I Saw This!!: A few words on works of television

More like "I Sat on This!!"  I started writing this in December of 2015 and plum forgot that I hadn't finished it.

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The Jinx (6 episodes) - HBO

Silicon Valley (season 1) - HBO

Wayward Pines (5 episodes) - Fox

Transparent (season 1) - Amazon/Shomi

Fresh Off The Boat (season 1) - ABC/Shomi

7 Days in Hell (special) - HBO
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (7 episodes) - BBC
The Wrong Mans (season 1) - BBC/Shomi
Fargo (Season 2)

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If I don't write many movie reviews anymore, it's because I'm not watching that many movies.  I'm too busy watching TV.  While TV has always been loveable, a perfectly adequate and enjoyable way to pass time, it rarely had the stigma of fine art and impeccable storytelling, not like film.  Because of the nature and demands of American television networks in the past, shows used to have to skew as broadly as possible such as not to upset anyone, and to have a generic enough premise with generic enough characters so as to sustain 5 to 10 seasons worth of storytelling.

Of course, with the influx of specialty channels, pay cable, streaming services, and more the demand and desire for original programming is at an all-time peak, and TV show creators (and the people that fund them) want nothing more than to stand out from the crowd.  How best to do that?  Be worth watching, tell an engaging, uniform story, with great characters and in a visual style that is cinema-quality.  Special effects can't measure up to a 200 million dollar blockbuster, that's for sure, but they can do enough to get the point across (and tell the viewer that the focus is more character than spectacle).

Television is so good today, and so plentifully good that it's legitimately frustrating.  Programming one's evening to optimize viewing time is almost a regular affair, and it's hard enough to just keep up with the shows that are currently running, never mind going back and watching ones that have ended or, Cthulhu forbid, watching a beloved show again.

Here I present some thoughts on a bunch of notable new-ish television I've been watching.

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We've been watching Game of Thrones through whatever means necessary in prior years (but always backing up our viewing with a purchase of the Blu-Ray set upon release), but this year we went legit, subscribing to HBO for its 10-week cycle.  This gave us access to a wealth of HBO-On-Demand programming which finally let me check out a number of shows people had been talking about but I otherwise would not have seen.

The Jinx naturally made a huge splash early this year with the surprise (and spoiler-filled) news of Robert Durst's arrest.  This six-part documentary examines Durst's life, his criminal history (both official and alleged), and the various crimes he's seemingly gotten away with, including the murders of his wife, his best friend, and a neighbour.  This is all framed with the usual talking heads-style commentary from people related to the story, but made fascinating even further by an in-depth, on-camera interview with a fully cooperative (if not really truthful) Robert Durst.

As far as examinations into true crime go, this is easily a high watermark.  Director Andrew Jarecki, who made another benchmark true crime documentary with Capturing the Friedmans, legitimately tries to maintain objectivity in the face of overwhelming (if largely circumstantial) evidence that points to Dursts involvement in his wife's disappearance and his best friend's murder.  Meanwhile he has to answer for the murder and dismemberment to which he fully admitted to doing but was acquitted of any wrongdoing.  Durst is a fascinating figure.  Even with a record of cold blooded, calculated murder, he still is completely unassuming on camera.  Not charming in the least, but genuinely intriguing.  He speaks in a curious croak with beady, darting eyes that project a constructed frailty, he plays the genial patsy but is a legit criminal mastermind.  Amateur psychologists will have a field day watching this.

The show ends with a stick of verbal dynamite, and the story behind it is as fascinating as what happens itself.  Even if you know what it is, it's still a massive "Holy shit!" moment that will have you rubbing your eyes in disbelief... and if you don't know how it ends, spare yourself the curiosity until you actually watch the show.  It's insane.  If I had to quibble, Jarecki and company do mess with the timeline of events late in the show (as reported on the internet) for storytelling purposes, which is an unfortunate side effect of being "entertainment programming" rather than straight up journalism.  It's not terribly crucial but understanding there's any deceit in the storytelling leads one to question much else of what we've seen.

