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No one had brought it up, so I figured I'd mention this since I got through as much of an episode as I could stand...
"Cinema Toast" is a new Showtime series produced by the Duplass brothers and created by Jeff Baena, best known for co-writing I Heart Huckabees, writing and directing Life After Beth and Horse Girl, and being Aubrey Plaza's boyfriend for a decade. The show is, essentially, Mad Movies. It uses public domain footage from movies and short films, edited down into 30 minute episodes, the new dialogue recorded by celebrity comedians and comedic actors to create what is probably intended to be funny (but isn't) experimental shorts.
At first glance of the trailers, it seemed like they were going for pure comedy, but really it's just about the weird juxtaposition of old films from the 40s and 50s having modern dialogue about gays and QAnon and other very current bullshit. It doesn't quite verge on Adult Swim-level anti-comedy, but it's a very tedious watch. The list of good actors is pretty wasted on this riff-adjacent show.
So buyer beware on that. I got through about 5 minutes then skimmed the rest of the episode for anything vaguely interesting or humorous and came up with nothing.
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Apr 23, 2021, 09:02 am
(This post was last modified: Apr 23, 2021, 09:04 am by Miss Martian. Edited 1 time in total.)
Damn that sucks - I always liked that as a format. So glad someone esle but me remembers Mad Movies. I personally thought the firesign theatre did a great job with that format when they ade J-Men Forver out of all those old serials. The SCTV Cisco Kid episode was also a ton of fun too. It seems like a great format - but it also seems really tough to write for.
I may give it a try anyways.
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(Apr 23, 2021, 09:02 am)Miss Martian Wrote: Damn that sucks - I always liked that as a format. So glad someone esle but me remembers Mad Movies. I personally thought the firesign theatre did a great job with that format when they ade J-Men Forver out of all those old serials. The SCTV Cisco Kid episode was also a ton of fun too. It seems like a great format - but it also seems really tough to write for.
I may give it a try anyways.
Tell me what you think. I wish there was something in there to make it interesting, but I just couldn't get anything out of it.
I'm not sure Showtime's even bothering to show it on their channel. They just keep pushing it as being available for streaming.
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I grabbed the full season, but struggled to make it through more than a few episodes. The cast is composed of "the usual suspects", and it's definitely made by and for a certain audience.
Not my cup of tea, that's for sure, but I gave it a go 
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Apr 29, 2021, 19:08 pm
(This post was last modified: Apr 29, 2021, 19:10 pm by Jam Handy. Edited 1 time in total.)
BadFilms - your review is spot on. I've seem much better amateur collage experiments at internet archive, and they aren't expecting to earn a cent.
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I didn't like it either. I barely made it through 10 mins. It was neat to hear Megan Mullally's voice coming out of someone else, but other than the short-lived fun of recognizing voices, it seemed painfully unfunny. (I had no political or topical sort of issues--I probably did not watch long enough. I think this stuff works best as improv in front of an audience. As a segment of Whose Line Is It Anyway? or something, it can be really funny, but in short bursts. The movie What's Up Tigerlilly? was pretty funny but also a little hard to sustain.)
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(Apr 29, 2021, 22:30 pm)Anarchemist Wrote: I didn't like it either. I barely made it through 10 mins. It was neat to hear Megan Mullally's voice coming out of someone else, but other than the short-lived fun of recognizing voices, it seemed painfully unfunny. (I had no political or topical sort of issues--I probably did not watch long enough. I think this stuff works best as improv in front of an audience. As a segment of Whose Line Is It Anyway? or something, it can be really funny, but in short bursts. The movie What's Up Tigerlilly? was pretty funny but also a little hard to sustain.)
I didn't mind the topical socio-political nature itself, it was just the all the "humor" just seemed to be the anachronistic nature of modern dialogue coming out of a 1950s film. It didn't do anything clever with it. Hard to dislike Megan Mullaly, though.
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