In retrospect, the early 2010s era of UCB/Second City-dominated comedy will go down as my favorite, and one that seems impossible to reproduce — the joy in all of these various productions (Bajillion Dollar Properties et al) is that everyone seemed so game to hop in for a couple scenes, and so you'd end up with things like this movie, where the call sheet reads pornographic a decade later: Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Cobie Smulders, Max Greenfield, Bill Hader, Ellie Kemper, Jason Mantzoukas, Ed Helms, Kenan Thompson, Adam Scott, the list goes on. It is hard to imagine this existing today — comedy has become a little too Moneyball'd, and Paul Rudd's stardom (and scheduling demands) make it much harder to imagine him dropping in for a week of shooting this kind of entertaining-but-middling fare.

I don't mean to say that this movie is "bad" when I say it's middling — this is, in fact, the kind of thing that I wish there was more of! It's silly, inconsequential, and with enough hits to justify its existence. David Wain's brand of post-post-ironic absurdity always treads the line of being too much for me, and here I think (in no small part because I am so fond of both the troupe and the source material) he nails it. This is a great way to spend eighty minutes; it is not my favorite comedy in the world, but I laughed and was left smiling.

★★★★