TV Shows I'm Watching

Well, this is my last quarter of school. Everyone has been asking me what I'm going to do with my newfound free time. I really don't know right now but on my list of priorities is getting back into shape. Besides that I am starting to get into a couple of TV shows. Over the next couple of days I'll try to write down some thoughts about the ones I'm watching. First is:

The Office
At first I thought this show was just going to be a spin off of the movie Office Space. In the first season this seemed to be the case; there was a diversity day, and a sexual harassment episode, but not much to get excited about. Now in its second season the writers have started to develop the personalities of the wacky characters on the show and they are creating some great laughs.

What makes this show great is it doesn't force the humor. Everything about the show is implied. The camera work is done to make you think that the show is a reality TV show, though it has never been established that this is the case. Also there is no laugh track to tell you when you are supposed to laugh, the show lets it happen naturally.

Steve Carrell also makes a great performance every show. His Michael Scott character is such an inept manager that it is almost painful (funny painful). The rest of the cast does a great job as well. Though the stereotypes are over the top, they do speak some truth to apart of everyone in the workplace. There is your over-achiever, weird guy, rule-follower, pal, and guy-who-doesn't-care. If you have ever worked in a corporate environment, you will enjoy how the show pokes fun at life in The Office.

Hoodwinked Review

I'm pretty tired so I am not going to write too much about Hoodwinked, but I am going to say that I was disappointed with it. I did like how they started with what appeared to be the normal Riding Hood story with attitude, then warped it so that every "suspect's" story was so skewed from the normal fairy tale we heard as children. However, though the idea was very interesting, it still failed to present anything unique. For example, trying to surprise the movie watcher by making an old grandmother an adrenaline junky just seems so cliche.

What really killed me though was the animation. On the movie's website the makers of the movie claim that with the power of modern computers they were able to avoid going to a big name studio and do the animation themselves. This clearly is not the case. When there was a lot of action, especially with more than one character moving at once (ie. the dancing scenes) the animation really slows now and becomes jerky. This really pulls you out of the movie and back into the theater, and you never stay involved with the movie. Also, in a lot of the close ups it is possible to see how simplistic the character models were. It makes them look almost thrown together. This is the antithesis of the effort put into the character in computer-animated movies like Toy Story or Monster, Inc.

Overall I really wouldn't recommend seeing this movie. The idea is cute and so much more could have been done with it. I'm just so disappointed that the movie makers tried to skimp on the movie funding. It really shows and keeps you from enjoying what could have been a funny comedy.