KWIF: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (+3)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, after a few weeks away.

This week:
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024, d. Tim Burton - in theatre)
The Instigators (2024, d. Doug Liman - AppleTV+)
Orion and the Dark (2024, d. Sean Charmatz - Netflix)
Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths Part 1 and Part 2 (2024, d. Jeff Wamester - AdultSwim)

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If you were to ask me if I was a fan of Tim Burton, I would indeed say "I was."

I haven't seen a new film Burton has made since 2003's Big Fish. There was nothing ostensibly wrong with Big Fish that made me say "no more", and besides the terrible Planet of the Apes, pretty much every on of his films before that I enjoyed quite a bit. 

But post-2003, I couldn't even stand to look at the trailer for his monstrous Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and Corpse Bride, looked like low budget The Nightmare Before Christmas devoid of the Henry Selick magic. The parade of Johnny Depp features that followed Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows didn't even come close to intriguing me, and I would say whatever Burton train I had been on in the '90's, I had jumped off and could barely see it chugging along in the distance.

Of his first 10 features, if you were to ask me what was my favourite, I would probably say Ed Wood,  or I would have up until the trailers for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice started popping up. The excitement for a return to that world was shockingly intense and immediate. The sudden surge of sense memories, of watching the original Beetlejuice countless times and being so stimulated by it every time... besides Star Wars, there was probably no other film series from my youth that I desired more of.  I had forgotten.

And so, 36 years later, we finally have a sequel.  

And as movie, it's fine. 

As someone who eyes his movies critically, I know it's merely fine. I wanted it to be everything that it was for me as a pre-teen, but I was a different person, and Tim Burton was a different filmmaker, so there's no way it can recapture the magic. Truth is, no sequel or prequel or remake can ever recreate the experience of watching an original, because times, places, people change and evolve.  The best a film can hope for is to create a new experience for the viewer.

As a fan, though, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice did transport me,  not back and time, not back to my youth, but back into the world I'd always wanted to spend more time with, and I cannot discount that exceptional feeling, even if the movie is only just... fine.

Why just "fine"? It just takes too long to get going is all. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, with a 30-year gap to fill, can't just get up and going, it's got to catch us up with some characters and introduce new ones, and explain what happened to old ones, as well as establish a plot contrivance or two, or three, or four that will bring everyone together.

The film opens with Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder, Stranger Things), now a widowed mother of a nearly estranged teen daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega, X) and host of a paranormal investigation show. She still sees dead people, but has recently started seeing Beetlejuice everywhere and it's freaking her out. Her boyfriend, Rory, is also her producer and a bit of a new age twerp.  The Lydia and Astrid are reunited when stepmom Delia (Catherine O'Hara, SCTV) breaks the news that her husband, Lydia's dad, has died.  A return to Winter Falls is necessary.

Meanwhile, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton, Birdman) is running a scare business, when he learns that his ex-wife, the soul-sucking (literally) Deloris (played by Monica Belucci, The Matrix Reloaded) has returned and is coming for him. He also has never stopped pining for Lydia, which is gross, but then that's on-brand for Beetlejuice.

Eventually Astrid gets caught up in some supernatural business, and Lydia needs Beetlejuice's help to save her.

I'm skimming over a lot of plot set-up here because there's really five or six threads at play that all eventually collide about mid-way when nearly everyone has made their way into the afterlife. Once this happen the film is crackling with energy. Keaton is clearly having a blast, O'Hara is in top comedic form, and Ryder treats Lydia like she slipped into her favourite pair of slippers...absolute comfort. 

Once we see Lydia and Beetlejuice team up, I suddenly got a jolt of the Beetlejuice cartoon, which spun out of the movie in a very unfaithful way and was primarily about the weird adventures Lydia had with this weird demon creature in the afterlife. This film sparks that notion but doesn't sustain it long enough which is why I wish it got to it much sooner.

