Modern Family S4E8: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

On this week's Modern Family: Phil unwittingly sets up a date with a gay man (guest star Matthew Broderick) and Manny and Luke go bar mitzvah hopping while Claire supports Alex during her academic competition. Mitch spends the day shopping for baby gear with his father and Cam gives Gloria and Jay a surprise gift.  

He said...

Things aren't always how they seem, and we often grow from misinterpretation. That appeared to be the cliche that Modern Family worked its charming way around in this episode. The subplots of this episode focused around some situations that we don't see too often in the show: Claire and Alex, Luke and Manny, Mitchell and Jay, Cam and Gloria, and Phil and the stranger. Some definitely worked better than others. Since these are in no particular order and happen more or less simultaneously, I'll just go over them in the order that I listed them.

I think that the Claire and Alex dynamic is somewhat interesting mostly due to the changing nature of Alex as she grows up. Claire is and has been somewhat narcissistic and less than tactful in displaying her own emotions. The two of them go out of town to follow Alex to some academic competition that she wins every year without fail. The whole time they're on the trip Claire won't stop bragging about how good Alex is and that she wins every year, but she tries to play it off like it doesn't matter. I think Julie Bowen really did a great job in this episode. I really felt painfully embarrassed for her when she was bragging to the other moms and Alex gets shut down in the first round. In this episode, Mother and daughter alike both grow somewhat. Alex starts to grow out of the cookie-cutter need to win every single event and be the best of the best while Claire learns a bit of humility in losing. In the past few episodes we've seen Alex changing a lot, with Haley coming in and out of the house and she's going through some major defining years of her adolescence. I think that soon we'll see Alex taking a new direction in life.

As for Luke and Manny, I really enjoy the segments they have together and would like Modern Family to show more of them in the future. Luke is always hilariously cynical and amoral, while Manny is (usually) the polar opposite. In this episode though, Manny is swept up in another one of his love-at-first-sight moments and needs to connect with some girl he saw in the lobby. He convinces Luke to use his conniving ways to get them into crashing multiple Bar Mitzvahs in the hopes of finding Manny's dream girl. For Luke though, it's really about the danger and the gift bags. Luke's one of my favorite characters and he doesn't disappoint in this episode. I lost it when he got hoisted up for the chair dance. Manny grows up a bit in this episode too and gets a little more action than usual, just a little though.

Another interaction we don't see very often was between Mitchell and Jay. The show has always made it clear that the two did not have a good relationship growing up and they lean pretty heavily on that in this episode. I wasn't that fond of this sub-plot because it seemed to be pretty cookie-cutter. Not many surprises, and a few laughs here and there. The larger picture is that we do get to see a bit of Jay's vulnerability in this episode. Without giving too much away, it was good to see their relationship take another step in the right direction.

The Cam and Gloria segment was ok. It didn't do too much for me until the aha! moment right at the end when Cam finally revealed his gift. Now that was really something. The rest of the episode Cam is basically just stalling, trying to get Gloria to avoid the upstairs while his gift was being finished. Gloria is still somewhat stale and doesn't really show that much depth to her character. The whole time she just thinks Cam is trying to run her day and control everything, which to be fair he usually does. I would call this and the Jay/Mitchell plots the weakest ones of the episode, unless I guess you really like Gloria or Cam's stories.



Really though the shining moments of the episode come from Phil and guest star Matthew Broderick (Dave). Though there aren't any real Buellarian moments in this episode, Broderick's character is convincing and the situation is hilarious. Phil and his usual caring, oblivious nature leads him to not understanding that Dave is actually a gay man that was trying to pick up a date at the gym. He is also, coincidentally, a very good friend of Cam's. The writers really did an excellent job of weaving this plot together with Cam directing Dave by phone at every turn and simultaneously (unwittingly) setting up the perfect date night for Phil and Dave. The dramatic irony plays out perfectly and it is hilarious to see Phil just being Phil, but coming off as aggressively advancing the mood of the man date he was on. Dave being in an emotional state after a hard break up just makes it all the more perfect. The ending was hysterical and altogether I think everything tied together pretty nicely. Overall, I'd say this was a pretty good episode.

