Arrested Development: Season 1, Episode 16 "Altar Egos"

Arrested Development: Season 1, Episode 16 "Altar Egos"

March 17, 2004


Ah, now we get to one of my favorites. This episode, “Altar Egos,” plays two-fold with the next episode, “Justice is Blind.” I liked these two episodes together because it proves that Arrested Development can have a storyline that lasts for more than 22 minutes an episode. It also introduces one of my favorite guest stars-Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the blind attorney Maggie Lizer. People seem to be cool on her character, but I really laughed at lot. We get the typical blind jokes, but they work very well. I liked the overall theme of this episode and the next. People pretend to be the person they say they are even though they really are not.



Lots of stuff happen in this episode and every storyline shown here is good for multiple laughs. Michael has a one-night stand with lawyer Maggie Lizer who feels bad for her blindness. But that pity goes away when he finds out Maggie is the lead prosecutor in the case against his family. GOB meets some unnamed woman (played by the delightful Amy Poehler, Will Arnett’s wife), and they end up marrying each other in a series of escalating dares. Barry neglects reading the case file for the trial because he is out searching for love-mainly male prostitutes dressed as women.



Everything was funny, and I really couldn’t stop laughing. Some people say the GOB storyline was superfluous, but I really enjoyed it. As for other things that occurred: Cindi Longbottom played by Jane Lynch revealed to George Sr that she is an FBI Agent but she fell in love with him which calls for divorce from Lucille, a flashback reveals that Michael once played a Peter Pan lawyer in high school, and we have some clear foreshadowing with the involvement of seals. Overall, a brilliant episode!



My Grade: A








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

Image
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.” Ah, wise words from our new young friend, Ferris Bueller. In John Hughes’s 1986 film, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , all Ferris wants to do is take a day and have fun. That is the most simplistic theme the movie has. You can go deeper, but the main takeaway is that it is okay to have fun. That is a motto I have taken to heart. I really loved the film. People consider The Breakfast Club to be Hughes’s best and most important movie. That’s a fine statement to make, but I would personally rank the film number two behind this particular one. The teen characters are instantly relatable, it has a memorable antagonist for the children, and this is basically a thirty-year-old travel guide for Chicago. Just how Woody Allen creates his movies as love letters for New York, this is applicable for John Hughes. A Chicago love letter!   Like all of his films, Hughes wrote
Read more

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Image
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) The James Bond franchise is one of those franchises that will never die. It has been going strong since the first movie rolled out in the early 1960’s, and new James Bond movies are still produced today. What makes this series unique is they use multiple actors to play the titular character over the years. They all bring their own gravitas to the role, and each Bond is a different man when compared to each other (although the martini, shaken not stirred and the beautiful women among other things remain a constant.) So my first James Bond review for this blog is 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me. This wasn’t my first look at the series, but it was my first look at the older movies. I really liked what I saw. This is an old-fashioned story that combines a spy drama and an action-packed war movie into one package. Like many of the older Bond movies, the story can get borderline preposterous. The cheesiness of the plot did come to grow on me after awhile, even
Read more

Broadcast News (1987)

Image
  Broadcast News (1987) If you watched the trailer for James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News , you would be forgiven if you thought this film is about a romantic love triangle set in a news station. Yes, there are aspects of romance, but it is way more than that. Brooks is a very smart, adept director who makes a living in creating deep, meaningful characterizations. In my eyes, Brooks had ideas about how work can overtake personal lives and any romance for these workaholics is essentially just a front because quite frankly, these people love to work…as we see detailed with our main characters. In addition, this film is quite informative. Even in 1987, news stations were more about entertainment and the looks, rather than delivering the actual news itself. It was a newer trend that eventually took over networks. With all the insanity within the newsroom, this film manages to find humanity within its characters. This is a detailed human portrait that is engaging, emotional, and comedic. Ja
Read more