I’m back.
For those of you who keep pretty close tabs on me (and I can only assume there are many of you), you may have noticed that I’ve been largely absent from this site. Well, a recent upheaval at my real job in addition to a brutal and ongoing series of apartment moves kept me detained for the better part of June. Luckily, my loyal staff (who, if you recall, I instructed to pull their heads out of their assess in my previous post) pulled me through the rough patch with a series of exceptional articles. Well, their heads were decidedly out of their assess, and this site couldn’t have survived without them.
Much has happened since I’ve been gone. The Love Guru was released, further sullying hockey’s popularity among Americans. Thankfully, in an inadvertent act of contrition, Canadian avant-gardist Guy Maddin’s latest My Winnipeg (which, if I’m correct and all Canadians obsess about nothing but hockey, could only be about the now defunct Winnipeg Jets) arrived in Chicago this weekend. But most important, Will Smith’s newest vanity project Hancock opened today. Important not because I give a damn about the numerous blunders of Mr. Smith’s carrer, but because the always likable Jason Bateman plays an integral role in the film. This is noteworthy first of all because I’m always glad to see Arrested Development alumni get exposure, but more so because it has reawakened for me that sleeping giant of a rumor: the potential Arrested Development movie.
The first hint of this appeared in the show itself, in the series finale, to be exact, during which producer Ron Howard made a cameo in which he jokingly hinted at the possibility of a film adaptation of the Bluth’s misadventures. Adding fuel to the fire was star Jason Bateman who, while doing the publicity circuit for Juno, mentioned that he was in talks with the show’s creator Mitchell Hurwitz about reprising his role as Micheal Bluth (by the way, that clip is worth it just to see MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann imitate a GOB-style “come on”). In the months following, more AD cast members corroborated Bateman’s story, giving definite shape to the project. Then, as recent as last week, Bateman emerged again to confirm that Hurwitz did indeed have a rough outline of the story.
Bateman mentions that Hurwitz’s intention is not to simply film “four episodes back to back” but to create something “specific to the medium of film.” What he might mean by that is anybody’s guess, but the history of television-to-film experiments presents a not-so-promising precedent. SNL’s notorious reputation for shitting out cinematic adaptations of paper-thin sketches — with only Wayne’s World and Stuart Saves His Family serving as clear standouts in the group — obviously brings down that average somewhat, but even adaptations that could have been promising like The Simpsons or Borat arrived flat and ultimately underwhelming in their big screen debuts. What makes Arrested Development potentially immune to this?
Well, the top notch writing for one. AD felt more like a film than a TV show not only because it didn’t allow itself to be self-contained from episode to episode — granted, a concept not new to the medium — but beyond that its sense of pacing was akin to something you’d find in a film. It resisted the temptation to lead the audience by the hand from joke to joke, opting to instead launch inside references, subtle one-liners and thinly veiled meta-criticism of the show itself at the viewer a mile a minute.
The show’s modus operandi appeared to be that if you missed out on something, that was your loss. This alienating sense of humor ultimately led to the its untimely downfall, but you really have to admire the resolve on the part of the show’s creators to not water down the material for mass consumption. Even shows that provided an ongoing storyline didn’t come close to achieving what this show did. Arrested Development was organic in its construction. It required that you take it in as a whole rather than separate episodes. You can fault it for the foolishness of its erudite approach when attempting to reach a mass audience on FOX, but you have to respect the boldness with which Hurwitz chose to approach this unconventionally brilliant comedy. For a supposedly throwaway sitcom, that’s something special. Hopefully the film seizes upon this genius and delivers a product that longtime fans of the show can truly respect.