The sub-plot that takes Astrid to the afterlife...well, it's doesn't not work, but it doesn't have the time to fill it out properly, and it resolves abruptly. There were ways to get Astrid into the afterlife that would connect her to her mom, and Beetlejuice that wouldn't have to involve a complete extraneous threat (when there's already another complete extraneous threat).

Speaking of, Deloris would have been just a great central plot on her own. I could see if this were, say, the fifth Beetlejuice movie, that it would revolved entirely around the threat Deloris presents. Instead it's a subplot that never feels fully integrated into the central character story here, as enjoyable as it is.

Is Tim Burton back? I dunno. Even in its overstuffed form, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice still ultimately delivers what I wanted from it, which was more Beetlejuice. And, much like how I felt after each time watching the first movie, I would still like more.

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A young crook (Jack Harlow, Dave) is in deep with a small scale crime boss (Michael Stuhbarg, A Serious Man) and has to gather a team to pull off a daring robbery. He winds up with alcoholic motormouth Cobby (Casey Affleck, Oceans 12) and depressed veteran Rory (Matt Damon, Oceans 13). Neither Cobby nor Rory are really that experienced at crime, and the foolproof job turns out to be a monumental shit show. And the shit show just escalates with each passing hour. Car chases, arson, kidnapping, these guys keep getting in deeper and deeper as they start uncovering a whole conspiracy of corruption in the mayor office.

Damon and Affleck together again. At this point, it's like Matt and Casey are in just as many projects together as Matt and Ben. It doesn't matter, these guys have decades of friendship under their belt, great affection for one another, and so pairing Damon with an Affleck on screen is always going to deliver.

The younger Affleck co-wrote the screenplay here with Chuck MacLean, and it's a script that has far more surprises and laughs than expected. It's a fairly lighthearted romp, but one that doesn't ever dismiss the characters, and toys with themes of corruption in political and legal circles. I've seen criticisms that there's no sense of threat or danger to these guys, and it is true that Damon and Affleck don't play like they're in mortal danger, but that's more of a case that both of these characters are far more troubled by their inner demons than external ones. These are men with nothing left to lose. This is why the fake kidnapping of Rory's therapist, Dr. Rivera (Hong Chou, The Watchmen), is so integral to the story, in helping to explore the mindset of the men and perhaps reframe what it is they're hoping to achieve and provide them a path back to living. 

Damon pairs up with Doug Liman for the first time since The Bourne Identity, a film with a pretty great car chase sequence. This film has a pretty big car chase, but it's not terrific. It's evident the production was limited in the speeds they were capable of going through the streets of Boston, and there's no amount of cross cutting and editing that can mask just how slow this chase really was going. There are fun aspects to the chase, but overall it's missing a lot of the oomf.  But the rest of the production looks pretty good.

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Charlie Kaufman is known for his twisty, heady, cerebral-but-weird films that trade in anxiety, delusions, and other mental conditions that often externalize these internal thought processes by way of scenes, sequences, or entire stories. Kids films also often trade in externalized emotions, but they're usually metaphorical, so in a way, a Kaufman-scripted kids movie kind of makes sense, even if none of Kaufman's prior work even hinted at being child-friendly.

In this Netflix animated feature, Orion is a boy of about 10 or 11, and is an absolute nervous mess of a kid. He's anxious and afraid of everything. He doesn't want to say the wrong thing, or embarrass himself which pretty much leads him to saying the wrong thing and embarrassing himself all the time. He doesn't want to draw attention to himself, which invariably draws attention to himself. His school days are nightmares, and at night, well literal nightmares. In the dark, when everything gets quieter, and time seems to slow down, all he's left with is his anxious thoughts and an absence of light.

Enter The Dark personified. The literal darkness who is tired of this kid always cursing his name. So The Dark takes Orion out for a spin in the night sky, to experience the beauty of the night world, introduce him to his nighttime crew: Sleep, Insomnia, Sweet Dreams, Quiet and Unexplained Noises. But Orion's reluctance to accept The Dark leads to near disastrous consequences that Orion needs to face up to.

