Full Body Tourette’s. He also corresponds with Doc Miles (Dwight Yoakum), who lacks serious medical knowledge but is by default the smartest character in the film when he asks Chelios “How are you even alive? Wait, never mind.” This band works their way through both Chinese triads and Mexican gangs eager for Chelios’ blood, leaving tattooed bodies and a media sensation in their wake.

As I watched Statham bomb around L.A. via Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s frenetic camera trickery, I couldn’t help but think of the movie as the American version of Run Lola Run, which is funny because I always thought that movie was a European commentary on the frantic and repetitious nature of American action franchises. It gives Crank 2 a sense of self-awareness that makes the film a piece of pure cinema, albeit one culled from the absolutely trashiest of trash. I almost wish I’d never seen the first, because I think all the flashbacks and callbacks would have been even funnier if I hadn’t.

My reaction to this film is nothing if not strange. I am repulsed by every second of it, from its shockingly racist caricatures (characters who speak perfectly understandable English are subtitled because they have accents) to its flagrant misogyny, and I've not even scratched the surface of what makes this without question the most offensive movie I've ever seen. But I couldn't tear my face away from the screen. This movie is all the questionable satiric elements of films such as Natural Born Killers, Fight Club -- their proximity to the things they're supposed to be sending up, alleged misogyny and fascism -- piled into one horrific mound of bleeding flesh. In that sense, I find this movie a fascinating social experiment into the current perception of the collegiate male demographic. No other film has been more a reflection of the audience who enjoys it, which makes my own sick interest in it all the more unsettling.

Yet by reveling in its un-P.C. nature, and employing its shocks because the writers simply thought they were funny and not just “edgy” (even when they absolutely, unequivocally are not), Crank 2 perversely works/doesn't work as a sub-comedic piece of nihilism where Observe and Report fell on its face. It’s a steroid injection into the buttocks of the tedious doldrums of spring cinema, a defiant middle finger to those who think a film should mean something or at least not be unabashedly terrible. Many action franchises get their own (usually shoddy) video games, so kids can feel like they’re a part of the action. I hope nobody makes a video game out of Crank: it would be redundant.

So what do I rate this? Are you kidding? This film eats stars. It deserves less than zero, yet I have a distubring fascination with it, like the infected soldier chained up in the yard in 28 Days Later. All you need to know is that this is a truer piece of B-movie revival since Grindhouse, meaning that it tries to be intentionally bad and succeeds where Grindhouse proved exhilarating and fun. Why the hell can't I turn away and run from this?

State of Play

State of Play comes with a plot so tailor-made for adoration from journalists that cynics everywhere will dismiss it as a cheap ploy to drum up praise. It’s a shame, because by all accounts it’s a solid thriller and a more-than-worthy entry into the tried and true newspaper genre. You know the one: intrepid reporters pursue the story no matter the personal danger, uncovering layers of corruption until justice is served.

Cal McAffrey sort of fits that bill. Played by a scruffy, pudgy Russell Crowe, he hardly fits the profile of the fresh-faced, idealistic journalist. No, he’s been around the block, and just about everyone with a lick of importance in D.C. is on a first-name basis. Those friendships give him an edge when an unknown assailant kills a drug addict and a witness, setting off the events of the film.

Soon after those killings, a senator’s aide falls (or is pushed…) off a subway platform in front of an oncoming train. The senator in question, Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), receives the news and breaks down in the middle of a subcommittee hearing and admits he was having an affair with the young woman. Collins was Cal’s college roommate, and his wife Anne (Robin Wright Penn) had a fling with the reporter. It’s a testament to the film’s structure and writing that everyone in the room didn’t tune out there and then.

As Cal investigates whether the staffer killed herself or was murdered, he attempts to protect his old friend as much as possible. Soon he plunges deep into what he believes is a corporate conspiracy perpetuated by PointCorp, an obvious Blackwater stand-in that’s the subject of Collins’ hearings. Aiding the gruff reporter is Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), the paper’s lead blogger. This of course immediately casts the film as an old guard/new wave examination more than a mere thriller, but thankfully the writers keep things varied: Frye is certainly naïve but she knows how to get facts quickly, while McAffrey teaches her not to blow a big story by rushing individual threads of clues to the internet to claim firsties.

