‘Inside Out 2,’ Anxiety Boogaloo

June 14, 2024

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

You put the Inside Out, you put the Outside In (CREDIT: Pixar/Screenshot)

Starring: Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Phyllis Smith, Kensington Tallman, Tony Hale, Lewis Black, Liza Lapira, Ayo Edebiri, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Paul Walter Hauser, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green, Grace Lu, Yong Yea, Yvette Nicole Brown, Ron Funches, James Austin Johnson, Steve Purcell, Dave Goelz, Kirk Thatcher, Frank Oz, Paula Pell, June Squibb, Pete Docter

Director: Kelsey Mann

Running Time: 96 Minutes

Rating: PG

Release Date: June 14, 2024 (Theaters)

I often like to ask if the movies that I watch make me want to be what they are. But of course, what Inside Out and Inside Out 2 posit is that, we are all already inside out. How twisted! Just like Pouchy – what a dynamite addition. Speaking of new characters, I’m already nostalgic for Nostalgia. Damn, that anxiety attack was exhilarating. Don’t spin around with a baseball bat for a dizzy race right before watching this movie!

Grade: 4001 Insides out of 5000 Outs

‘A.P. Bio’ Has a Striking Amount of ‘Community’ DNA

July 8, 2019

jmunney A.P. Bio, Community, Television , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

CREDIT: NBC

Over the past few months, the delightful high school-set sitcom A.P. Bio has become one of my favorite shows on the air, but then NBC went a little cuckoo and cancelled it. There’s been some effort on the part of the cast, crew, and fans to find the show a new home, but unless that happens, we will have to be satisfied with two short-but-sweet seasons.

One of the reasons I love A.P. Bio so much is because it shares a lot of DNA with my favorite show of all time, which would be Community, another former NBC sitcom that was constantly on the brink of cancellation (though unlike A.P. Bio, it kept beating the renewal odds). Their premises and central characters are strikingly similar. In Community, Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) is a high-powered lawyer who gets disbarred and must enroll at a community college. Meanwhile, A.P. Bio stars Glenn Howerton as Jack Griffin, a disgraced Harvard philosophy professor who is forced to take a lowly part-time teaching job at a high school in Toledo, Ohio.

As I watched and grew to love A.P. Bio, I kept noticing more and more Community similarities, to the point that I could detect analogues for all the major characters. So I’ve assembled below a side-by-side comparison of the Greendale Human Beings and their corresponding Whitlock Rams. Enjoy, and let me know if you need help reacting to riding that ram.

(Thank you to my fellow commenters at the AV Club and Disqus for helping me out with these comparisons!)

Jack (Glenn Howerton) = Jeff (Joel McHale)

CREDIT: YouTube

The protagonists who try to act above it all but eventually embrace the crazy scholastic ecosystems they’ve become an integral part of.

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