Orion and the Dark is a charming enough film in the Pixar-knockoff vein of personifying things or ideas, but as a full blown adult, I'm not certain I was absolutely sold on the execution of the conceit. Kids will probably dig it just fine though. The voice cast is rock solid with Paul Walter Houser, Angela Bassett, Natasia Demetriou, Carla Gugina, Nat Faxon, Colin Hanks and more, and Kaufman constructs some narrative twists that kind of work but also kind of break the film at the same time(?). What really holds me back from liking the film is the animation, which is, as most CGI animation has been for the past 25 years, very soft, rounded, and charicature-like. The characters have their eyes set together, Jim Davis' Garfield-style and, well, I hate it. Hate hate hate it. It's a design decision that I never got comfortable with and threatened to soil the whole movie for me.  

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I've watched many of the various direct-to-video DC animated movies since they started appearing in the late-Aughts, but nowhere near all of them. I'd wager I've seen 1/4 of the 55 animated productions since 2007, but you won't find many of them reviewed here. I'm not sure why...I review TV, I review movies, hell...I even do Hallmark movies, so why not spend more time on these superhero cartoons?

I think the answer is they are not good enough to really waste time thinking about too much, nor are they bad enough to really vent about. They aren't part of the main cultural discourse, nor really part of film discourse. They are animated features, typically based off one DC Comics mini-series or story arc, made for DC Comics fans. It's a miracle if anyone who's not a DC fan happens to watch them.

Over the past four years, much of the DC animated movie output has been connected in what's casually called the "Tomorrowverse", culminating in three movies that retell the classic comics epic Crisis on Infinite Earths. The gist of it is the Multiverse is being destroyed, universe by universe, a wave of energy destroying everything in its path. An eons-old being called the Monitor diverges from his observational duties to intervene, assembling heroes from across the Multiverse who may have a hope of finding a way to salvage...somthing.

This is not the first time the classic event was adapted, as it was used as the denouement of the Arrowverse, but this is a somewhat more faithful adaptation. The thing is, in the comics, there was 50 years of comics history and thousands of comics stories and characters to bridge together. In the Arrowverse, there was nearly 10 years of shows and hundreds of episodes of TV, and the Crisis there started bridging gaps with all the other DC superhero TV shows past and present. It made sense.  This... this Crisis... only really makes sense if you know these characters from the comics.

I don't think I've actually watched any of the Tomorrowverse movies and it didn't seem to matter, because I have 45 years of DC Comics reading history under my belt, and I've read Crisis on Infinite Earths at least a half dozen times over the years.  This does tailor the story a little to the Tomorrowverse animated universe, but there's not a great history that it's bringing together.

Crisis... is an epic story, and the only thing that makes this animated trilogy "epic" is that it's an animated trilogy. Part One is a time hopping, non-linear Barry Allen Flash story as he's unmoored from time and  trying to piece together what his actual objective is. Along the way we learn about the Crisis and Barry's integral role in ensuring the continued existence of not just one earth, but infinite earths. It uses its time jumping effectively, although it's often stiffly animated and edited, and the general tone of the piece isn't adventuresome, it's ominous. But even that ominousness is pretty dry.

Part Two is a story that could have been told in scant minutes, but it drags out its plots over roughly 85 of them.  It opens reminding the audience that, indeed, there's a crisis, but there's been a temporary patch put in place thanks to Barry Allen's sacrifice (spoiler for a 40-year-old story). And then it jumps back in time across two character storylines, first exploring Kara Zor-El (Supergirl)'s originals with The Monitor, and secondly delving into the tortured drama of the Psycho Pirate. It's some of the most tedious cartooning I've ever watched.  

Eventually it comes out of these flashbacks but by then it's too late and all the momentum of Part One is utterly lost. Any attempts to build up momentum fall flat, and the emotional beats it's hoping to convey never quite land.  To be honest, if I wasn't such a nerd for this stuff, for just seeing how it plays out differently than what I know, I would have turned it off.  It's not great, and I certainly couldn't recommend it.