But Cal lets the relationships that give him an edge get in the way, and soon he’s playing cop instead of reporter. He and Frye tie threads together, but soon the roles of muckraker and ethical reporter switch: Cal begins to break the law to get the truth (or at least the truth he wants), while Della protests in vain. And hovering over them always is their editor, Cameron Lynne, played with conviction by Helen Mirren. The only real road bump is the ending, which plays out in the predictable fashion of giving us a twist, then throwing in an even bigger one just because.

Thrillers tend to unfold by rote at this point, but State of Play threw me more than once. Some scenes reminded me strongly of the shadowy terror of All the President’s Men, the film about Woodward and Bernstein’s uncovering of the Watergate scandal: a late-game scene in which Cal runs through a parking garage attempting to hide from the killer behind the initial murders is genuinely pulse-pounding. And many of the reveals drew gasps and “oh’s” from the audience, which is always a good sign.

For a film that many people are calling potentially the last newspaper movie ever – it won’t be I can assure you – it mostly avoids proselytizing about the superiority of paper over blog. Well, there’s some cheap dismissal at the start, and a groanworthy moment at the end where Della tells Cal that their story is too important to be just thrown on the internet, but otherwise the film suggest a healthy co-habitation. I only wish they’d really stuck with that point at the end instead of suddenly making it all about the thriller.

Observe and Report

Jody Hill might have a long career as the anti-Apatow if he can just cut down on the insufferable drag in his movies. Indeed, as much as Apatow and his crew's films have that tell-tale lag in the middle, they have nothing on the moments of excruciating downtime in Hill's fun but overrated debut The Foot Fist Way. Observe and Report, one of the most deceptively marketed films in recent memory, makes FFW look downright taut in comparison.

As with The Foot Fist Way, Observe and Report follows a pudgy, sad outsider as he slowly gives into his disturbing psychosis. Also like the protagonist of his debut, Seth Rogen's Ronnie slaves away at a laughable job he badly performs. But that job is all he has and he treats it with absolute sincerity. Head of security at a local mall, Ronnie stalks the corridors and the stores, fancying himself a real officer of the law as he curses all those who irk him while remaining oblivious to the jeers of everyone. His ragtag band of guards aren't much saner than their leader, and some of them look forward to the day they can carry real firearms in the mall.

As Ronnie walks around, medicated on mood levellers to stave off complications from his bipolar disorder, only one person snaps him out of his disturbing reveries: Brandi (Anna Faris), the ditzy, slutty blonde who works the makeup counter. When a flasher exposes himself to the young woman, Ronnie sees his chance to be the hero and win the girl, and he vows to bring the pervert to justice. Then a detective (Ray Liotta) shows up and steals all of Ronnie's imagined thunder. Before long, the film many worried would be yet another Paul Blart morphs into a comedic Taxi Driver, or at least that's what it strives to be.

Brandi becomes a major source of contention among detractors, and for good reason: some truly vile things happen to her, and we're meant to laugh. First, Ronnie forces her into a date by refusing to let her leave the mall until she acquiesces. Then he gets her so drunk that she can't walk, and we cut to Ronnie having sex with an unconscious Brandi, complete with vomit on the pillow. But it's not date-rape, say the filmmakers, because Brandi snaps out of it long enough to ask a slightly concerned Ronnie "Why are you stopping?" I guess it's funny because she's a slut, but Ronnie still had sex with a woman clearly too intoxicated to give any real form of consent.

And that's not the only time Ronnie goes beyond the pale. When he stops taking his medication and, as a result, fails the psychological exam of his application to the police force, the mall guard slips into ultra-violence worthy of a Scorsese movie. He assaults one of the food court operators (Patton Oswalt) for insulting his friend Nell (Collette Wolfe), bound to a wheelchair after ankle surgery. Skateboard punks receive a beating that would make Tommy DeVito flinch. There's even a preposterous and completely unfunny showdown in third act.

Then there's the ending, one of the most graphic and hysterical scenes I've ever watched. I don't like to call things this early in the year, but I seriously doubt I'll see a funnier scene this year than the final chase. Indeed, the film is often quite funny, but at least half of the film is drag. Hill seems to believe that by making Ronnie a psychopath with an alcoholic mother (Celia Weston in a show-stealing role), he has crafted a dark comedy. Not so: he really just made a slapstick with political incorrectness. Sometimes it works, but often -- particularly the date-rape scene -- are just there for shock value and greatly take away from the funny bits.

