Tuesday, April 4, 2017

A good couple days for Will Arnett


I hope you were one of the lucky ones who managed to watch Netflix Live - Canceled, as it has already gone the way of the dodo bird.

Netflix' April Fool's Day joke didn't last much longer than April 1st. I looked for it here at the end of the night on April 3rd, and found that it is no more.

But in the short time it existed it was glorious. The setup was this: Netflix was supposed to be testing out some kind of live program, but when it went belly up, Will Arnett was left at an anchor desk, providing color commentary on mundane activities around the office. You know, kind of like that Bill Murray Christmas special from a few years ago, only funny and with less singing.

And boy was it funny, thanks in no small part to Arnett's brilliant dry delivery. In the 48-minute program, Arnett commented (in agonizingly wonderful real time) on such activities from around the Netflix office as a burrito cooking in the microwave, a toaster toasting toast, a man getting a printout from the printer, two people thumb wrestling, a person trying to parallel park (that was the best), a guy doing a crossword puzzle, and whether a puddle would get stepped in or not.

It was a hoot. I laughed out loud multiple times. And it looks like (for now) you can still get it here.

Two nights later I got out to see Arnett in again, in The Lego Batman Movie, which has finally opened here now that school holidays have begun. Oddly enough, this also contains a scene of Arnett waiting for something to cook in the microwave for longer we would expect, though the team of Lego writers cut it short at about 15 seconds, as opposed to the full three minutes and thirty seconds in Netflix Live - Canceled.

That microwave scene in Lego Batman is followed by probably the funniest single scene of the movie, as Arnett's Batman sits in a bat jet ski floating in the bat cave, surrounded by a bunch of bat aquatic vehicles, eating a lobster (shell and all) with loud crunching sounds that echo through the space.

But that wasn't nearly the only time I laughed in this movie, which I think I liked just a little more than its predecessor, definitely preferring Arnett as my lead to Chris Pratt. (I like Pratt in other things but did not much care for his performance there.) That Arnett delivery gets me every time.

So yeah, Arnett has done a good job wiping out my memory of his Netflix show Flaked. No amount of delivery helped the two episodes we watched of that.

But hey, without Flaked we may never have gotten Netflix Live - Canceled.

Watch it before Netflix makes YouTube take it down.

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