TV on DVD: Two and a Half Men -- The Complete Fifth Season

Season 5 is Now Available on DVD

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Far more sex-obsessed than Carrie Bradshaw and her three New York pals on HBO's Sex and the City and rivaling FX's It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as the most politically incorrect show airing on a non-premium channel-- essentially creators Chuck Lorre and Lee Aronsohn's Two and a Half Men is a network television version of a Kevin Smith movie.



However, while Smith left absolutely nothing to the imagination-- the impeccable writing on this smash success Emmy award-winning series manages to aim simultaneously for the highest of the highbrow and the lowest of lowbrow in humor by throwing out enough obvious below the belt references to the masses that they can get away with on CBS (aka the Hallmark Hall of Fame network who brought us Jag and Murder She Wrote). And admirably they do this while at the same time wickedly layering their dialogue with the most innuendo possible to make the humor far richer.

Definitely a show that isn't for everyone as just two minutes of the program can send people running in the other direction. However-- and just like the aforementioned shows in tandem with other personal favorites like the witty discomfort of Ricky Gervais in Extras and BBC's The Office and Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm-- as far as this reviewer is concerned, I simply marveled first in shock about the jokes being leveled at the audience in Everybody Loves Raymond's old 9pm Eastern/8pm Central Monday night time slot. Shock that was until I picked my jaw up off the floor and became dazzled as a writer by the writers' amazingly acerbic style.

While most sitcoms go for a sarcastic line followed by an obvious joke, Two and a Half Men pulls a fast one on audiences every single time by riffing, picking up threads from jokes thrown out carelessly two minutes earlier and manage to keep topping the previous joke even though the moment's long passed and a different conversation is well underway.



Although I'd seen a majority of the first season and a few episodes here and there when work or college didn't get in the way (and sadly this was before the era of widespread and affordable access to DVR and/or TiVo), I managed to get hooked right into the familiar premise in this Warner Brothers release of the complete fifth season.



Due to the writer's strike-- Two and a Half Men's season five was truncated from its usual length to a mere nineteen episodes as opposed to the traditional twenty-four or twenty-six that typically run annually for a comedic series. And while some shows struggled to find their footing once again when the writers returned, Two and Half Men never made a false step by adding some multi-episode story arcs.



In fact these additions were extremely helpful in augmenting the running gag of the part time wealthy musician and full time womanizer Charlie Harper (Charlie Sheen) who spends most of his time drinking at all hours of the day and parading in and out of his gorgeous Malibu beach side home women half his age whose IQs are probably right in alignment with their bra size.



Essentially taking an Odd Couple approach-- the show's set-up is simple as in the earliest season, Charlie took in his younger brother Alan (Jon Cryer) and Alan's son Jake (Angus T. Jones) following his divorce from the still controlling and now remarried Judith (Marin Hinkle). Yet although the arrangement was supposed to be temporary, the threesome remain sharing the same roof to amusing effect as-- whereas Charlie's life is all fleeting hedonistic spontaneous pleasure where women and good fortune never fail to fall into his lap-- the uptight, neat freak chiropractor Alan never manages to have one tenth of his brother's success.



Thrown into the mix are Alan's exceedingly dim son Jake (Angus T. Jones) who seems to have ruined his brain with cereal the way that his uncle Charlie has done with booze and Berta (Conchata Ferrell) as the guys' loud, always inappropriate but comically dynamite housekeeper.

And, offering a true glimpse into just how Alan and Charlie's development went so wrong-- the series' frequent scene stealer Holland Taylor routinely swings by as their old manipulative cougar mother who works in real estate by trading in dirty gossip and helping arrange divorces to boost business (once by amusingly pimping out a clueless Charlie). Taylor's bravery is commendable as she launches headfirst into the unlikable role of a woman who is in every sense an older female version of Charlie except in lieu of toxic bachelorhood, she'd been married nearly a half a dozen times.



One of the comedic bright spots who pops up only occasionally in the fifth season is Melanie Lynskey's delightful contradiction of a sweet smiling devil with an angelic face in her embodiment of Rose-- a former stalker and girlfriend of Charlie who despite moving to England (allegedly) still sneaks back into Charlie's life from time to time. This is used to great effect in one of the season's kookiest episodes that finds Charlie and Rose reenacting Rob Reiner's Misery except with yarn knitted scarves and strong European tranquilizers instead of brutal violence.

Featuring some nice twists that find Charlie first trying to take a cue from Alan and date a woman his age (i.e. a brainy judge played by Ming-Na), which only lasts a few episodes-- soon he becomes an overnight children's singing sensation Mr. Waffles who uses his new found popularity as a far less talented version of Raffi to ignore his hatred of children and troll for single moms a la Hugh Grant in About a Boy.