Nevertheless, the film's got gall, I'll give it that. When it clicks, it's one of the more original comedies in recent memory, so audacious it almost begs you not to laugh. But more often than not it mistakes lulls for atmosphere and development and genuine offensiveness for boundary pushing and satire. So it's a bit of a failure, but a noble one. I still recommend it, if for no other reason than the final ten minutes.

My 30 Favorite Mr. Show Sketches (15-1)

15. Phone Sex (Season 4, Episode 3)

Homoeroticism played a big role in Mr. Show, and when a man who wins some phone sex off a friend's lost bet casually calls the bud up so he can "deliver the goods," the show leaps into the stratosphere. Bob's effeminate sex voice is matched in hilarity only by David's flippant attitude towards it all, and the payoff is gold.

14. The Great Philouza (Season 3, Episode 7)

Combining the bombast of Amadeus with the silliness of marching band, "The Great Philouza" is the kind of sketch a band geek like me can latch onto with relish. David plays the Salieri part, an erudite, studied composer who finds himself upstaged by Bob's even-more-dumbed-down-Mozart Philouza. Unlike Mozart, who at least was a genius under his childish demeanor, Philouza is a gibbering moron who "composes" his tunes by blowing raspberries to a vague tune. David describes Philouza's music in overwrought, agonized prose, damning the God who blessed his rival with the power to move mountains while relegating his hard-learned talents to the shadows. It's Mr. Show's finest single-movie parody, and a better send-up of pretentious artiness than even the Inside The Actor's Studio spoof.

13. Hail Satan (Season 3, Episode 1)

Tom Kenny is by far my favorite of the supporting cast, which is saying something considering the show boasted comics like Paul F. Thompkins, Jack Black and Sarah Silverman. And this sketch is like a six-minute document of why I think the way I do. A merciless deconstruction of televangelism, The Hail Satan Network features incredible performances from Tom, Jill and Bob as the preaching trifecta and David as a child so lazy he must be wheeled around in a chair. When Tom sets off into a frenzy, promising to build David "a devil's house" with TVs for walls and a bathroom in the bed, the sketch's immortality is assured.

12. Wyckyd Sceptre (Season 4, Episode 2)

Where Titannica played up the controversy of metal, Wyckyd Sceptre dealt with the latent homosexuality that the genre hid in plain sight. Possibly based on Rob Halford's coming out around the same time, the skit really goes after 80s metal in general when a band celebrates their platinum-selling album by getting drunk and engaging in gay sex. A tape of the incident surfaces, but the band fails to see the problem: after all, they're just partying. Then the whole thing gets capped with a Spinal Tap-like rocker with thinly-veiled, homoerotic lyrics.

11. Lifeboat (Season 4, Episode 1) [Sketch starts 1:48]

The Jerry Springer Show was always its own parody, but that of course didn't stop all the spoofs. However, when Bob, as the Springer stand-in, decides to take his show on a cruise liner which subsequently sinks, all the Springer goodness is magnified tenfold thanks to a simple location change. Also in the lifeboat with Bob are the redneck who loves his woman but impregnated her mom, both the women, an audience member who has to do all of the hyping himself, and even a super secret black gay lover named Fabian. It also contains my favorite line: "Life is precious, and God and the Bible.

10. Pre-Taped Call-In Show (Season 3, Episode 10)

A special case of "so-simple-it-should-have-been-done-before," the Pre-Taped Call-In Show wound up one of the most inspired moments of the show's run. Watching David break down trying to explain to the people calling in to discuss their topics are actually calling in for last week's show during this week's taping is one of the most madcap things ever.

9. Mom and Pop Porno Shop (Season 2, Episode 2)

As someone looking to transfer into a journalism major, I know all too well the effects of the internet on many industries, but Mr. Show indirectly pointed the way to the future with this brief bit on a mom and pop adult store whose kindly owners run like a place where everybody knows your name. But they must contend with a disinterested son, the scourge of this new digital porn and a realtor who wants to buy their property. And then a God-like figure comes to teach the son a lesson about the beauty of porn. And if you don't laugh when Bob smacks David on the head with a dildo, well, sir, I pity you.