T&K's XMas (2022) Advent Calendar: Day 3 - Spirited

 2022, d. Sean Anders - AppleTV+

I look at writer/director Anders' repertoire on IMDB and it's basically a list of films I have actively avoided (all except Hot Tub Time Machine, I did watch that and it was ok).  Add to that the fact that Will Ferrell's comedy schtick had kind of run out of gas in recent years, and the whole Ryan Reynolds thing has gotten pretty tiresome... and then sprinkle in the conceit of an A Christmas Carol musical, and it seemed like these the ingredients were a recipe for disaster.

Thank Santa for Christmas miracles though.  

Don't get me wrong, only about half the jokes really land, and only about half the songs really seem to work, but the feels though... I think 100 percent of the feels are genuinely felt.  And really, when you look at it, half the jokes do land, and half the songs do work, so why not lean into the positive, rather than the negative.  Why not try and put some good into the world, rather than negativity?

This is a good movie, maybe even a pretty good movie.  It's one that manages to effectively utilize both Ferrell and Reynolds' star power by giving them characters to play, rather than letting them just do that thing they kind of always do.  It's exactly when they're permitted to do that thing they always do that the film kind of grinds down, and it feels like they fall out of character.  Thankfully it doesn't happen too often.

The gist of the film is, much like the recent Hallmarkie, Ghosts of Christmas Always, about an afterlife organization that Scrooges people.  The curious thing is the whole elaborate organization in Spirited is all there for ONE person every year.  It was a global scale in GoCA.  Here they do research and find the one candidate who, if they successfully scrooge them, will have ripple effects that make the world a better place.  But it's clear the bureaucracy of this organization is long-serving and still thinks small.  Putting all those resources, all that time and effort into one Christmas stocking every year seems terribly inefficient and wasteful (but, spoiler, they figure that out by the film's end).

Like GoCA, our lead is the Ghost of Christmas Present, here in the form of Will Ferrell.  He's not the boss, but he's kind of the MVP around the workplace.  Everyone loves him and he's amazing at his job.  He's been eligible for retirement (which is a gold watch and the option to return back to Earth) for 46 years, and he's turned it down presumably because he loves his job so much, but we know there's something else (no spoilers...it should be a groan inducing surprise, but it actually works, and the story [and a few songs] build nicely upon it).  When the boss picks out their next "perp", Present instead sees Clint Briggs (Reynolds)-- a big shot media consultant with a jaded world view and a talent for spin -- in action, and knows he's their next project.  But the file comes back and shows that he's marked "unredeemable", but Present seems to know that nobody is unredeemable and he's ready to quit unless they're willing to try.

It goes badly.  Bonnie the Ghost of Christmas Past (GLOW's Sunita Mani) is promptly seduced by Clint, and needs Present to take over her past duties.  It goes only marginally better for him, that is, until Clint is faced with the memory of his dying sister's big ask of him and he can't handle it.  Clint escapes into the afterlife headquarters, and there's a Monster's Inc. vibe that lasts all too briefly unfortunately.  Clint is just too good, he talks circles around everyone and charms them at the same time.  He's not malicious, per se, but he's oblivious to the maliciousness that spins out of his spin, but he also has a semi pessimistic view of the world, of other people, and so he learned how to manipulate them rather than connect with them.

He turns the tables on Present and starts to open him up, to learn about Present's past.  Even after Present is reprimanded for how much he's being manhandled by Clint, he can't help but keep trying every tactic he possibly can.  We find out why its so important to him, and it actually winds up being pretty sweet where it all goes.  It has its twists and curve balls and it's a far more engaging story, with far more engaging characters, than I had thought. Even in the end it doesn't cheap out.  We still get a coda that provides a happy ending but it's certainly not where you think it would wind up, and it's a better film for it.  