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Another HBO show comedy fans won't shut up about, Silicon Valley is the latest show from King of the Hill/Beavis & Butthead/Office Space creator Mike Judge.  I was expecting a transcendent comedy experience and instead found another outstanding, thoughtful, insightful, and rewarding Judge creation that was less about manufacturing laughs than about telling a meaningful character story that happens to be humorous as well.

The show zeroes in on Thomas Middleditch, an unassuming, awkward programmer working and living in the same house with a small group of other programmers (Kumail Nanjiani, Martin Starr) and their benefactor (TJ Miller), creating intellectual property which hopefully will break big.  Middleditch stumbles upon a compression algorithm that winds up in a bidding war between Hooli, a Google analog, and an Elon Musk-style genius/venture capitalist.  Turning up a 10 million dollar offer, he takes the small development handout and the majority percentage ownership and he and his small team get to work on building a company out of a suburban home.  Much of the show focuses on how uncomfortable and ill-suited Middleditch's character is with leading the charge for what could be a massively successful and revolutionary product.  Not helping is the additional pressure of Hooli's attempts to go to market first and reverse engineer his code, or equally Miller's loudmouth pothead character who should at this point be a silent 10% investor and is instead anything but.

 The show has a strong cast of characters and performers which allows it to take comedic diversions without distracting from the more naturalistic elements of the show. It dwells heavily in the world of tech culture and the socially awkward personalities that dominate it, doing so in a manner that doesn't feel exploitative, but equally doesn't accept it as (it seems to be of the opinion people can change).


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Oh Wayward Pines.  You tried so hard.  Too hard.  You wanted to be what you couldn't, because we already have Twin Peaks.  Based on a series of novels (which own up to their Lynch-ian influence), Wayward Pines was shepherded into existence for the summer TV schedule (home to many a middling genre programming) by M. Night Shyamalan, whose predilection for story twists has audiences anticipating and mocking him, sometimes simultaneously.  Pines is filled with twists, each episode doling out one, two or sometimes much more of them, but rarely doing so with any real craft or effectiveness.  The plot has Matt Dillon's FBI agent on the search for two other agents who have disappeared.  He gets Doc Hollywooded into Wayward Pines where he finds one of them long dead, and the other many years older and quite settled into the sleepy environment that's oxymoronically draconian and utopic.  Public executions take place in the streets for disobeying the town's rules (which feel about as simplistic as those accompanying a Mogwi in Gremlins) and everything appears to be on camera or audio recorded.

It's all so sinister, so anyone who seems happy with the status quo seems in on it, and if they're not then it's all the more creepy.  The show aims for a Lost-like formula whereby it introduces new mysteries each time they expose one, only Lost had the benefit of engaging and mysterious characters as well as an engaging and mysterious setting and overall narrative.  Pines just has the town, and its mysterious quite quickly become maddeningly ridiculous (or perhaps even guiltily enjoyable).  It all culminates in the fifth episode whereby Hope Davis teaches the students of the local Academy all about the town's history while Matt Dillon silently scales the city's wall, discovering for himself its awful secret.  As clunky as the first four episodes were, the fifth is a masterpiece of exposition, one that somehow makes an undeniably ridiculous scenario seem totally logical.  I was beyond impressed.  And yet, I stopped watching with that episode.  I had no burning desire to continue the series and I still feel completely uninvested in it or its events.  I don't think a bad story really, but the show certainly wasn't executed well overall.

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We started watching Transparent shortly after we finished watching Sense8, coincidentally more than by design.  Though there's little similarity between the shows, I mention it because, as per its title, it too features a lead trans character as well as bisexual and gay characters in its main cast.

Jeffrey Tambor is the trans parent of the title who, in their advancing retirement years, finally decides to embrace who they feel most comfortable being, becoming Maura and moving into a trans-friendly community as part of the transition.  The show doesn't just follow Maura's transition, but her whole family, who as the children of a neurotic mother and distant, psychology professor father, are all a bit askew in the world.  Eldest daughter Sarah rekindles a romance with her college lover, terminating two marriages in the process, while youngest daughter Ali still struggles with adulthood and responsibility well into her thirties.  Middle child Josh suffers form anger and trust issues, having had an unstable romantic relationship with his childhood babysitter for years, and (not coincidentally) using his position as a music promoter to curry the favor of young female musicians.