8. The Altered State of Druggachusettes (Season 3, Episode 3)

If you've ever seen tapes of old 70s children's TV or even lived through them, you'll know that they were only a stone's throw away from full on drug humor, and the guys simply decided to give it that one last push over the edge. A full-on acid trip, Druggachusettes is so ingenious I simply can't describe why it's one of the funniest moments in the history of television.

7. Lie Detector (Season 3, Episode 3)

In the DVD commentary, some cast members voice a disapproval with this sketch because it ends with a punchline and "that's not what Mr. Show was about." But I couldn't care less: yes, it may seem like an SNL sketch that was just too blue to make it to air, but it's also a killer old-fashioned sketch-comedy sketch.

6. Spank/Founding Fathers (Season 1, Episode 4)

Few forms of protest are as inane and nonthreatening as flag desecration, and Mr. Show use a mocking sketch of a protestor who defecates on the flag in order to trace the flag's history back to the Founding Fathers (Lincoln is there for no reason, complete with hilariously wrong accent). Their attempts to come-up with a shit-proof flag end up with a wonderful meta-solution: a flag made of poo ("Who would shit on shit?"). Apart from being anarchic and ballsy, it's also the first example of a great link on the show.

5. Recruiters (Season 2, Episode 5)

My all-time favorite documentary is Hoop Dreams, so imagine my delight when Mr. Show took the ruthless preying of basketball recruiters to its extreme. Bob and David play college recruiters targeting kindergartners and getting them while they're young. And as funny as it is when Bob tells a 4-year-old that his college offers a two-year cowboy degree to entice him, there's a knowing subtext that understands how inner city youth are played by these men. Then things pick right back up into pure hialrity when Bob tries to feel a pregnant woman's stomach to test the kick of the fetus.

4. Titannica (Season 3, Episode 10)

Of all the excellent band parodies on Mr. Show, this take on the early-90s paranoia over subliminal messages in heavy metal music remains the finest. Megastars Titannica visit a sick child at the hospital after he attempted suicide after hearing their song "Try Suicide." Then the blanket comes off and, oh, I just can't ruin it for you.

3. The Joke: The Musical (Season 1, Episode 2)

The episode starts with Bob as a Southern Dixiecrat senator telling an offensive joke, then an entire musical grows out of it. Featuring some sly Godspell references and a joke that plays like "The Aristocrats" with a different premise, "The Joke: The Musical" is the first sketch that proved Mr. Show had legs (even more than the excellent "Ronnie Dobbs"). It's dry while at the same time giving in to pure inanity, and the results are extraordinary.

2. Commercials of the Future (Season 1, Episode 2)

Mr. Show gave us plenty of absurd yet plausible ads in their time, but when Bob and David pitch a series of profane commercials to a futuristic mega-conglomerate called Globo-Chem (a recurring entity), the result is a transcendant moment of commentary on censorship that ends up a great excuse to give us the ads "they" really want to show us. And the highlight isn't even one of the commercials: it's the boardroom reactions that clinch it.

1. Monsters of Megaphone (Season 2, Episode 6)

This one sketch is the reason I can't even play at making a "best of" for Mr. Show. There is no way I can objectively argue that this is the greatest sketch in the program's all too brief run, but I simply love it too much to place it anywhere but the no. 1 spot. A dead-on spoof of the sort of pretentious documentaries that PBS runs all the time about old-time musicians forgotten by a world that moved on. Tom Kenny is downright perfect as the old music historian who tells us the tale of Dickie Crickets, the king of megaphone crooning or, as they referred to it back then, "megaphone crooning." Kenny sounds like every single old timer they wheel out for these kind of documentaries, and he alone would cement this as my favorite. Then there's the crooning: Bob and David pose as competing crooners, singing short ditties about the lastest inventions and ultimately fighting against their increasing irrelevancy with the "Monsters of Megaphone" tour, in which they inventing new items just so they could sing about them. Mr. Show excelled with their "historical fictions," and this is the king of them all. If you don't think this is funny, I don't know how I could be friends with you.

