Curb Your Enthusiasm

Started by Banky, October 06, 2003, 04:47:13 PM

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Fernando

:yabbse-sad:  yeah, that sucks  :yabbse-sad:

Why didn't they announced from the start that it was the final season?  :(

But...in hbo's main page it says 'Season Finale' not Series', then on the curb site says what abuck quoted, at least to me isn't that clear that the series is done other than the episode is named The End, that worries me.

Edit. At least the ep. is 1 hour long.

abuck1220

larry's going to die...just so he can do the stink eye staredown thing w/ st. peter.

Kal

SPOILERS

SPOILERS




I thought it was going to be an hour... what the hell?

Didnt like it... it was funny first, then I was expecting Dustin Hoffman and the "Heaven" part to be hilarious and it wasnt at all. They could have really used those extra 15 minutes to make it end well.

Damnit I didnt like it and I hope its not the last episode in the series cause that sucks! At least I wanted a great ending.

abuck1220

spoilers


i liked it. there was a world of comedic possibilities in heaven, and i was a little disappointed it didn't go further (especially when i thought it was going to be an hour  :yabbse-angry:). but i still thought it was good. hope it's not the end for the show...if it was, they should have just let him die.

the montage of him doing all that stuff in arizona was hilarious. if you had never seen the show, i'm guessing you'd find zero humor in it, but knowing his character...great stuff.

abuck1220

oh, and i thought we were going to see cheryl's tit for a second there.

and joe mayo was in it.

Pubrick

under the paving stones.

Fernando

Since recently I gain back my satellite privileges, well I obviously saw it.

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

I liked it, not the best ending mind you but I think the best part of it all is that there's a great possibility that this wasn't the final ep. ever.

As soon as I saw Hoffman I started to laugh but I agree that being in heaven it had much more comedic possibilities than what eventually happened there.

The LOL moment in this ep. for me was when Sussie wanted to approach Larry, she said very sweet Larr..and LD was like nah...like don't bother to say goodbye, hahaha that was a pure LD moment.

I only saw the last two ep. of this season so I have eight new to look forward.  :yabbse-thumbup:

grand theft sparrow

SPOILERS

Besides the fact that the show is great, I would be upset if that was the last episode for one reason.  Until he came back, it would have been a great finale.  I would have loved a cliffhanger: kill Larry off in the finale and if season 6 gets greenlit, bring him back.  Let the fate of Larry David the character be bound to the fate of the show itself.

But no...

Other than that, I thought it was a good episode, and Sacha Baron Cohen's presence made me laugh more than Dustin Hoffman's.

MacGuffin

Has Larry kicked it to the 'Curb'?
The 'Enthusiasm' star winds up Season 5, and possibly his series, with an outlandish episode.
Source: Los Angeles Times

*INCLUDES SPOILERS*

When Larry David came back to write the "Seinfeld" finale, he decided to leave his four characters to posterity in a jail cell — imprisoning them, finally, for being uncaring and self-involved, dangerous to the social order. This was David's closing argument, a twist that enabled the episode to act as a comment on all the celebrated, much-quoted behavior of nine seasons.

Sunday night, in what was officially the finale of the fifth season of David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" but felt, maybe, like a bigger kind of finale (the episode was called "The End"), Larry finds out he's actually the product of Gentile parents and converts from nettlesome Jew to beneficent Christian. He gives up his kidney to an ailing Richard Lewis, only to discover on the way to the operating room that the private investigator tracking down his birth parents has made an error. A near-death experience finds him on his way to the afterlife, where he's bounced back to Earth after an argument with a heavenly guide (Dustin Hoffman) over the proper system for storing DVDs.
   
The whole dying process is played as you might imagine Larry David playing it — the weightiest of occasions undermined by petty arguments. In heaven, Larry is berated by his mother, who is played by Bea Arthur ("Who goes around giving their kidney to people? Idiot!" she greets him), while around his deathbed his loved ones haggle over the Blue Book value of a Prius.

