Binge-r #185: The Iliza Shlesinger Sketch Show + Parasite
Lady Parts: Iliza Shlesinger fronts The Iliza Shlesinger Sketch Show
THE ILIZA SHLESINGER SKETCH SHOW S1
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All six episodes new streaming
There were two reasons I was keen on finding a good new sketch comedy series. The first is, well, the world circa early April 2020, and the second is that I can’t keep going back to my favourite pieces from last year’s bolt-out-of-the-blue Netflix success I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson [full review here]. Comedian and actor Iliza Shlesinger already has a handful of stand-up specials on Netflix, and her take on the sketch show translates her strengths fairly well – a confident tone that become convulsive, a skewering of pop culture’s failings, and an eye for idiosyncratic characters. Shlesinger doesn’t do brain-bending concepts as well as Robinson, or strafe the inequities of gender as Amy Schumer did on her sketch show, but she is solidly funny and sneakily hilarious – her best jokes are infiltrators.
Beginning with Female Jackass, a TV send-up which is tender when you expect abrasive and vice-versa that becomes a recurring bit, the mood alternates between brisk satire and happily deranged fare – a budget airline and Shlesinger’s nightmarish CEO, Cashew Albacore (“fasten your meatbelts!”), are the first signs of her loopy range. Individual bits can run too long, but when revisited they can erupt into a different tone. Shlesinger plays Kip Wazzle, Nicole Kidman’s very Aussie stunt double, hosts a show called Make it Nice, and updates the Jodie Foster film Nell with a bonkers restaurant sketch. Given that each episode is just 20 minutes in length, you can treat them like comic palate cleansers before hitting your other series. And the best episode to start with? Number four.
The House Always Wins: Cho Yeo-jeong (Mrs Park) in Parasite
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
PARASITE (Stan, 2019, 132 minutes): Bong Joon-ho is the most brutal of filmmakers, yet in the scaldingly thrilling Parasite the bloodletting is the last and least of his transgressions. Made with gilded precision and sardonic assurance, so that you happily barrack for wrongdoing and readily mistake jealousy for necessity, this South Korean hit picked up Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay just three months ago. Debuting on Stan tomorrow, the movie follows an impoverished Seoul family – first seen scrounging free Wi-Fi – who seize on an opportunity to infiltrate a wealthy household, taking jobs and soon after liberties. With Hitchcock-like set-pieces and Bunuel’s scabrous humour, Bong uses architecture and amorality to chart the unspoken range of inequality and the cruel degradations that flourish in its wake; Bong hates the game, not the players. The writer-director’s two previous films, 2013’s Snowpiercer and 2017’s Okja, are both currently available (and required viewing) on Netflix, but Parasite is the timely summation of a career that stretches back to 2000’s Barking Dogs Never Bite. It is tragically complete.
New on Netflix: A late career masterpiece from Paul Schrader, First Reformed (2017, 113 minutes) stars Ethan Hawke as a priest questioning the purpose of his faith in a story told with both austerity and moments of cinematic transcendence; BlacKkKlansman (2018, 135 minutes) is a politically urgent 1970s drama with John David Washington and Adam Driver going undercover, but it’s also a luxuriously assured piece of filmmaking from Spike Lee..
New on SBS on Demand: As Teddy Kennedy, a U.S. Senator whose immense privilege was confronted by a young woman’s death in 1969, Jason Clarke gives a remarkable performance in Chappaquiddick (2017, 102 minutes) at the centre of an unstinting political drama; Marshland (2014, 100 minutes) is a murky Spanish crime procedural, set in a remote 1970s community and quietly effective in terms of pungent atmosphere and plot twists.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here for reviews of two new and very different Netflix shows: the intimate and deeply felt Netflix drama Unorthodox plus the poorly executed docuseries How to Fix a Drug Scandal.
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