Jody Hill’s disturbing and dangerous new comedy, the ‘Arrested Development’ creator’s new cartoon, and Taibbi’s harsh look at what we should really be protesting.

Considering the split opinions on this particular film — and the fact that the Under Culture team went out to catch it this week — it seemed appropriate to offer up at least a brief review in case you’re split on whether or not to go see the more maniacal of the year’s mall cop movies. It may be less in-depth than what we normally post here, but in the interest of aiding those on the fence, timeliness may be of the essence. So here goes:

Observe and Report is not an easy movie to watch. This latest strange stab at comedy from writer/director Jody Hill, following Eastbound & Down and Foot Fist Way, continues his pattern of creating humor out of discomfort and shock. His characters are not of the lovable goof or witty outsider mold. They don’t win over their audiences or triumph over obstacles. Hill leads us to alternately despise, pity and sympathize with his protagonists, and as a result, resist either hating or loving them for fear of what that says about us as viewers.

This time around, Hill’s ability to unsettle is at its most evolved: Seth Rogen’s portrayal of a bipolar security guard is at times nasty or violent, at others tender or vulnerable, and sometimes sadly clueless. Observe and Report is not an end-to-end hilarious classic the way Anchorman or 40 Year Old Virgin were, primarily because it does not live fully in the light-hearted realm of comedy. Like Eastbound & Down, it’s more of a character study focused on one pathetic individual’s fight against his own mediocrity. The majority of the humor comes out of deciding whether it’s okay to laugh or not as he blunders through or lashes out at the world he’s trapped in. This isn’t a film of punch lines, it’s an exercise in testing our boundaries and questioning what’s okay to find funny.

So although it’s difficult to come away entirely satisfied having had a purely good time and picked up some quotable new lines, Observe and Report remains a film worth seeing. It’s definitely going to make you laugh, but it also makes you wonder why. It’s a challenging comedy, an absurd drama, and possibly a dangerous experiment to see exactly how funny brutality and meanness and crushed dreams and victorious lunatics can really be.

For more debate and insight, the Onion A.V Club featured both an interesting panel discussion and lengthy interview with director Jody Hill. Both shed more light on why you may not have loved the movie, but will be glad you saw it — assuming you dared to take the plunge, of course.

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Speaking of things that not might be as funny as we’d like them to be: the new project from Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz debuts this Sunday night.

Sit Down Shut Up is an animated comedy featuring the voices of AD alums Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Henry Winkler (promising), plus SNL veterans Will Forte, Kenan Thompson, and Cheri Oteri (troubling), where a gang of quirky cartoon schoolteachers are drawn on filmed real-world backdrops (questionable).

Here’s a video preview to pique your interest, or if you miss Sunday’s pilot episode, it should be available on the Fox site.

As much as I adore about 85% of the three-season run of Arrested Development, this does not get my hopes up. Where that show was subtle and eccentric and different, the jokes in this clip seem largely obvious and typical. Of course, I skipped out on watching the first several seasons of Family Guy because of poorly chosen promo clips, so I’ll be more than happy to be proven wrong and willing to give it a try. Maybe I’ll end up writing again in a week gushing about how you have to see this show, but sadly, my hopes are not high.

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Wrapping up on something that wouldn’t be funny at all if it weren’t for the usual spectacular writing, Matt Taibbi’s ‘The Big Takeover’ article from last month should be mandatory reading. If you have some spare time to understand how screwed up the financial mess really is, especially in light of the misguided ‘we hate taxes!’ protests this week’s teabaggers were so up in arms about, you will find yourself bewildered.

There’s currently only a teaser up at Rolling Stone, but for now at least the full article can be read on Scribd.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — “our partners in the government,” as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

It’s both educational and infuriating to read some real reporting on all the nefarious things corporations are up to that we haven’t the first clue about. It’s sort of sad that so many of us are so out of the loop regarding our own government that we don’t even know what to be genuinely angry about, but luckily there are at least a few people like Taibbi trying to cleave through the jungle of BS.

If you’re hungry for more, he’s also got a new Taibblog as well for other stories to make you red with anger.