The show can be wickedly funny and squeamishly uncomfortable in equal measure.  The Pfefferman clan hits just that precise level of self-involved assholishness that it makes them uneasy to watch or even care for.  If it weren't for Maura's sympathetic journey, it would be intolerable, but Maura's transition is dealt with in such a positive and favourable light that it gives a bright center for these dark spirals of characters to orbit around.

The best handled aspects of the show are the flashbacks, which largely show Mort as he tries to come to terms with who he is 15 to 20 years in the past.  For a lot of his journey, he's accompanied by Bradley Whitford who portrays a transvestite, and they retreat away to hotels on weekends to dress up.  This culminates in a brilliant full-flashback episode where the two go to a camp for transvestites and Maura encounters the prejudice they have towards transexuals there.

Most episodes have particular moments that stick in your brain, either by subject matter or by visual craft.  Perhaps the best episode deals with Ali's relationship with Dale, a transsexual she met through her father's sessions, which seems to be portrayed as something a little unhealthy as she's denigrated and the submissive, only to be revealed to Ali's own surprise as something far more awkward and confused.  This spin on fantasy versus reality doesn't actually have any logic in how its presented, but it allows for so much pondering on themes of identity, desire, and fantasy as well as delving into Ali's psyche in an indirect fashion.

It's a brilliant and challenging show.  I never look forward to watching it, but once I start, I binge on two or three episodes before I have to stop.  I feel overwhelmed, and yet I also feel rewarded.

(Supplementary Note: Even though Season 2 has completed and we have access to it, I'm finding it hard to bring myself to watch it. )

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Family comedies haven't really been my thing since the late 1980s, and yet here I am regularly watching Fresh Off The Boat.  Based (loosely, and somewhat contentiously) off Eddie Huang's memoir, the series first season finds young Eddie moving to Miami with his family as his father starts a new restaurant.  Early on the series dealt with some of the more difficult elements of the transition, mainly being Chinese in a predominantly white city, as well as the hardships of establishing a new business, always with little peculiar touches that differentiated itself from other shows, but establishing itself on the same playing field as Malcolm In The Middle and Everybody Hates Chris before it.  As the show got deeper into its half-season order, it started to eschew the moments of drama and the darker elements of their life to focus more on the absurdist comedy (where things like the "success perm" and Jessica's gaydar blindness seed themselves as running gags).  Like The Wonder Years or Everybody Hates Chris, the adult Eddie acted as narrator, and as such the show largely revolved around him.  Eddie identifying with 90's hip-hop, having a crush on his older neighbor, and feuding with kids at school were key parts of his story entering the 7th grade at a new school.  His younger brothers Emory and Evan seemed to have an easier time adjusting, the former a schoolyard Lothario, the latter an extremely bright student and social butterfly among the adult neighbors.  Where Eddie is a disappointment to the standards of a Chinese child, having little interest in educational pursuits and defying his parents regularly, Emory and Evan both are dutiful children who enjoy their disciplinary tiger-mom.

The real Huang became publicly disgruntled with the show's direction, which put him at odds with the producers and network as the show became the first successful Asian American-led network sitcom.   Just as the writer decided to distance himself from the show, so too did the program decide to distance itself from Huang's source material, for season 2 it dropped its narration and expanded the focus on all of the family members for its full-season order.  It's first season was solid, but this second season has been far more entertaining, fleshing out both its major and minor characters in more interesting (and often sillier) ways.  It playfully toys with both Chinese and Chinese-American culture, fielding an even mix of the real and surreal, showing elements of American culture that the Huangs (as individuals and as a family) have glommed onto, and also highlighting some other aspects of Americana that still elude them.

The show uses its 90's setting to great effect, putting a spotlight on some of the cultural touchstones from the time, whether it be Shaquille O'Neil's ill-fated Shaq-Fu video game or a Janet Jackson concert, there's equal time for reverence, nostalgia, and mockery.