My 30 Favorite Mr. Show Sketches (30-16)

Saturday Night Live's stance as the United State's defining sketch comedy show is indisputable, but its long run and ever-shifting cast work against the program as much as they help. But when ex-Ben Stiller Show writers David Cross and Bob Odenkirk took the sketches that weren't allowed on network TV and got a show of their own for HBO, they crafted not only the finest sketch show of its time but possibly the funniest sketch comedy show since Monty Python.

Drawing clearly from that legendary British troupe's style of hyperliterate absurdity, Mr. Show could swing between biting satire, shocking political incorrectness and gleeful silliness in the course of a single sketch. It didn't always work, but their method of eschewing punchlines in favor of loosely strung together non-narratives ensured that you never went more than a sketch or two without laughing. Any list about greatness is of course subjective, but attempting to rank the finest sketches of this brilliant program is next to impossible (case in point: I originally was just going to name 15 sketches and ended up with a top 50 before I realized it was getting out of hand). So here's a painstakingly crafted list of some of my very favorite moments of one of the funniest shows of all time. The numbers are just for show (links added clips of the sketches)

30. Camp Monk Academy (Season 4, Episode 5) (Part 1) (Part 2)

Undoubtedly the greatest strength of Mr. Show was its ability to start a sketch in one direction and end up in some crazy new territory by its end. Things start funnily enough when a slacker heads to Tibet to check up on an old friend, only to find he's the Dalai Lama, but then things spiral until the Buddhist monks square off against the fat kids' camp (who are all white and American for no reason at all), culminating in a rap-off. Who else could mix a parody of Kundun and camp olympiad films like Meatballs and Heavyweights in one sitting? There's even a brief nod to Pretty in Pink at the end.

29. Thrilling Miracles (Season 2, Episode 1)

SNL tends to ride its cast's gift for mimicry and accents in order to inflate sagging quality (at this point they're just using the elections to guarantee four more years on the air), but one of my favorite aspects of Mr. Show was the fact that nobody could pull off a good imitation and, apart from some Southern accents, very few accents were pulled off with any skill. And that's proven in spades as Bob butchers a British accent as an increasingly disturbing infomercial pitch-man shilling "the Super-Pan." Things keep getting stranger and darker until it can't get any more intense, then it ends on a moment of glorious inanity.

28. East vs. West Coast Ventriloquism (Season 3, Episode 3) [sketch starts at 0:35]

The East Cost/West Coast rap feud caused irreparable damange to hip-hop; ignorant detractors continue to dismiss the genre as nothing more than glorification of violence and dangerous, and for a time they got all the evidence they need. But all Bob and David saw in the carnage was some serious schadenfreude, and thus begat this off-the-wall battle between vicious puppets and the bewildered humans who find themselves forced into the fracas. It's all worth it for the roundtable discussion featuring two bemused rappers.

27. The Audition (Season 4, Episode 3)

Anyone who's seen Arrested Development knows that David Cross knows how to make the best fake auditions. Here, he combines auditions with good old "Who's on first?" confusion to thoroughly flummox the casting directors. Can I use this chair?

26. The Fairsley Difference (Season 4, Episode 4)

Mr. Show's fake advertisments could rival SNL's in their convincing brilliance: Mayostard. Cock Ring Warehouse. Siamese Twins. All wonderful, and all quite reluctantly left off the list. But this ad war between an old-time family-run grocery and an undercutting, libelous nationwide chain hilariously captures the sad truth of the effects of chains like Wal-Mart and Kroger on small businesses.

25. The Story of Everest (Season 4, Episode 4)

The Pythonesque influence was stamped all over Mr. Show, but this bit of pure absurdity is one of the purest tributes to the British troupe. When a strapping young lad returns to his home after conquering Everest, he relates his exploits to his overjoyed parents. Then he slips. Then the déja vu creeps in. By the end of it they've crafted the best repeated gag since Sideshow Bob walked through a minefield of upturned rakes.

24. Josh Fenderman (Season 4, Episode 10)

Bob and David barely appear at all in this E! True Hollywood Story/Corey Feldman send-up, but that doesn't stop it from being one of the funniest parodies in the show's history. Fenderman got his start as a lovable kid in a commercial and found himself driven into 80s pop horror by a terrible stage mother. It's a brief but thorough satire of the entertainment industry's effect on its stars, but whenever things get too serious there's a clip of hilarious dancing to lighten the mood. I wish life was like that.

