Monthly Archives: November 2013

Analog This: The Pete Holmes Show Is Quietly Reinventing Late Night

Image via PopWatch

Late night isn’t what it used to be. Besides the fact that most people are just watching the highlights online, there’s just way too many hosts and way too many shows to choose from.

During the 11 PM hour, I have to choose between Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Conan O’Brien, who are all personal heroes of mine. Two weeks ago, Comedy Central kicked off “@Midnight,” which proved to be a surprisingly smart and fun way to combine TV and social media into a game show format. There’s a reason that Chris Hardwick now hosts everything ever.

Then one week later, “The Pete Holmes Show” premiered on TBS at the exact same time. After two or three episodes, I was sold. Granted, I was already a huge fan of Pete Holmes through both his standup and his podcast “You Made It Weird.” Holmes’ standup is endearingly goofy and consistently sharp in its observations. “You Made It Weird” focuses on a loose conversation that is funny and enlightening and often pushes the three hour mark. Holmes is both one of the most talented stand-ups working today, and host of a podcast that is often better than some of its more well-known contemporaries.


In his new show, Holmes takes both his skills as a comedian and his skills as a great conversationalist and shoves them into a half hour that is abundant with jokes that never feels rushed or crammed in. Normally, it takes a late night host a while to get settled in. Just ask Conan, who serves as this show’s executive producer. However, Holmes already looks like he has the gist of it after just a little more than a week on the air. That’s probably because this is Pete’s show. He built it from the ground up (with a little help from his friends) and then put his name on it. There is no legacy that he has to preserve. With that pressure off, all he has to worry about is being funny. After all, that is his job.

Because of this sense of freedom, Holmes has quietly been tweaking with the late night format while also showing great respect for it. Unlike most late night shows, “The Pete Holmes Show” always opens with a pre-taped sketch. Lately, he’s had multiple parodies of James Bond and X-Men. Neither of these things are that relevant to pop culture at the moment, but who cares. It seems wrong to make jokes about something over a year old, but the bits are so funny that the time that they air seems irrelevant.

After the opening credits, its naturally time for the monologue. Instead of firing off a bunch of one-liners about the day’s current events, Holmes instead does a few minutes of stand-up. One night, he might tell a long story about going to an Enrique Inglesias concert. Another night, he might go on a rant about farmers and Daylight Savings Time. You never know. What is beautiful about this is that Holmes is bringing unpredictability back to late night.

And of course, the show ends with an interview. Just like the monologue, the interview format can change from episode to episode. One episode last week featured a pre-taped interview with Allison Williams in which they sat in their pajamas and ate ice cream. When guests come on, they rarely discuss the products that they are actually there to promote. Holmes incorporates the laid back and friendly atmosphere on “You Made It Weird” into his TV show and makes his interviews unforced and fun.

Analyzing the reason why a certain joke is funny tends to ruin the joke. However, I will say that “The Pete Holmes Show” fully embraces the philosophy of comedy, especially improvisation. Pete Holmes always has the attitude to just go with it, and when he accidentally goes off script (which he does a lot), or laughs at his own jokes (which he also does a lot), he embraces the “yes, and.” This can sometimes be disastrous, but because Holmes is so naturally funny and quick on his feet, he can always turn an awkward moment into a fun and hilarious one.

“The Pete Holmes Show” clearly comes from somebody who loves both comedy and late night television more than most people. It is with this knowledge that he is able to move the format forward. He can play with conventions without being sarcastic or mean. As Holmes has stated on his podcast, people enjoy a monologue and an interview because the familiarity of it is comforting. “The Pete Holmes Show” is not radically new but rather a much needed breath of fresh air.

You can tell how different “The Pete Holmes Show” is just from the look of it. The set is decorated with paintings that look like they come directly from the walls of NerdMelt, one of America’s best alt-comedy venues which happens to be inside a comic book store*, and perpetuates the “we’re all in this together” comedy mentality.

Pete doesn’t even need to wear a suit to show you that he knows what he’s doing. Ladies and gentlemen: the new future king of late night wears Converse.

*NerdMelt is located inside Meltdown Comics on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. If you live in LA and have never been to a show there, go as soon as humanly possible.

Here are some of Pete’s funniest stand-up bits:

Movie Review: Evil Dead (2013)

Image via YouTube

Well, if you’re going to remake a classic that didn’t need to be remade, then you might as well remake it like this.