It was David throwing the petty fights in which his show has trafficked, the molehills made into mountains, into heightened relief. His whole conversion to the good in himself, followed by the inevitable going-down-with-the-ship of his innate personality, had that "Seinfeld" finale self-awareness to it, even if nobody was saying that this was the end of "Curb."

True, last season ended in grandiose fashion too, with David starring in a Broadway production of "The Producers," but visually and contextually this was a further reach — Larry on a horse in Arizona, Larry hurtling into the afterlife. It didn't entirely work. "Curb" has always been better going for smaller versions of comedic triumph. The show at its best can seem to be about watching David meander from deli to doctor's office to cocktail party, infecting the entire Westside of Los Angeles with his obsession and shame reflexes.

In this, "Curb" became influential, a show that not only lent a certain vogue to the idea of improvising dialogue but also tipped off other comic artists that exploring the obnoxious side of show business personality, in real-time, vérité style, was the way to go. And so you got Kirstie Alley in "Fat Actress" and Lisa Kudrow in "The Comeback," and both proved that what David did looked deceptively easy.

"Curb" has been criticized this season for having played itself out, although the show has essentially remained unchanged — David fantasizing into his id and producing moments, if not entire situations, pitched to articulate the paranoia and social phobias and comical asides that human beings don't otherwise express.

He's the outside voice where most of us would keep it inside, a fact reflected back at him by a strong ensemble cast that plays this well. Having had its debut during HBO's powerhouse Sunday night lineup, coming on after "Sex and the City," "Curb" seems more naked now as the network's fortunes on the night have changed.

Then too, the form of the series has become familiar to viewers, and the same thing that happened to George on the later seasons of "Seinfeld" has happened to David on "Curb Your Enthusiasm": The comedy of him comes across as louder and more obvious.

And yet, it can be hard to determine whether "Curb" has changed or the audience has changed around it. In Season 5, as in Season 1, the smaller predicament builds to the bigger one — like the "Curb" of a few weeks ago, in which Larry tries to curry favor with the head of a kidney transplant consortium and ends up stranded at episode's end on a ski lift with the guy's Orthodox Jewish daughter, who panics that she can't be with a man at sundown.

We know the show's biorhythms by now, so an episode like "The Ski Lift" doesn't play as memorably as, say, "The Doll" from Season 2, in which Larry cuts off the hair of a little girl's doll, causing unimagined repercussions. That life should be good but is fraught with tumult at every turn is the place from which each "Curb" starts.

David took this to a more symbolic place Sunday night; even when we're dying, the other kind of tsimmes doesn't abate. "Curb" was kind of an accident to begin with — an HBO special David did about returning to stand-up comedy post-"Seinfeld" that blossomed into a series — so it would not be out of context for the show to depart on parallel terms.

However far it has fallen off the cultural radar, there's still some kind of touchstone in its complaints.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

abuck1220


Pubrick

Quote from: abuck1220 on December 06, 2005, 04:03:26 PM
Quote from: Pubrick on December 05, 2005, 12:35:30 AM
use this button:

i have a system.
you're gonna have my edit stain in your posts if you don't start using it.
under the paving stones.

Kal

pubrick did you watch the episode?

it was a joke...

Pubrick

Quote from: andyk on December 07, 2005, 01:15:13 AM
pubrick did you watch the episode?

it was a joke...
oh, nah the season hasn't shown in australia yet. regardless, he should use the edit button instead of posting consecutively only minutes apart.
under the paving stones.

Kal

I know... but a big part of the episode is Larry explaining "he has a system", and even if his system doesnt work he insists on it.

Thats why I guess he was joking... but he WILL use the button in the future.

:yabbse-thumbup:

modage

the most awkward (and not in a good Curb way) interviews EVER are available as HBO podcasts on iTunes with Larry David and Jeff Garlin. 
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.