1-1-1 KsMIRT: August wind-up [part 1]

K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month (or mebbe twice each month?!?) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format. 

This Month:
The Decameron (2024, 8/8 episodes, Netflix)
2024 Summer Olympic Games (July 28-Aug11, CBC Gem)
Umbrella Academy Season 4 (2024, 6/6 episodes, Netflix)
M.A.S.K. Season 1 (1985, 8/65 episodes, Tubi)

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The Decameron
The What 100: In the thick of the plague of the Black Death (mid-1300s-ish), a disparate group of nobles and their servants descend upon a Tuscan villa upon invite from its lord as a safe haven for them to escape the death and decay. Instead, within its secure, well-stocked walls, they find jealousy, rivalries, and the strains of class and status to be potentially as deadly as the threat outside. Oh and the lord of the estate already dead, leaving claim to its riches yet another thing for these petty elites to vie for, or die trying.

(1 Great) The series opener is a delightful farce that has nearly every character covering up or hiding something from the other characters. Amidst a very, very dark period in human history -- with communicable disease everywhere and awareness of sanitation, cleanliness, health care and such pretty rudimentary or based in superstition -- the noblepersons of the story all move and talk with a sort of wilful ignorance of potential doom around every corner. Their attempts to ignore it with frivolity and maintaining some sense of "status quo" is where the farcical humour comes from, but the show makes it clear the characters, for all their nuances are also very scared. And so they hide. But the great divide of "class" and hierarchies, artificial lines that get pretty blurry when everyone faces a disease that you can't really hide from, means that the characters need to come together beyond titles or face certain doom.  

(1 Good) It's not far beyond the first episode that The Decameron reveals that it isn't going to be like, say, The Great, where its well-to-do twits get to continue to behave awfully towards each other with few repercussions. The dangers outside the gates of the villa, the secrets the characters hold from one another, the aspirations and manoeuvring against each other all rapidly catch up to them. Once the show starts subverting its own premise, it doesn't stop, and the story of these characters zigs and zags in weird and wholly unexpected ways. It's not always satisfying when expectation are dashed, like when certain arcs or story threads are cut off at the knees by other plot elements (the machinations of one character against another, often have unintended consequences to the others in the villa).  There is a lot of watching characters strive for growth and fail, or they are revealed to only be feigning it, but over its 8 episodes The Decameron shows it holds no one sacred and creates a comedy that explores human nature with a pretty caustic eye.

(1 Bad) Following our own plague which killed millions globally, and with increasing economic disparity more and more prevalent, as the series ticked on it became evident that it was not interested directly commenting on these topics from a modern lens.  Where it could have very easily made very modern allegories out of the current culture wars, or political division, or dipshit internet "remedies", it resisted most every urge to do so. So the question I had to ask myself was this: if the series isn't using its setting to directly make a sort of statement of current affairs, then what's the point? But I think it's a show that is instead interested in its characters and their humanity, and exposing the audience to the many varied and often uncomfortable truths about how we can behave so poorly towards one another when a situation calls for us to come together. It's a pretty chaotic show that never really finds time to settle into a situation, so it does make it hard to see the goal it's trying to achieve.

META: Without doing having really done the research before watching the series (and still not doing much after) I know The Decameron is based on an old Italian short story collection (thanks to Lady Kent for that tidbit) and I knew that it was infamously adapted into a sex comedy anthology film by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1971.  I had watched The Little Hours a few years back which takes one of the shorts and expands it to a feature-length indie improv comedy.

I tried to watch Pasolini's film and got I think three or four short-stories in before I called it quits (it was made in that era of Italian film where every production had to be dubbed, and it's dubbed terribly, and the English subtitles on Amazon would only appear after a character spoke, which killed any comedic timing it might have had...and it was pretty dubious on whether it had any comedic timing to begin with...there's a lot of rough acting happening there). The Netflix "adaptation" of The Decameron clearly hadn't taken much inspiration from Pasolini, as there's no trace of "sex comedy" here (and 1000% less erect penises). There is comedy, and there is sex, but the two aren't connected and the sex certainly not as graphic as the Italian production.  I can see a lot of film nerds being upset that it doesn't even try to be raunchy like Pasolini's film, but they're just being snobs.