The song and dance numbers vary from powerful to impotent, from dazzling to dorky, and kind of every stretch in between.  The best numbers are the gut punches, the ones that really dig into the characters' psyches.  They employ so many musical standard tricks, but I'm far from inured to them, so they still wrung out a few tears.  One might not have expected Will Ferrell to be the musical type, but of his roster of SNL characters, I think his duo of Bobbi and Marty Culp with Ana Gasteyer showed he did have some singing acumen even if it was applied in a silly way.  He really belts out some of these tunes here, and I'm impressed.  He doesn't have the smoothest singing voice, but he manages the emotion and the intent of every song.  Octavia Spencer also isn't known for her singing voice, but in playing Clint's right hand (and also Present's object of affection) Kimberly she gets a couple songs and really does well with them.  Reynolds does more of a sing-talking but he's not embarrassing himself at all.  

The dancing is pretty grand.  There's a huge roster of dancers, so every number is BIG.  Some of them are real wows, but there are many that are held back by Ander's lack of sensibility towards dance, capturing things at awkward, unflattering, or undynamic angles.  On the flip side he also captures some pretty amazing moments, so it's all a learning process to be sure.  Both Reynolds and Ferrell do pretty well in their numbers.  They're not dancers but they do what they need to.

Sometimes, a film is bigger than the sum of its parts. Ultimately, I think the tried and true test of a holiday movie's success is whether it's one you'll want to watch again the next year, or even again the same year.  With this, no promises, but I just might.

PS. I think the title sucks. I keep forgetting it.

3+1 Short Paragraphs: The Discovery

2017, Charlie McDowell (The One I Love) -- Netflix

I have a next door neighbour whom I noticed about 10 years ago. The first handful of times I saw her, I nodded a smile of recognition and hello. But soon after I realized, I had no idea from where I knew her. To this day, I have never figured out how I knew her, but am still convinced I must have -- she could have been the server at a bar I frequented when I arrived in Toronto, she could have worked with me briefly at The Store. Or, she could be from another, a past life?  And no, I have never done something as simple as ask her -- what do I look like, the creepy next door neighbour? Don't answer that.

The premise of The Discovery is that Robert Redford discovers indisputable truth of the Afterlife. They don't say exactly how, but it involves machinery and brainwaves. Despite us being in a world that disputes vaccines and how social distancing can save lives, the world accepts his science and the ramifications are not pretty. People around the world are committing suicide in droves, hoping to get a better start in the next. Will (Jason Segel, How I Met Your Mother) is Will, his son, who helped him with the Discovery, but has become estranged from his father after seeing the consequences, and from lingering bitterness against his father for his mother's suicide. The movie begins with Will on a ferry heading to a small island, to ask him once again to stop the science, tell people he was wrong. On the way to that island, Will meets Isla (Rooney Mara, The Social Network).

This is a melancholy movie about the point of life. Will believes that you shouldn't be moving on to another life if you haven't made the best of this one. It's not about Heaven or Hell, as religion plays very little into this movie, but about mistakes and learning from them. He sees people just repeating the same mistakes over and over in life, so he questions how it could be any different just moving on to another "plane of existence" and expecting anything else. That is, until he sees the results of his father's latest experiment, where he records what people see after they pass over. This new and terrible reality is that people do make different choices, do get to choose the better paths -- that you can just re-start and expect a different outcome.

**spoilers**

The weird thing is that the movie presents us with this horrible idea of not being bothered by consequences, because you can just go on and try again, and suddenly slides past it into a rather beautiful idea of the Afterlife. Will, after suffering a great loss, takes upon himself to use the machine, the machine that even his father now believes must be destroyed, to find out whether he could save Isla from a tragedy. And he passes before he learns. But in doing so, he is back on the ferry to the island, and he is back meeting Isla for the first time yet with an inkling that he knew her, but now things are being explained to him --- that Death, as a natural part of Life does allow you to try again and again and again, getting multiple chances in multiple realities, until you get it Just Right. In showing us this beauty, I had hoped it would show the folly of choosing the quick path, of ending your life early so as to have another chance, was wrong -- that it would have unforeseen consequences. Alas, no, Will has died (and technically at his own hands) but has another chance to make his life with Isla come out for the better. So, what are we supposed to learn? Nothing, I guess, just life I will never know who the neighbour really is.