Where the show triumphs is in its dense supporting cast, including the team at Louis' Cattleman's Ranch restaurant, Jessica's family from D.C., or Eddie's misfit group of friends at school.  But the main cast is resoundingly great.  Randall Park has deserved a spotlight show for years, and has finally found it.  Constance Wu makes Jessica one of the liveliest characters on television, while the trio of Hudson Yang, Forrest Wheeler and Ian Chen as Eddie, Emory and Evan respectively are three immensely delightful young actors who manage to eschew precociousness or excessive cuteness that so many family comedies rely upon.  Especially in season 2, Emory and Evan are given room to grow as characters, rather than the more one-note jokes they were in the first season.  As a whole it's a genuine delight.

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I'm not certain what spurred HBO on to make 7 Days In Hell. At 50-ish minutes, it's not a movie-length production, and it feels more like it would fit on ESPN despite it's satirical nature (I think ESPN should have more original scripted programming that's very sports-centric).  The special is a talking heads mocumentary ala Zelig or the Rutles about an epic 7-day match between the top tennis players of the early 2000's at Wimbledon.  The players are Aaron Williams, the adopted brother of Venus and Serena Williams, played by Andy Samberg (so immediately you see the humor in that family dynamic), and Charles Poole, a dimwitted prodigy played by Game of Thrones' Kit Harrington.  The special doesn't demand deep knowledge of Tennis, but does request some familiarity.  If you don't know the structure of the game, at least somewhat loosely, nor do you know the more famous commentators/ex-players like John McEnroe or Chris Evert it's going to lose you somewhat.

But the production is very entertaining, focusing on the manufactured rivalry between Williams (the bad boy superstar of the game) and Poole once idolized Williams, but is manipulated exceedingly by his mother (Mary Steenburgen) and manager (Fred Armisen).  There's a lot of sports and sports-biography stereotypes put through their paces, mostly hitting on the funny, but occasionally falling flat.  Top marks go to Michael Sheen as the aging, salacious British talk show host drooling over Poole through a chain of cigarettes and whiskey on air.  The tennis itself is a joke, both players rather than being so good having instead a crazy rash of illnesses, overdoses and other afflictions.  It all ends in a somewhat unsatisfying fashion, leaving no closure (as well as the absence of the two stars from the talking heads), and yet not really having anywhere else of go when it's all said and done.  It's a definite curiosity, the like you don't see too often, as it's not a film, nor a sketch.

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Magic isn't really my thing, man.  I mean magic as a superpower, or as a trope of fantasy. It's so nebulous and unspecific such that it can pretty much do anything, the consummate Deus Ex Machina.  The  rules of magic, the limitations of it, how one can wield it better than another...these are all things that rarely have good definition in a story.  It's magic, so there's often no logic for it, nor is there a how or a why.  I guess I just don't get it most of the time.  But I got Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I got it almost immediately.  The magic wielded in this mini-series, based off the novel by Susanna Clarke, all comes from textbooks, and are limited mostly to the incantations inscribed.  Sure it ventures somewhat outside of that, but it's knowledge, it's studies, and understanding.  It's more like science in this series than magic, even though it does fantastical stuff.

Harry Potter spent a good seven novels (and eight films) building a world around magic and magic learning, and while I found that series to be generally palatable, it was still full of mystical mumbo jumbo and an overwhelming number of magic peoples that it still put me off a little.  Meanwhile Strange & Norrell takes place in the very specific era of the 19th Century Napoleonic Wars, an establishes a very tangible English society that the characters live in.  At this time, Mr. Norrell (Eddie Marsan) is the main keeper of the mystic texts and the sole purveyor of magic.  It's otherwise a largely distant memory in the public consciousness.  Mr. Norrell offers up his services to English army to help protect and advance the homeland's interests, gaining some powerful political allies in the process.  When Jonathan Strange (Bertie Carvel) comes along, a gifted amateur who seeks tutelage under the only magician in the land, Mr. Norrell is both excited and wary.  It's his pleasure to finally have an associate, but the fact that Strange seems so much more adept and agile at spell casting troubles him, and his ego.