While admittedly it is a tad repetitive as overall, most of the humor derives from the brothers' polar opposite sex lives as Alan suffers through a relationship with a neurotic, self-loathing weeper (Janeane Garofalo) whereas the promiscuous sex-addict in denial Charlie begins a twisted flirtation and intermittent affair with Jenny McCarthy just before her father (James Brolin) marries their mother.



Still fortunately, it's to the credit of the writers once again of switching things up with nice curve balls to lead you around the bases to a home plate you were never guessing would be there in managing to lessen the potential "ick" factor with a sinister twist for McCarthy and Brolin's extended cameo work.



Aside from wishing there would be more opportunities to work in Jane Lynch as Sheen (and Cryer's) terrific psychoanalyst and noting that the show always benefits from the additions of Rose and their mother (particularly in one episode when Charlie is shocked to discover he enjoys hanging out with her), one major drain on the show's humorous energy comes via the dialogue scripted for the overwhelmingly dim-witted Jake. In fact, as the season continued, I realized I began to pity poor Angus T. Jones so much that you feel the "half" portion of the men would be left out of a few more episodes.



While the series has always been synonymous with Charlie Sheen and his payday is long said to be the highest of any network television actor, when I began watching the fifth season in quick succession while preparing this review, I began to realize just how talented and underrated Jon Cryer is in the role of Alan.

Cryer, who will always be known to me as Pretty in Pink's Duckie, brings so much to the table since without Alan as his foil-- the Charlie show or God forbid, the Charlie and Jake show-- would've only survived a single season as opposed to the recent announcement that Men has been renewed by CBS for an additional three full seasons.

Although on television in its regular run, the show just ended its sixth successful season as one of the most watched and highest rated popular sitcoms on network television (and in my eyes, one that far surpasses the channel's previous contenders The King of Queens and Everybody Loves Raymond)-- given some of the risks the writers took throughout this great slim-packaged fifth season set (which also contains the hundredth episode milestone mark) in trying to actively inspire change in the main characters, I'm hopeful that they'll have enough ideas to play with this more in the future.

Similarly, by showing their ambition for the men continue to grow (as much like Jake, it's only logical), I'm optimistic that-- instead of succumbing to the sad fate of so many long-running shows by remaining the same Odd Couple like types they were introduced as in the opening season-- they'll keep us laughing for a long, long time.

The Search for John Gissing

Originally published at Blogcritics as part of my feature: Under the Radar

The story behind the final release of writer/director Mike Binder’s charming corporate culture clash comedy The Search for John Gissing seven years after its production is nearly as entertaining, surprising, amusing, and filled with enough dubious events to rival the plot of the film itself.

After using the benefit of a British tax break to shoot overseas and scraping up enough money between his own savings and that of supportive family and friends, Binder filmed Gissing in early 2001 entirely “on the cheap,” as he told Cinematical’s James Rocchi. Yet, despite drawing raves from audience members and inclusions into several film festivals around the globe, he was never able to find a fair studio offer, admitting that, “the only deals we could get were from people who wanted to own it. Forever. For doing nothing.”

Understandably finding it unacceptable, Binder promptly moved on to other projects, including HBO’s The Mind of the Married Man, his critical breakout Joan Allen and Kevin Costner vehicle The Upside of Anger, the straight-to-DVD, Preston Sturges meets Jerry Maguire Ben Affleck comedy Man About Town, and the little-seen, entirely underrated Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler post 9/11 buddy film Reign Over Me.

However, while Gissing remained on the back burner for Binder who even at one point “re-wrote the whole script… called… The Multinationals,” with the intention of filming it again, the search for the original John Gissing film remained a constant obsession for its fiercely loyal, determined, and unwavering fans. While Binder grants that the devotees consisted of “primarily absolute Rickman fans” (among which he includes himself), an online petition was begun to force the film’s release, ultimately gathering 3,630 signatures and fans flew from across not only the U.S. but England as well to see the film and Binder’s Q&A when Gissing was included “as a last minute thing” at the Westwood International Film Festival. Touched by their passion, Binder took down the mailing information of forty attendees and sent them each a burned copy of the DVD, as Cinematical reports.

Inspired, finally he decided to follow through on his goal “to put together a site to sell my movies,” which he admits was “more work than I thought it was going to be… there’s a new obstacle every day.” However, via his experiment to eventually create “a big-ass pipeline going right through the ground to people that want to buy my movies,” he found an unlikely DVD maker through an adult entertainment DVD company “looking to go letimate.” Eventually the disc earned its release, with no studio input — a Binder film (made by Mike and produced by his brother Jack) on a Binder website to a Binder audience. After stumbling on the DVD at a local video store, I found myself becoming quite the Gissing fan in my own right.