31 Days of Halloween 2017: The Dark Song

2016, Liam Gavin -- download

I found this low key, only dual casting movie somewhat of an enigma. It was compelling enough, a rather well laid out tense and creepy movie, but I wasn't quite sure of the point in the end. Many séance movies have that bit near the beginning, a small ritual by amateurs to summon the dead, and it usually goes wrong. But what if the whole movie is the séance?

Sophia lost her child, to violence. She hires occultist Joseph to cast a powerful spell. She initially says it is because she wants to talk to her son, then admits she wants revenge of the people who took her son from her. Joseph cares not why, as long as she is honest, for that honesty will fuel the ritual to summon forth a guardian angel, of whom she can ask a boon. Any boon.

This is John Constantine level magic, with arcana and long torturous rituals performed over and over. Joseph is harsh, abusive and demanding but he states that he has to be, to control the forces he is letting in. Sometimes we think he is a charlatan who just wants more than money. Of course, she has that worry as well. But with a shower of gold flake, things begin to happen. Before her guardian angel can arrive, stranger darker things enter the house, providing familiar haunted house or ghost tropes.

The movie is carried more by the powerful performances by the leads. Joseph (Steve Oram) is a knowledgeable yet reprehensible seer, fully into this for the power, if not the money. Sophia (Catherine Walker) is drive, so utterly overwhelmed by her grief, she subjects herself to abuse, humiliation and self-torture. Whether she receives what she wants in the end seems to matter naught. She has to do something extreme to deal with her feelings, and this is definitely qualifies.

Does this ritual work? Yes, but not without cost.

Cleaning the Slate: TV (American Gods)

Making a decision. As I watch too much TV, I have too much to comment on, some great, some good, and mostly only meh. As I always have a massive backlog of movies and TV, and even some video games, I am going to pare that down. Only four five remaindered TV shows will get posts, and after that, only things that leave a great impression will end up here. Well, maybe if I actually clean house on the Movies, I will do the occasional What I Am Watching post.

2017, Bryan Fuller (Wonderfalls), Starz -- download

While I am rather peeved Fuller left Star Trek: Discovery to focus on this show, I am also glad he did this show. But first, full disclosure. While, I am and will always be a mega-fan or Neil Gaiman, this book never left much of an impression on me. I keep on saying I need to re-read it, but I never pick it up. I am also not very fond of taking an entire season to set things up (I am glaring at you Preacher) but as I just said, sometimes it is the journey, not the destination. And oh my, what a journey this classic road story takes us on!  Fully engaged, full onboard!

Shadow Moon is in prison, or more accurately, just about to get out. With a name like that, you know something is going to happen to him. Rather horribly, a few days before he is due to be released, he gets a, "I've got some good news, and I've got some bad news." The good news is that they are letting him out early; the bad news is it's because his wife was killed, with his best friend's cock in her mouth. On the plane flight home, he bumps into con man Mr. Wednesday, who offers Shadow a job, one connected to Shadow's shadowy past. Mr. Wednesday is a jerk, a downright charming asshole, but Shadow is expectedly off kilter and ends up accepting the role.

And that is what the entire first season is about -- Shadow Moon tagging along with enigmatic Mr. Wednesday while we get introduced to a world a lot more broader than he ever suspects. All around Shadow, the old gods of mostly dead religions are playing their modern parts. Mr. Ibis and Anubis run a mortuary, Bilquis seduces men in night clubs, Vulcan runs a munitions factory, Czernobog works in a slaughter house. The gods are everywhere, but few take notice.

Fuller is a visual wonder. He builds these incredibly wonderful backdrops that just draw us into the world. He gives us vignettes of the world of the old gods, the most startling being African god Anansi in the hold of a slave ship, decked out in 21st century finery, telling each and every slave their lives are fucked. The dialogue is horrible, gut wrenching and utterly compelling. And it establishes the gods, and our place in their world. Or their place in our world? That is sort of the problem they face, that they have been shaped by us.