Ultimately, Strange realizes he's surpassed his master, though he still reveres him and his intelligence, Norrell seethes with jealousy and envy, and seeks to spite his pupil and stunt his growth any way possible, yet every turn seems to only build his legend more.  Norrell seeks power, gains and abuses it, while Strange left somewhat untrained messes with forces he's not quite equipped to control or contain.  While the world wages war around them, they wage war with one another and it's fairly intense, as the audience can see it fall apart from the beginning but are also keenly aware there's little these two men can do to stop it.  It's a fantastic production, utterly engrossing, and both Strange and Norrell are such deep characters, where they could have been made so thin.  Marsan and Carvel are fantastic in the lead roles conveying all manner of subtlety, foregoing scene chewing or overt theatrics.  Like their magic, their performances are ones of nuance.

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Another British import, but of a completely different sort, The Wrong Mans is a mistaken identity comedy that somehow manages to trump all mistaken identity comedies that came before it.  Over six episodes writers/stars James Corden and Mathew Baynton manage to exploit and exacerbate every trope of the subgenre while playing up most of the conventional action movie tropes at the same time.  The result winds up a genuinely compelling action-mystery that just so happens to be quite hilarious.  Rather remarkably on a modest budget the show manages to maintain the tension of an action vehicle without really containing that much action, but when it does it looks pretty good.  It constructs itself around a genuine mystery for the characters to solve.  Where most mistaken identity comedies have the audience in on the truth and watching the character bumble their way through it, this one unfolds in as engrossing a fashion as any of your binge-worthy peak-TV series.

What The Wrong Mans does both to differentiate itself and make it so entertaining is it keeps doubling down on the mistaken identity.  Each episode seems to thrust Baynton's hapless character into another alias or misunderstanding that pushes him deeper into the web of corruption and crime that the show takes place.  Baynton does hapless well, and seems out of his depth perpetually throughout, even at the successful resolution.  Cordon does a satisfying job filling the role of the desperate clinger-on, a very Nick Frost-type part at first but the show does an effective job at humanizing him and not just making him pathetic comic relief (or simply a situation exacerbater).

The show works both as a whole and as an episodic.  There are clearly defined breaks, but it all still seamlessly runs together like a 3 hour film.  This one came recommended and I wholeheartedly pay that recommendation forward.  There is a second, 4-episode season that I've still yet to get to, but I hear is quite complimentary and equally enjoyable.

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Fargo Season 1 was an utter surprise, managing to capture a Coen Brothers-esque flavour without aping or parroting.  It was a show that forged its own path, with a debt owed to its source that it repayed tenfold.  In this golden age of television, Fargo managed to be one of the shiniest spots.  Given that it was a complete story told over ten episodes, one had to wonder where a second season would go, and whether it was even necessary.  One also had to wonder whether the Fargo crew shouldn't quit while they were ahead, seeing as what they got away with in season 1 was a minor miracle.

Once again, defying expectations, Fargo Season 2 came in and blew the excellent first season out of the water.  Like the source and Season 1, Season 2 is a crime story taking place in the Northern Mid-west States in 1979, the tale of two mob factions gone to war, the troubled husband and wife caught in the middle of it, and the police who are trying to understand what is happening and how to quash it.

Season 1 had a dynamite cast, and Season 2 kept up the caliber, with Patrick Wilson, Jean Smart, Ted Danson, Kirsten Dunst, Bokeem Woodbine, Jeffrey Donovan, and more.  Every single player in the very deep cast is excellent, some new(ish) players doling out very take-notice performances.

Not just satisfied with simply telling an already engrossing story of these characters and their lives, creator/showrunner Noah Hawley also seeds through the show with a number of different themes as part of its backdrop, including Reagan's presidential run, feminism, and UFO sightings.  The density of Howley's storytelling, coupled with his astounding visual flourishes (frequent use of split screens and screen wipes, which were very much a staple of 1970's cinema) and a killer soundtrack (both the song selection and the score from Jeff Russo are dynamite) all contribute to one of the most immersive television experiences that demands revisiting.  With this second season the show crawls out of the shadow of the Coens, but once again begs the question "What's next?"  Again, I wonder if perhaps they shouldn't quite while they're ahead, but now I'm more curious than ever to see where (and when) they go and what they come up with.  Simply the best television has to offer.

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And this is what I watched as of mid-late 2015.  I've been subsequently watching this stuff...

I Saw This!! It's a Crime!!

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our all-too regular feature wherein Graig or David attempt to write about a bunch of movies they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. Now they they have to strain to say anything meaningful lest they just not say anything at all. And they can't do that, can they?