23. I'll Marry Your Stupid Ass (Season 4, Episode 7)

There's nothing more irritating yet hilarious than a drunken argument between two macho doofuses, and Bob and David take it to the extreme. In their best homoerotic-but-not-quite-gay sketch, the two get into a screaming argument in a bar and quickly forget their respective dates in the maelstrom of testerone. Unwillingly to back down and admit defeat, they end up marrying and living a life of tender hatred, death do them part.

22. Three Times One Minus One (Season 2, Episode 2)

A semi-recurring bit, Three Times One Minus One is the be-all, end-all skewering of contemporary R&B as well as a comment on the plagiarism and "softening" of black culture to sell to suburban white America. But you can go ahead and toss all that right out the window, because the greatest fake New Jack swing duo of all time earn their position for a much simpler reason: they prove that wigs and silly costumes are every bit as funny as subversive satire. Few things are as funny as watching David Cross' hairy chest as he sings nonsensical mouth music while Bob (looking about as iconic as any legitimate musician) stands stoically in the background.

21. Toenapper (Season 4, Episode 2)

Oh honestly, just watch this one. It needs no explanation.

20. Indomitable Spirit (Season 3, Episode 4)

Who remembers having to sit through all the "inspirational" guest speakers in school? All of you, of course, because we had to sit through them the entire time we were in school. Every addiction, disease, deformation and injury under the sun got trotted out like a politically correct freak show to tell kids that perseverance (with the usual mention to God) could overcome all. From the opening lines of the presenting teacher, you know that this sketch is going to savage one of the worst aspects of childhood. Indomitable Spirit itself is a band consisting of a guitarist and drummer with no arms, a flautist with only a head, and a woman. It's perfect as is, then a one-armed ex-drummer shows up and the whole thing heads to comedy heaven.

19. Men's Club of Allah/Taint (Season 4, Episode 6)

The brilliant linking of sketches of Mr. Show allowed for long-range satire and madcap nonsense, but these two barely tied-together skits display possibly the most inspired and unpredictable links in the entire run. Starting off as a spoof of Louis Farrakhan, incendiary rhetoric soon morphs into an angry sermon on the importance of rewinding rental tapes. Then the whole thing takes a left turn and becomes a parody of the Adam West Batman. AND THEN the show manages to barely link into something completely different: a spoof of the Larry Flynt biopic that glorifies the area between the scrotum and the anus. All of this in less than ten minutes.

18. Burgundy Loafe (Season 4, Episode 3)

A sketch on the class gap? Did I pop in a British show by mistake? David Cross did a bit in his stand-up about going to a restaurant so fancy and pretentious that they literally served an edible sheet of real gold with their dessert, but he was attacking the borderline obscene selfishness of the wealthy long before. The eponymous six-star restaurant of the sketch is so high society that they don't even lower themselves by including a restroom. Instead, servers place a box under a seat with a hole in the bottom while the customer deposits his "foundation" while he eats. Isn't it nice to see that Bob and David were never so far up their asses that they couldn't turn satire into toilet humor on a dime?

17. Coupon: The Movie (Season 2, Episode 6)

All the hipsters who made up Mr. Show's primary fanbase probably thought this sketch was a vision of the apocalypse. In this frightening world, product placement has become so ingrained into the movie business that, when a movie based entirely on a commercial product tanks, the studios take a case to the Supreme Court and force everyone in America to see the film. Not only does the movie display all the hilarity that the show's shoestring budget inadvertently created, but the sheer dryness of it all makes "Coupon" arguably one of the 5 best sketches of the show, even if I don't love it quite as much.

16. The Bob LaMonta Story (Season 3, Episode 2)

If you're anything like me, seeing the words "Based on a True Story" attached to a movie makes you wince. Bob and David know our pain, and that's why "The Bob LaMonta Story" is so damned good. Not only are the exaggerations of "true story" adaptations played up but the Oscar-baiting exploitation of the mentally challenged gets a nod too. And Bob Odenkirk and Jill Tailey's portrayals of LaMonta's retarded parents aren't half as offensive as, say, I Am Sam.