 Day 20, Greener Grass, suggested in a hat trick by Franklin Distalt's Vague and seconded by 20 people. I, uh, think we need to turn up the saturation on this a little bit, don't you? I grew up across the street from a soccer field. Every Saturday morning, the living room would fill with the screams of children and cheers of parents and vice versa. Occasionally, a stray ball would end up in our yard and some tiny child would run over, apologize, and then get back to the game. I played soccer for one year and one day. At the first practice of what would have been my second season, I just stopped caring. My parents asked if I wanted to continue and I said no. We never went back. Imagine the mortification that must have brought them, me obviously being over this whole thing while all of the other five-year-olds were taking it real serious like. Now imagine the most absurd way that a suburban parent might try to avoid that mortification. Then give that parent braces a golf cart, fill a town with them, and basically you've got greener grass. Don Lubey and Jocelyn DeBoer met in 2011 here in New York at the Upright Citizens Brigade and found each other to be kindred spirits. Both middle children from Miss Western suburbs ultimately decided to partner up when they moved to LA, writing and starring in three short films, Greener Grass, Buzz, and The Arrival, before using that first project as a launchpad for something much bigger. Greener Grass was actually first pitched as a television series, but ultimately it was determined that a feature would be more appropriate. And while I totally see how you could make six seasons plus this movie out of that creepy little burb, I imagine there would have been budgetary constraints that would have impacted the ability for these two to make the world that they envisioned last so long. Because it really is a world. Sure, you've seen places like this town before so many times, but never, never quite in this way. Those usual perfectly manicured lawns and matching outfits are the sort of thing you would see in any movie about creepily happy people in a suburb, but most of them have cars and teeth that are already perfect. A town of golf carts and adult braces is just kind of weird, as is how unperturbed they are by some truly wacky shit. One of these days I want to have a big discussion about surrealism versus absurdism in cinema, but suffice it to say that Greener Grass is hecka fucking absurd. I mean, it's a movie that opens with Jill, played by DeBoer, giving her baby to Lisa, played by Luby at soccer game because Lisa says she loves this baby, and like, put yourself in that situation. What do you do? The politest thing in the world would be to offer up your child, right? Of course, Lisa would have been much politer to respectfully decline, but she didn't. She takes the child, and so Madison becomes Paige. And that's hardly the strangest thing that happens. This is a world where children can fall into a pool and become dogs and still have to go to school, but they're dogs, where a person can put a soccer ball under their shirt and now everyone believes that they're pregnant. And when they give birth to a soccer ball, everyone accepts that it is a real baby and should be in all future family portraits. It's just what it is. We're calling someone a school, but in a literal sense, as in a place with classrooms inside of them is treated as a really cutting insult. No one thinks any of this is weird, and each time you think that Jill is going to be called out for the objectively terrible thing that she did, the reality is weirder. Her husband is only annoyed that she didn't ask. Another friend is angry that Jill didn't give the kid to her, and when Jill asks Lisa if she can have her baby back, Lisa gets incredibly offended. But even if the consequences are as absurd as the initial act, this is a movie about someone who loses everything because she wanted so badly to commit to the backwards values of this place. She makes a bad choice in a moment of impulse, and that is the pulled thread that unravels everything. Unless she can break out of the cycle, Jill will end up with nothing, and watching her come to terms with what she has done, what it means about her, and what it means about the place that she lives and the people she surrounds herself with is deeply sad and super funny. Like, greener grass is hilarious. I love me some absurdist comedy in general, but this thing is non-stop jokes. Even the most blatantly sad shit is still played for laughs, and each performer totally nails that particular vibe, making this whole thing feel consistent if not necessarily coherent, and it's critical to have that consistency to make the dramatic beats underneath that comedy feel earned. The ridiculousness isn't some sort of crutch, it's key to the satirical vision that is found across all of the pair's projects, but is most fully realized here. They know what they want to communicate, and how. So the rest of us just get to have a grand old time watching it all play out. 8.2 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching, and thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Hammer and Marco, Kat Saracota, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliott Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I'm the Sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindyce, Andrew Madison Design, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, that's great. If not, oh well, if you want to see more, suggest what I should do in three days in the comments. Great. Bye, I'm so behind. Oh my god.