To be fair, I’ve been a Binder fan without realizing it since tagging along with my parents to see the Big Chill-like, sunny Indian Summer in the early '90s (which he wrote and directed) but ever since Upside of Anger, I’ve made a special effort to seek out his work. In that film, he became one of those unique and admirable (yet far too few) males to accurately portray women as complicated and fully realized characters and it was thrilling to witness a movie with such a tremendous and overwhelmingly female cast wherein the women weren’t obsessed with shopping or mani/pedis. Yet, more than that, he’s equally — and obviously given his gender — probably even more so at home in the world of the male-dominated concrete jungle where Art of War seems to be the post-MBA manual. It’s a subject he keeps returning to again and again — whether it plays a dominant role as it did in Man About Town or a more subtle one with Don Cheadle’s character's work struggles in Reign Over Me.

And again, international business is the agenda of the day in The Search for John Gissing, yet to just say it’s a business comedy would be to do it an immense disservice. It begins as a far better hodgepodge of Neil Simon’s Out-of-Towners and the comedies of the modern day French master Francis Veber (The Valet, The Closet, The Dinner Game) with a little of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment thrown in for good measure, which Binder admits indeed helped inspire the office building set decoration.

When Compu-Corp employee Matthew Barnes (Binder) and his wife Linda (Janeane Garofalo) arrive in London, they assume it’ll be their next temporary landing place in a series of buy-outs, mergers that go along with being one spoke in the wheel of his employer’s international conglomerate company. However, from the moment their feet touch cement at Heathrow Airport, anything and everything goes wrong as all the plans made for the couple’s arrival by Matthew’s same-level London colleague John Gissing (Alan Rickman) fall through. Soon they begin to wonder if their trip is being sabotaged on purpose by Mr. Gissing himself. And the first forty minutes of the film blends the misunderstandings and mistaken identities found in not only Veber but also British sex farces to great effect as the couple find themselves in situations one has to see to believe. I’d reveal more about exactly what and whom the Americans encounter but hesitate to do so as by even expanding on the character descriptions, I’d be killing several of the film’s jokes before one even inserted the disc into their DVD player.

However, once Rickman and Binder share screen time, it morphs first from a chess match of one-upmanship into thematically similar territory of the freewheeling buddy movie adventure he did so well in Reign Over Me. Except in the case of Gissing, the tears come from laughter this time instead of sadness and we absolutely can’t get enough of Rickman as we’ve never seen him before. As a Steve Martin-like “wild and crazy guy,” Binder notes that contrary to his fear that Rickman was “gonna be tough; he seems kind of cranky and cantankerous and a bit curmudgeonly in the meetings,” he was instead the “warmest, sweetest gentlemen I’d ever worked with in my life,” adding that he believes Rickman “was just dying to tear up the scenery and the furniture.” And after viewing it, I wouldn’t hesitate to agree and despite my fondness for Rickman as a serious actor (despite being the source of my childhood nightmares after I watched Die Hard with my older brother while still in grade school), I would honestly love to see him offered more comedic work to show the wise-cracking, pratfall friendly side of Harry Potter’s Severus Snape.

With a great turn by the always hysterical Janeane Garofalo who makes a perfect bantering partner for Binder, Gissing is one of those word-of-mouth films sure to get one phoning others as soon as it’s over. Filled with inventive jokes about the culture clash to be found when Americans travel abroad even to a country that speaks our language, the award-winning The Search For John Gissing also contains priceless bits sure to attract an even wider international base as the finale involves a German group of buyers and a French antique-chair obsessed superior to Barnes and Gissing who receives his comeuppance in a decidedly unexpected way.

And although given the background of the film, it’s easy to forgive the skimpy extras (containing outtakes and deleted scenes), one can’t help but wonder, given its cinematic plot-worthy backstory, if perhaps in the future Binder won’t do something with it down the road. Whether he chooses to make an insider Hollywood satire (although after the lackluster Tropic Thunder -- man, do we have enough of those) or in its next DVD release, turn Gissing into a double-disc special feature heavy version, one thing is for certain — namely, you can guess you’ll find it via Binder’s own “big ass pipeline,” online, which may inspire more independent filmmakers to reach prospective audiences down the road.

Still, in the effort not to inspire yet another petition to plead with him to reinvent a perfectly good DVD, I must say that Binder’s movie is even more entertaining than the seven year odyssey to its release. Or in the spirit of brevity to match the setting of the film’s business world — I’d urge you to begin The Search for John Gissing at your earliest convenience. Thank you for your time and there will be a meeting about it in the morning. And as I’m sure Matthew Barnes would warn — just make sure you don’t ask John Gissing to call you with the details.