The performers of this The Decameron are of an international scope, including Arrested Development/Veep's Tony Hale, Girls/Flight Attendant's Zosia Mamet, Derry Girls' Saoirse-Monica Jackson, and quite a few "that guy/girl" faces. (My favourite performance was Douggie McMeekin as Tindaro, an hypochondriac erudite idiot with no social skills whatsoever. Meekin reminded me of a young Bruce McCulloch from Kids in the Hall...real Gavin vibes). All the performers spoke in their native accents which is a bit disorienting given that it's supposed to be Italian countryside, but that settles pretty quickly, and I don't really think there's a weak performance in the bunch.

Likeable, ambitious, flawed, but... solidly enjoyable.

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2024 Summer Olympic Games
The What 100: Do I need to explain the Olympics? Every four years, the elite international athletes in their designations descend upon a new host city to compete for the top three positions earning medals (gold, silver, bronze) for the glory of their home country. Each Olympics the IOC and the host city examine the sports in competition and sometimes add, remove or modify what the requirements are.

(1 Gold)  A relatively new sport in the Olympics is the climbing discipline. In Tokyo, they combined all disciplines (speed, bouldering and lead) into one medaling competition, and in Paris they separated out the speed climbing from boulder+lead into two competitions. Boulder consists of four horizontal climbs with few natural holds, while lead is climbing ten stories (at least) where the grips progress in difficulty. They're all basically intensely physical puzzles to be solved by the competitor and it's surprisingly fascinating to watch. But it's the speed climbing that's the real "wow" stuff. The men's 50m freestyle swim is the fastest in the pool at around 20 seconds, and the men's 100m dash is the fastest on the track at sub 10 seconds, but the speed climb is now a sub-5-second run and watching these competitors do the wall it looks like Spider-Man and it never gets tired. It's a head-to-head, process-of-elimination climb with pressure sensors measuring the start and a tap out to finish. Super, super exciting, and again, adding more contemporary competitions to the Olympics really energizes it.

(1 Silver) Breaking. I generally find the scoring disciplines (diving, gymnastics, synchronized swimming, figure skating, etc) frustrating because it's clear the judges are looking at very technical, very precise things versus what Joe and Joeanne Everybody, who only ever watch these things once every four years, see as an impressive routine. The breakdancing discipline, making its first appearance at the Olympics this year, is a head-to-head competition. Live DJs, hype men, a lot of swagger, and bodies flying around in pair a fully improvised dance routine.  The scoring is up to 9 judges grading both routines and assigning a winner, and it's a bit of a mystery. It's partly the technical accomplishment, the inventiveness, but also how it meets the rhythm of the dj set.  The sheer physicality and body control of both the men and women breakers is beyond even what you see in gymnastics. Breaking is just an exhibition sport this year and not a permanent addition (it will not be in LA in 2028), but it adds some much needed contemporary energy to the Olympic. And congrats to Phil Wizard from Canada on his gold medal. (I'm not going to pile on Raygun. Vox has the commentary worth reading there)

(1 Bronze) I saw that "handball" was a competitive sport at Paris, and I paid it little mind. I know what handball is...it's just racquetball without the racquet, right?  I mean, there's other racquet sports like tennis, badminton and table tennis, so sure, handball, why not?

But no, handball is not a ball-against-the-wall type game, but instead it's an indoor court sport that seems to be a mix of basketball, soccer and hockey. Six men per side and a goalie, as they carry and toss around what looks to be maybe a volleyball-like softer, smaller ball from one end of the court to another. The scoring is ultra-frequent to the point that being a goaltender in handball must mean your goals against average is awfully small.  I'm undecided about whether handball is an improvement on the other sports it's hybridizing or if it's a terrible sport. But then I see the flying throws that the players make, which look like John Woo-style flying-and-shooting when replayed in slow-mo and I'm just delighted.

Meta: I was torn between writing about specific Canadian athletes and their amazing accomplishments or talking about specific sports. I went for the latter, but let's acknowledge the former:

Summer McIntosh's amazing 3 gold + 1 silver dominance in the pool (200m butterfly, 200m IM, 400m IM, 400m freestyle respectively), with Josh Liendo and Ilya Kharun taking Silver and Bronze in the same 100m Butterfly race.

Ethan Katzberg and Camryn Rogers taking dual gold in men and woman's hammer throw was spectacular.