The Return of the Original Paragraph.

Run All Night, 2015, Jaume Collet-Serra (The Orphan) -- download
The Drop, 2014, Michaël R. Roskam (Bullhead) -- Netflix
Seven Psychopaths, 2012, Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) -- Netflix
Red Eye, 2005, Wes Craven (Swamp Thing) -- Netflix

I consider Run All Night the spiritual sequel to Liam Neeson's A Walk Among the Tombstones. In the latter Neeson is an ex-cop investigating crime, in the former, an ex-enforcer for the mob. Again with Neeson and the capable violence. Again with the aging Liam Neeson not comfortable with his former lives.

Jimmy Conlon worked for Shawn Maguire, head of a waning Irish mob in NYC. Jimmy's son is Joel Kinnamen, still looking for a great role since The Killing, but always putting in quality work.  Mike (Kinnamen) hates Jimmy but a plot intervention, that could have been the elevator pitch for John Wick, has Mike witnessing Shawn's son in a drug deal gone wrong and being forced to kill the son. Now Shawn wants Mike dead and Jimmy has to protect him.

The best bits are between Shawn (Ed Harris) and Jimmy, two old gangsters who genuinely care for each other but cannot doff the responsibilities they have. Shawn's son was an idiot but Shawn has to avenge him. Jimmy has no real connection to his son, but has to protect him. So, Jimmy and Mike run all night chased by gangsters and dirty cops and a weirdly placed Common as a quiet hitman, who seems to be making a guest appearance in this movie.

The Drop brings Tom Hardy into yet another weird role which he pulls on like an old sweater, it completely enveloping him. Accent, mannerisms, look -- all change again, as Hardy plays Bob a mild mannered bartender in Brooklyn, used as a drop for the mob. Drop bars collect money for the mob and occasionally they become the center of BIG drops, tons of dirty money that no petty crook in his right mind would rob. But if they didn't, we wouldn't have a movie.

Hardy plays Bob not just as mild mannered, but somewhere along the spectrum. So meek, he puts up with shit from everyone and is laughed at for it. But from scene one, we know there is something behind those eyes that are always glancing left or at the ground, mumbling his responses. He won't get involved in cousin Marv's (James Gandolphini) scheme to rob his own bar and he is extremely hesitant to take care of an abused pit bull puppy he finds in the trash. But everyone else's machinations force Bob to come into his own.

This is a well crafted crime thriller on the slow side of things. But intentionally and, remember, Hardy was able to pull off a movie that was solely contained in a car -- he can do slow, and do it well. And I really liked seeing him play off Noomi Rapace, much more than I did in Dead Man Down. But oddly, the characters are interchangeable. Not sure who decided she will ever play the abused woman hiding from society. Next to Bob, Noomi's Nadia is ebullient. And Bob likes the puppy, so he gets my smile.

In Bruges was one my favourite movies that I can remember very little of. I was looking forward to  the next by McDonagh and have no idea why it took this long for me to sidle over to it. Like the former, Seven Psychopaths is a comedic romp around crime. Colin Farrell is back, this time as a screenwriter trying to find his next piece. Cliches abound in his character, from blank pages to a single success before this wall, to being a drunk. His best friend, the off Sam Rockwell is that friend, the one you don't know why you stick with, because he keeps on fucking up your life. This time it starts with him trying to insert his own character into Farrell's script, which happens to be Seven Psychopaths. And thus begins quite the meta movie.

Its funny, well scripted and has a ton of solid B-movie people like Tom Waits, Woody Harrelson and Christopher Walken. But like the other, I doubt I will remember it much beyond the writing of this segment.

What? This average crime thriller from 2005 was directed by Wes Craven? Weird. And no, its not a thriller pretending to be a horror. Its just an average, decently presented thriller about a terrorist who ropes a pretty young hotel manager into his plot. Rachel McAdams is the pretty, young thing playing off Cillian Murphy (as Jackson Rippner; now ain't THAT a handle). The funny thing is that she is too good for such a throw away role, so the character is not just a pretty young thing, and ends up turning the tables on Murphy.

