bart got a room: thank you, instant netflix, for making me laugh at love...for once

Bart Got a Room: teen comedrama starring steven j. kaplan and alia shawkat

...and a kick-ass soundtrack.

yeah. it's 4:15 in the morning, and i really liked bart got a room. you may perhaps notice that anything with any of the cast of arrested development in it appears to go on my personal yes list, but it's not just alia shawkat that made me like this so much. i actually laughed out loud, a lot, because the main character was such a straight man, and the comedy sort of behaved like a series of concentric circles: the people a ring outside him were a little nutty, and then you got these pretty darn nutty people a ring away from those people, and then on the fringes were the cameos, which had more to do with perspective than actual nuttiness, but, like, the bride with the broken arm who is walking by? come on, that's funny! the fact that the dad's favorite restaurant is filled with nothing but old people, and him and his son and his series of dates? i don't know. i just liked it. the incidental comedy kind of reminds me of those sort of brief visual, random, ironic jokes that gilmore girls used to make so well. and as the situational humor gets broader the cameos get broader, until finally bart shows up with his date and his suite, and then bart and his date start dancing, so it's like somewhere outside of the main characters' world, napoleon dynamite is going on, if they only knew where to look and how to channel it, but they don't, because they're occupied with their own world. it's really good. i liked it very much.

it actually seems like that's part of the thing that the movie is doing: the miami (?) the movie is showing us isn't the "bienvenidos a miami" side of the locale. rather, it's the retirement, lizard-in-the-house side. there's a cool miami somewhere out there, but it's not the characters' miami. the characters' miami has a lot of retirees buying a single fish at 4 in the afternoon and golf balls in the pool. the main character--danny, that's his name--tries to make his reality match up with some cooler, less virginal, less family-oriented one, but it can't be done. so he accepts it, and, kind of like the kid whose bar mitzvah he crashes, becomes a man...or re-becomes a kid...or acknowledges that he's neither.

yeah. it's really good. the acting is great, the script is great. and the SOUNDTRACK!!! dixieland and klezmer, i think those are what those genres are called, and a bit of some other stuff--yeah. yess. thank you, bart got a room, for promoting such a positive auditory experience.