Melissa Humana-Parades and Brandie Wilkerson's amazing run to silver in beach volleyball (Canada's first medal in beach volleyball ever)

Katie Vincent's canoeing skills won her gold (200m single) and bronze (400m doubles, with Sloan Mackenzie)

Christa Deguchi taking gold in Judo (57kg)

And the Canadian mens taking the gold in 4x100m relay is an unreal result.

Congrats to all the medallists.

Good on the IOC for banning military aggressors from the competition. Russia and Israel were both absent from the games for obvious reasons. Russia is not as dominant a force in the summer as they are in the winter, but they are so routinely a threat that their absence really opens up the field especially in some of the field athletics. Also, Russia is often the subject of doping scandals which have been few and far between this year (unfortunate bullshit in the media about transphobic "testosterone checking" in women's competition though).

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The Umbrella Academy Season 4

The What 100: When last we saw the Hargreeves children they once again either saved or destroyed the world, which seems to be their lot in life. Having rebooted reality once again, they start the season without their powers and six years later each living a less shiny life than before. Victor runs a bar in Canada, Ben is just getting out of prison for a fraud scam, Luther is a low-rent stripper, Klaus has developed a fear of everything, Allison is a struggling actor, Five works for the CIA, Diego is a delivery man, married with kids to Lila, who secrety works with Five at the agency. They have their little lives usurped when Victor is kidnapped, and they are asked to rescue a girl whose disappearance is connected to their new alt-reality version of Sir Reginald Hargreeves, their adoptive father, and to getting their powers back.

(1 Great) I hadn't realized how much I'd grown to adore this gang of misfits until the six-years-later catching-up sequence in the first episode of this season. What's worked so well for this series has been continually putting these characters into different setting yet they invariably remain or return to pretty much being themselves with only minimal amount of character growth.  The show works best when the cast is playing off one another, in a group even moreso than in smaller pairings or sub-groupings, and they are together quite a bit early on before they're broken up and sent on their side quests.  

(1 Good) The initial threat at play here finds Drs. Jean and Gene Thibideaux being absolutely ruthless in their acquisition of anomalous paraphernalia that lends credence to the conspiracy theory that our universe is not the only universe, and in fact, is not the natural order of things. Drs. Jean and Gene are the founders of The Keepers, their numbers growing, who believe in The Cleanse that will restore the natural order to time and space (which all centers around the disappeared girl the Hargreeves kids are looking for). As far as stunt casting goes, you couldn't get a more perfect pair than husband-and-wife duo Megan Mullaley and Nick Offerman, both sporting radically 70's looking garb and hairstyles, with Offerman veiled under thick, thick muttonchops connected to a hearty mustache.

(1 Bad) I have no doubt the fourth season was supposed to be longer than six episodes, because it's absolutely evident in the janky storytelling. The prior seasons were 10 episodes each, and if at times I found those seasons to maybe drag on a little too long before heading into endgame... here it's absolutely too compressed.  Perhaps if the season were actually rewritten as a six episode arc then maybe it wouldn't feel it so badly, but it's clear the journeys the characters were intended to go on were meant to have a longer lifespan, and it's felt pretty deeply in most of the arcs, which feel either fast-forwarded through or abruptly resolved before heading into the grand-scale, world-destructing endgame we come to expect from a season of The Umbrella Academy. When Klaus goes on a side quest to pay off his debts to his drug dealer, or Diego and Luther get to visit the CIA, these feel like radically unnecessary diversions away from the main story and character plotting.  In the second half of the season, it feels like whole sections of story are missing, and a lot of sudden movements, like what Sir Reginald's wife gets up to, or David Cross' insertion into the Drs. Jean and Gene story just feel so abrupt and out of the blue. Five and Lila have a time-traveling detour that should have supported a whole standalone episode of its own. Ben finding a girl who actually likes him, only for it to lead to the destruction of the universe should have been a devastating tragedy that's slowly discovered as we come to adore the pair together, instead we get it all exposition dumped to us and it's not satisfying in the least. 

META: I did like so much of what was happening this season, but it is so rushed obviously parts are missing. I think it could have been a fantastic finish to the Umbrella Academy with even two additional episodes, especially in the way it establishes the Hargreeves childrens' relationship to the universe and/or timeline. Instead, it leads to so much headscratching as it skips and jumps its way to its conclusion.  Where its sibling show, Doom Patrol, ended with me tearing up multiple times, there wasn't enough air in this season to give it time to emotionally resonate that it was even ending until, well, the end.

