Social Distancing Journal: Week 1 (March 16-22, 2020)

Because I had been out of town and then immersed in work, I hadn’t been able to go to the grocery store to stock up for a week or two. I’d gleaned from social media that stores had been cleaned out. Sure enough, certain aisles looked like something out of a dystopian thriller. Good luck getting toilet paper, paper towels, flour, rice, and more. To me this ransacking of consumable and utilitarian staples seemed like an overreaction on the part of a public weaned on years of pop culture steeped in apocalyptic stories. You’ve seen The Hunger Games and scores of zombie movies; now you can play-act your own prepper and doomsday fantasies from the comfort of home! Still, I felt like I was able to get most of what I needed. Why worry too much because this will be over in two weeks, right?

So social distancing begins, and social media is there to help keep us connected. Bzzt! Look, I was already not feeling great about social distancing, and seeing how Twitter had devolved into a sewer pit wasn’t helping. (Insert joke about how it was already one before all this transpired.) Ironically, Facebook seemed like a less stressful place to check, perhaps because people were less concerned in commenting about the Presidential race and more interested in putting on brave faces for the start of staying at home.

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With a little more time on my hands, now would mark the occasion to dig into some of the Criterion Collection Blu-rays I’ve amassed but haven’t watched. Problem is, I’m just not feeling it. Based on my mood, I quickly decided that I was going to direct my viewing toward comedies, with exceptions carved out for Survivor and Shark Tank. (Blame the MBA for turning me into a regular viewer of the latter. I thought it might be useful for when I took an entrepreneurship class.)

I landed on two shows available on Netflix. I rewatched Great News, a 30 Rock-ish sitcom that ran for two short seasons on NBC in 2017 and 2018. The series focuses on Briga Heelan as a cable news segment producer and Andrea Martin as her irrepressible mother, who goes back to school and starts interning on the program. It’s a shame this silly workplace comedy didn’t get any traction among the peacock network’s Thursday night comedies to earn a longer run, but the twenty-three episodes that exist are highly satisfying.

I also relaxed with Shaun the Sheep: Adventures from Mossy Bottom, a new Netflix series that continues the funny and inventive escapades of the barnyard animal and pals. The 2015 Shaun the Sheep Movie from Aardman Animation is a comedic treasure. While this new series and the 2019 film A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, finally available here exclusively on Netflix, don’t reach the same heights, the gentle humor and setpiece creativity in both provide a soft escape from the daily news.

On the film front, I rewatched Wet Hot American Summer, which I reviewed six years ago. That review is just mildly positive, an assessment I’d push upward based on how I feel about the film now and the goodwill it earned from the series Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp. I even foresaw this happening when I concluded the piece stating that the film already seemed better in my memory than the grade I was giving it. Is the lesson that things do get better over time?

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Previous Social Distancing Journal Entries:
Pre-Social Distancing

Wet Hot American Summer

WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER (David Wain, 2001)

Hormones and emotions are running high at Camp Firewood on the last day of the summer of 1981. In WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER the teenage counselors and adult administrators are looking for love, especially if it’s been elusive during these muggy months, while their pre-teen charges are sad over the imminent separation from their new best friends.

Camp director Beth (Janeane Garofalo) has her eye on vacationing astrophysics associate professor Henry (David Hyde Pierce). Shy counselor Coop (Michael Showalter) is infatuated with Katie (Marguerite Moreau), but she’s dating resident bad boy Andy (Paul Rudd). Big-talking Victor (Ken Marino) is desperate to score with a ready and willing Abby (Marisa Ryan), but being assigned to take some boys a couple hours away for whitewater rafting may thwart his chance. Susie (Amy Poehler) and Ben (Bradley Cooper) are preoccupied with organizing the evening’s talent show. Arts and crafts teacher Gail (Molly Shannon), whose marriage is in shambles, is about as stable as a macaroni art project.

Written by The State’s Showalter and David Wain, who also directs, and featuring other members of the sketch comedy troupe, WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER unfolds in short episodes from the final day of the season. It begins as a straightforward spoof of late 1970s and early 1980s camp films, programming seemingly in heavy rotation on pay cable movie channels in the mid-’80s. (MEATBALLS, a clear inspiration for this film, is the most prominent example.)

True to The State’s absurdist style, the film evolves into something much weirder and more unpredictable. The humor is rooted in intentional continuity errors, non sequiturs, and montages riffing on films with no relevance to camp comedies. There’s a distinct hit-and-miss quality to the various ideas they’re playing with, but enough of these strange jokes connect for WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER to succeed. For instance, a pep talk before and team response to a big game subverts expectations. Rudd behaves like a petulant toddler when ordered to clean up the mess he makes in the cafeteria.

The execution and exaggeration of the counselors going on an over-the-top bender during an infrequent opportunity to go into town make the montage sufficiently funny, but what elevates the scene is how it reflects real camp life. The same goes for the talent show scene and its host Alan Shemper (Showalter), a Catskills comedian who hasn’t written a joke too hacky to tell. The gag is that none of what hits the camp stage is funny, but the insular community and campers starved for entertainment eat it up. The outsized reactions serve as the punchlines.

In addition to the actors already mentioned, WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER also features Elizabeth Banks, Christopher Meloni, and Michael Ian Black. Like FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH and DAZED AND CONFUSED, the cast is a remarkable assemblage of future stars. Many are now bigger names than those top-billed during the film’s 2001 release.

With a cast decked out in ringer tees with iron-ons in Cooper Black font, tube socks, puka shell necklaces, muscle shirts, and midriffs, WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER evokes warm memories of movies that likely weren’t very good. Oddly, the film plays better when thinking back to it than it necessarily does while watching it. That quality likely owes to the scattershot nature of the humor, but it also indicates that like the best comedies, it improves over time and repeated viewings.

Grade: B-