Overall Rating: 8.5/10
- Could have done more with Cam/Gloria and Jay/Mitchell subplots
- Phil and Dave scenario is a riot
- I'm a sucker for Manny and Luke's antics
- Overall, another consistently good episode  

She said...

I had fun watching Ty Burrell and Matthew Broderick's scenes on Modern Family this week. It all starts when Phil invites a fellow Bulldog alum (Dave) to his house so he can have a guy's night out while Claire's out of town.


Dave had just come from a break-up and took Cam's advice to get out there, have fun, and meet some new guys. This segment was cleverly done and just plain hilarious. Even though nothing was said between the two, their actions said it all. Phil was oblivious to what was going on and his actions towards Dave kept him hoping for something more interesting to happen.

 

Phil tends to be a little slow at times and not really know what's going on. The tension kept rising and I kept hoping for Phil to realize what he was doing, but I'm glad it ended the way it did. However, the other segments didn't shine as much as this segment did. It seemed like it was just filler for the episode compared to what was going on with Ty Burrell's character.



Luke and Manny's bar mitzvah hopping didn't do anything for that episode. I did laugh at a couple of their scenes, but Burrell and Broderick definitely stole the show. Cam and Gloria's scenes got kind of boring, but the surprise baby gift was pretty funny! Claire and Alex's scenes during the academic competition didn't add anything new either. She was just the overly proud mom who wanted to brag about her incredibly smart daughter to everyone. I thought it was funny though when she bragged about her 2-day cushion and complained about how she paid more money for one last year.  

Overall Rating: 7/10

Ty Burrell and Matthew Broderick really took it home with this episode. You're not going to miss anything in terms of plot, but if you want to see those two guys be hilarious together then go ahead and watch! Oh and don't forget about the surprise baby gift!  

All images are used courtesy of ABC and Modern Family.

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Movie Review: Wreck-It Ralph

We take a stroll through "Game Central Station" in this review of Wreck-It Ralph. Tired of being treated like the bad guy, Ralph starts on his quest for a golden medal so he can be treated like a hero. He enters the game Hero's Duty, claims the medal, but gets catapulted into the racing game Sugar Rush with a cy-bug in tow. The adventure stars when he meets Vanellope Von Schweetz, a glitch in Sugar Rush, who steals his golden medal and uses it as a token so she can participate in the race.  

He said... 

A love letter to gamers. That's what Wreck-It Ralph is. Bear in mind, I'm not talking about the typical "casual" gamer that flicks birds from catapults and answers the call of duty. No, I'm not talking about your tablet-toting soccer mom or cubicle farmville addict. I'm talking about the core gamers. Wreck-It Ralph is an homage to what has become "the classics" while still mixing in the modern age. I would call myself a core gamer, and because of the subject matter, I'm going to do this review like one. If you want a review from another perspective, go down this page a few notches and check out Krisma's take on it. 

 

Aerith Lives. And now, so does Ralph. Wreck-It Ralph does something that I can't recall too many others doing. It uses iconic video game characters and references (a lot of them) and actually uses them well. Just from the header image alone you can see plenty of cameos from very popular games and/or franchises. Kano actually DOES do his classic heart-ripping fatality (although it is on a zombie, so I guess he's technically not killing him). It caused controversy in some circles, but I thought it was awesome they put it in nonetheless. Who says Disney doesn't like to push the envelope every now and again? 

  

That's just one of the many, many examples of references in the movie, but you're probably tired of reading about them and you can just go google them anyway. Ok, one more that I got a kick out of was when Ralph was rummaging through a box and the Metal Gear Solid "!" appeared. Classic. Where the movie really shines though is in its implicit references. The game Ralph is from is probably some kind of mashup of Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. but set in the modern age. Fix-it Felix is pretty obviously an homage to classic Mario or Jumpman in the Donkey Kong games, and Ralph himself is big, bulky and throws stuff down at Felix much like Donkey Kong. That got lengthy real fast, but the point I'm trying to get across here is that everything in this movie is an homage or reference to some other games. The story is about Ralph leaving his own game in order to become a hero. He's sick of the day in, day out bad guy business. The opposite reality of this movie portrays all the characters in the game just acting their parts as the user plays in order to keep getting more plays to stay plugged in. All of the games in the arcade are (quite obviously) connected to electrical sockets. Inside of those power strips is "Game Central Station" where the characters go once the arcade closes shop, with some even being left behind once their game is canned. 