There's (unsubstantiated) suspicion that Netflix knew of showrunner Steve Blackman's propensity for creating a hostile or troubling working environment for writers and support staff (as reported in Rolling Stone this past June) and that resulted in the truncated season as well as virtually no promotion of the final season (and his other deals at the streamer have also been cancelled).   

It's always hard to learn that an end product you like or enjoy has a complicated or even troubling background to it, but if there's a fly in your soup and you're only informed of it after you've eaten the soup, did it ruin all the other ingredients that went into the soup? Or is the fly all you can think about?

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M.A.S.K. Season 1
The What 100: After Reagan's administration deregulated the airwaves, animators and toy companies were free to collaborate ostensibly making 1/2 hour toy commercials for kids. Following the success of Masters of the Universe and G.I. Joe (among others) every toy line in the 1980's was pretty much dead on arrival if it didn't have a cartoon to promote it.  M.A.S.K. was Kenner's answer to Mattel's G.I. Joe AND Transformers lines, with an elite squad of warriors with cool transforming vehicles fighting an organized enemy with a snake-themed name. M.A.S.K.'s toy gimmick was its vehicles had two modes, the standard-looking vehicle and a "battle mode" (of varying quality). Its characters had special masks which inexplicably gave them superpowers. M.A.S.K. lasted for two seasons, with the second season ("Split Seconds") leaning away from international espionage and into sports racing?

(1 Great)  My first reaction to the theme watching the first episode of M.A.S.K. was a recoiling "eugh". The 80's "rockin' theme song" trope was in full effect. And these kinds of jingle-rock meant to appeal to children and not offend moms always kind of offended me. But getting over the "trying to please everyone" aesthetic of it took a few listens, as it earwormed its way into my brain.  It's kitschy in its own right, but I dig it. Is it "great"? Yeah, it kind of is.

(1 Good) The Condor's "Mach 1" effect is pretty nifty, and the only aspect of the animation that actually made me say "that's pretty cool".

(1 Bad) Pretty much everything else. It's competent animation from DIC but not impressive in the slightest. The vocal performances sound like they've been slowed to .75 speed and recorded in cavern, and are really uninspired. There's a real "Canadian" quality to this overall that just feels like an on-the-cheap production. I hate the Matt Tracker's kid and his stupid robot unicycle/best friend T-Bob. Shows built around kid sidekicks getting in trouble and needing rescuing are an easy "no thanks". Every episode of M.A.S.K. seems to center around some international locale or "exotic" artifact that invariably leads to the M.A.S.K. team to encounter people of different cultures handled with all the dignity, respect and inclusiveness that you would expect from a 1980's cartoon (so yes, it's that bad). Even one of the key team characters Bruce Sato speaks with the stereotypical "sage Asian" voice talking in proverbs. It's all so cringe-inducing. And finally there's their adversary V.E.N.O.M., who seem to be the same three idiots every episode. Admittedly, my viewing is limited but dear God they are the most unintimidating villains I've ever seen. Threat level 0. They are also no fun at all. Main bad guy Miles Mayhem (a portly, military general-styled, gray-haired mean grampa) doesn't even do the the usual villain maniacal laugh like Skeletor, Cobra Commander, Megatron or Dr. Claw. Just no fun at all.

Meta: After watching nearly 100 episodes of the 1980s G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero cartoon, I wanted to dive into something I had no familiarity with. M.A.S.K. I mainly knew from comic book ads. I never had the toys as a kid because they were in a 2" scale which was much smaller than G.I. Joe and Star Wars which was all the justification I needed. But having absolutely no investment or nostalgia in M.A.S.K. made it really, really hard to pay attention to the cartoon. It was boring, and pretty stupid, but not in the same knowingly entertaining way that G.I. Joe is. It doesn't even have the puritanical earnestness of Masters of the Universe, it really just feels like "crank out an episode, sell some toys" and has zero flair or panache. (Just to note, nostalgia also doesn't make a show better, because my favourite 80's toy line is Super Powers and the Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show is pretty awful, and more often than not, revisiting TV shows and movies you have nostalgia for can result in flat out killing that nostalgia).