“Evil Dead” pulls a Sean Parker and removes the “The.” While it would be funny if this was the only change made in this remake, “Evil Dead” defies a lot of expectations by actually being its own movie. Unlike the recent “Carrie” remake, “Evil Dead” knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be: a spectacularly gory horror movie. At that, it definitely succeeds.

Once again, “Evil Dead” begins with a group of young adults heading up for a pleasant weekend in a cabin in the woods. At this point, you’d think that people would watch enough horror movies to know that you’re probably screwed if you go to stay in a cabin in the woods.* Even if reminders of “The Evil Dead” past abound, including the car, a deck of cards, and that ticking clock, this new group has no clue what they’re in for.

You could sit there and try and figure out which character is supposed to be in the place of which character from the original, or you could look at them as separate people. The characters in “Evil Dead” are definitely more fully fleshed out than in the original, even though their paper-thin nature is what made the characters originally so funny. The most important characters here are David (Shiloh Fernandez) and his sister Mia (Jane Levy). Their mother had died, David wasn’t there for them, and Mia tries to get off drugs once and for all.

While the original almost immediately jumps into demon play, “Evil Dead” takes its sweet time, which allows for some solid buildup. During this time, we learn that Olivia (Jessica Lucas) is a nurse who is somewhat helpful to Mia, even though she doesn’t realize that her possession isn’t actually withdrawl. Meanwhile, Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) finds the infamous Sumerian text and begins to piece together what is really going on. You see, Eric is smart, and we know this because he has long hair, a beard, and glasses. Meanwhile, we learn that Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore) is an attractive blonde who is in this movie because she is an attractive blonde. At least Fede Alvarez gives his caricatures decent backstories.

These cabin dwellers are certainly a little less oblivious than the first bunch, or at least they are the victims of some plausible misdirection. Also, the demons themselves are a little different this time around. It seems to be more clear where they come from, and they are also much more personal in their taunting. This comes back to how well developed the characters are at the beginning. Yet David, like Ash, doesn’t have much more of a comeback beyond “Shut up!”

Once everyone figures out what exactly is going on, “Evil Dead” is relentless. It relishes it buckets of blood and shocking violence. I don’t use the word “shocking” lightly because that is something that is nearly impossible to do nowadays. “Evil Dead” shows everything from discarded flesh to mutilated arms. Normally, this would be just too much and if this already sounds like too much for you, then you definitely should not watch “Evil Dead.” Yet, “Evil Dead” earns the right to show too much, as the film tries to replicate the experience of hell literally breaking loose on earth.

“Evil Dead” also highlights how well the original film holds up today, despite many sequels, knockoffs, and raised stakes in gore and torture porn. There’s still nothing as perplexing and weird as a tree coming to life and committing rape. That scene is handled quite differently in the remake, as if here it is actually trying to give itself a purpose for existing. Maybe it just really felt the need to be in the remake, given how infamous that scene is. The great thing about “Evil Dead” is that you don’t need to be a fan of the original trilogy in order to enjoy it. Yet, those who are will find themselves rewarded. “Evil Dead” was produced by Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, who clearly knew which scenes fans were dying to get recreated.

“Evil Dead” might be even more bloody disgusting than the original, but its also surprisingly more hopeful. “Evil Dead” is as much a redemption story as it is a horror film. Independent from the original, it is a high quality horror film, mining screams from the utmost depths of unimaginable fright. It is just as scary to see an arm pop out of the ground and scare someone as it is to see someone saw off their own arm in order to save themselves. These are two things that happen in “Evil Dead,” many times over.

Unfortunately, “Evil Dead” loses a few valuable traits in its translation from 1981 to 2013. It lacks the visceral sense of humor of “The Evil Dead” as well as its audacity and simplicity. The original felt like commentary on all of horror in general. Through a bleeding projector and some off-putting point of view shots, the film transported the viewer right into it and then asked if they still enjoyed watching a horror film as it tore itself apart from the inside. The new one is a bit more of a back-to-basics horror film, often asking the audience to just sit back and be scared. That is not necessarily a bad thing, because “Evil Dead” delivers damn well on that promise. Still, it sometimes feels like “Evil Dead” homogenizes a revolutionary cult classic.

Nonetheless, “Evil Dead” is a fine practice in plausible insanity. Despite a lack in laughs, it never takes itself too seriously. “Evil Dead” is a sometimes fun, sometimes scary, practice in developing a bunch of characters, and then trying to find ways to kill them all off.

*Come on, guys. This is why Cancun was invented!

IT’S JUST LIKE “THE HAPPENING” LULZ. Image via Bitch Magazine