 

Without getting too much into the nitty-gritty of the plot, I'll just let you know that Ralph bounces around a few places: his own game, Hero's Duty (A riff on popular war/sci-fi fps's: Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, etc.), and Sugar Rush. Sugar Rush is a tongue-in cheek reference to all the racers of old, probably most notably the different iterations of Mario Kart, maybe even Diddy Kong Racing. I really enjoyed how they were able to integrate popular gaming culture and references without needing the explicit characters and still creating their own environments. It was a lot of fun to see what kind of movie could be made by, well, gamers. I'm just gonna go ahead and say it. For any movie to be this meticulous it must have been made (or at least largely creatively directed) by gamers. I refuse to believe otherwise. 

Even though this movie is what you might typically expect of a Disney movie (heart-warming, bright, unrealistically positive) on a lot of levels, it carries over well to many audiences (something you might also typically expect of Disney movies). The dialogue can be clever, the video game references innumerable, and the visuals are crisp and eye-catching. There's a lot of good character development and they get you (got me at least) to the point of being emotionally involved with the characters. The climactic scene got me a little teary eyed and I was glad I went on this ride with that big, clumsy oaf in the overalls. That's not to say the the film was without its faults. I think that they could have done a better job combining the different segments of the movie. To some extent it feels a bit episodic since Ralph travels to different games and the scenery shift is so sudden and immense. I would have liked them to explore the scenery of the games a bit more and integrate them into the story line better, but I can understand issues due to time constraints. I know that no movies get it right, but being an engineer, I have to nitpick at the way they represented the guts of a game's programming. They did a much better job of representing code than other movies, but I have to say it could still stand to be more accurate. Really, I don't have many too bad things to say about this movie and I personally enjoyed it a great deal. 

Positives

• Great visuals and environments
• Plenty of references for gamers to get excited about
• Accessible to many audiences
• Fun for the kids and adults

Negatives

• Feels a bit episodic
• Programming doesn't exactly work that way.

9.2/10 - Go see it!  

She said... 

Confession time: I'm not a gamer. The only games I've really played are Bejeweled and Temple Run, but I watched this movie with Tim because he was so excited about it. And I'm glad I did because it was so fun seeing all the cameos from popular games like Street Fighter, Sonic, Pac-Man, and even Dance Dance Revolution! All the actors were good at portraying their characters and John C. Reilly really made me feel like he was Ralph. But every time I heard Sgt. Jean and Fix-it Felix, Jr. talk, all I could think of was Jane Lynch in Glee and Jack McBrayer in 30 Rock. It kind of bugged me because instead of thinking of them as the characters they portrayed in the movie, I kept thinking of them in their most popular roles instead. Jane Lynch acted like she always does on Glee and although McBrayer embraced his character more, I just couldn't get 30 Rock out of my head. This isn't a big negative to the movie though and I'm sure most people could get past that. 

 

Ralph's character development and Vanellope's role in the movie really surprised me. Vanellope was very self-assured and embraced her glitches in contrast to Ralph's dissatisfaction and insecurity. I appreciated the message that Disney was trying to say through their interactions with each other and it made the characters that much more relatable. 

 

I agree with Tim about the transitions though - they weren't as smooth as they could've been and the movie jumped around a lot between the different games. However, the special effects and the backgrounds were superbly done. Everything was crisp and clean and it really made me want to jump in Sugar Rush and eat everything! The sound effects and game-like character gestures and movements made me feel like they were real games and that I was living in the same world as them. 

 

There's not a lot of bad things to say about this movie and as a whole children and adults will have a great time watching it. All the gamers out there will appreciate the references and even if you're not a serious gamer like me, you'll still enjoy all the game cameos and special effects.  

Overall Rating: 9.5 / 10 Positives:

• Great message
• Special effects are superb
• Character development

Negatives:

• Transitions not smooth
• Voice actors distracted me a bit

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