Other aspects of this show also make me mourn Star Trek: Discovery's loss of Fuller. He does a few episodes that completely knock down boundaries that even cable TV has up. The magical sex scene between a Muslim man and a Djinn is the most graphic, the most erotic sex scene I have ever seen  between two men. And especially since this is not demographically a gay TV show. On the other end of the spectrum, our female lead (Shadow's deadwife Laura Moon) is utterly sexless, a full alive zombie desperate to get back to Shadow, as death has proven even she could love. Her purging scene, after awakening from the embalming needle, is so revolting, I am not sure I can look at Emily Browning the same ever again. But damn, its a captivating episode.

As I have already said, I am not fond of the idea of taking an entire season to establish a premise, but damn just watching Fuller do it, makes it worth it. Every episode is lush, full and captivating. And of course, ever since Ian McShane was Swearengen in Deadwood, I can listen to him talk for days. Ricky Whittle, whom I know from The 100, is a powerful Moon. And we also get Gillian Anderson is Media portraying herself as David Bowie, Lucy Ricardo and Marilyn Monroe. And Orlando Jones is Mr. Nancy (Anansi) and Peter Stormare is Czernobog and Pablo Shreiber is the ever expanding character, a leprechaun tied to the deadwife via his lost magical coin. I cannot wait to see what he does next, even if the plot doesn't drag me in.

Pilot Season '16: The Good Place

NBC, Thursdays @ 8:30

This is a terrible ad for this good show.  It's a
show that makes a point about the afterlife
being intensely multicultural and yet it
promotes with only its white leads. And doing
that 40-Year-Old-Virgin thing that's been
played out for well over a decade...sigh. 

 

 

For a few years in the early 2000's we (as a collective audience) were treated to surreal comedy dramas about death from the creative mind of Brian Fuller,  Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies...hell, even Hannibal can be considered a deep black comedy in the right (/wrong) light.  So to find that The Good Place, a surreal, vibrant show about the afterlife didn't come from Fuller, but rather Parks and Rec and Brooklyn 99 creator Michael Schur was rather surprising. 

There's an absolute kinship between The Good Place and Pushing Daisies most explicitly, with Daisies being the lightest and warmest of Fuller's works.  The Good Place is about a perfect society, lovingly crafted by Ted Danson's Michael (who had apprenticed for a builder for over a century), where roughly 300-400 newly dead go to live.  The catch, of course, is that this is the Good Place, where only the goodest of good people go.  The rest go to the Bad Place, and pretty much everyone winds up there.  Yet, through some kind of clerical error, Elanor (Kristen Bell) has wound up in the Good Place where she definitely doesn't belong, only Michael doesn't know it.  In fact the only person who does is her "soul mate", Chidi (William Jackson Harper), who raised himself up from poverty to be an ethics professor, and he's promised her that he won't betray her.  Now he struggles with betraying a promise and the well being of the Good Place's society, as Elanor's mere presence is causing random chaos to ensue, distressing Michael every time.  It's a fantastical twist on My Fair Lady in a way.

The pilot episode is an extremely bright and eye-popping widescreen adventure, directed by Drew Goddard (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Cabin in the Woods fame), and is a very assured pilot.  The premise is well set-up, and by the episode's end the cast seems quite at ease with each other and the comedy.  The second episode, directed by Mad TV and Cougartown vet Michael McDonald, is a shocking transition as McDonald's style is far more tellingly for TV.  More close-ups and tighter framing.  It wouldn't be so noticeable if the two episodes weren't paired for a 1 hour premiere.  Even still, the show grows in its second episode and the laughs increase as do the stakes.  The cast starts to flesh out even more, (particularly Jameela Jamil as the pompous Tahani gets a bit of a showcase).

It's a strange scenario for a comedy, for sure, which may curb its mass appeal, but in the niche reality of today's TV, there's no question it should survive if it can come out the gate so strong.  The possibilities for the show increase when one realizes that there may be other Good Places to explore, new faces can arrive, and a reality that can be shaped and reshaped as it goes along on the whims of its creator.  Plus, the flashbacks of Kristen Bell being utterly terrible in her living years are hilarious, and a needed pop outside the surreal environment.