But still, the movie barely rates one paragraph. And how did 2005 get so... dated looking? Seriously, I was starting to get offended by the 1990s looking like the ancient past, but now only 10 years ago looks like my childhood?  Urgh. Getting old can mess with your perception, especially as you get older. No, that is not pithy. In 2005, 1995 just looked like it was around the bend. But in 2015, the year 2005 looks positively ancient. I believe its more a product of my mind aging.

See what I did there?

I Saw This!! The TV land one-paragraph challenge

Piggybacking off the success of my  last entry in which I managed to plow through my backlog of films to "review" (or whatever you call this), I figured I'd do the same to just get through all this damn television I've been watching dammit.

I have to say I'm at television overload, almost at story consumption overload.  I'm almost ready to break from TV and stick with compacted storytelling of cinema for a while.  I read about 30 ongoing comic books a month, I have a couple dozen active TV shows that I watch (plus another dozen at least that I want to), I have about a dozen weekly (some daily) podcasts I enjoy listening to,  and I'm never going to be able to watch all the movies I want to see.  I'm overwhelmed, and I get distracted by how overwhelming my queue is.

Entertainment should be escape from the crushing weight of reality, not a contributing element to that crush.

Anyway, TV:

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The Muppets  - ABC
Supergirl - CBS/Global
Rick and Morty - Teletoon/Adult Swim
DC's Legends of Tomorrow - CW/CTV
Mr. Robot Season 1 - TNT/Showcase/Shomi
Black Mirror - (Redux) - BBC/Shomi
The X-Files (season 10) - Fox/CTV
The Colony - TNT/Bravo
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The Muppets return to TV was going to be awkward regardless of what it turned out to be.  I don't think any longtime fan would be wholly satisfied with it in any format.  The fact of the matter is Jim Henson is dead, Frank Oz is out of the picture, most of the original performers are long gone, and so anything Muppets, under the Disney banner instead of Jim Henson's, is going to feel like a pale imitation.  That they even managed to come up with something that was remotely entertaining in its own right (even if it's an ill fit for the brand) was a minor miracle.  The first half of this first (and probably last) season was a direct lift of The Larry Sanders Show, a behind the scenes look a late night talk show (in this case Miss Piggy's) and the cast of characters who keep it running.  In the muck of the Muppets legacy is the fact that they are "actors", almost always "playing themselves" in film and television.  But the show messes with the happily ever after love story of Kermit and Piggy by launching with them having had a terrible break up yet still contractually obligated to work together as producer and starlet.  Sure it may destroy countless childhood memories, but actually made for fairly amusing television.  Some just outright dismiss the more mature, occasionally innuendo-laden jokes and themes, but I warmed to it rather quickly.  Yes, I was disappointed it wasn't a family-friendly, corny Vaudevillian venture that I could watch with my six-year-old daughter, but so scarred by the Muppets Most Wanted was she that she's sworn off the Muppets for good, so, whatever.  Post-Christmas break The Muppets have come back softer, more diversified in focus, and unfortunately less entertaining for it.   I'm about ready to give up.

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On the other hand, Supergirl is the perfect show to watch with my six-year-old daughter.  Were I a single-dude comic book nerd dwelling in my parent's basement as I turned 40, it may not appeal to me so much, as it's heavy on the melodrama and even heavier on exploring themes of women's role in the workplace and society.  As I said, for a young girl, growing up in an age where the internet abuse of women is commonplace, a time when despite years of outrage, progress and change, the patriarchy that still governs much of the world and dictates what a woman should be like, Supergirl addresses these head on, and says, pretty much, own it.  Don't let society bring you down for who you are and don't let society build you up into something you're not.  It's a rather beautiful and persistent message.  The voice of this message, most often, is Calista Flockhart's media magnate Cat Grant, who serves as Supergirl's voice in the press, and mentor to Kara (Supergirl's alter-ego) as her boss.  The show brings Jimmy (James, please) Olsen over from Superman's world (that he's handsome, brawny, African-American, and bow tie-less is rather divergent cosmetic changes from the comic, but irrelevant) and gives Kara male bff who's totally stuck in the friend zone.  The show's weak link is Kara' adoptive sister, the perennially out-of-breath Alex, who is supposed to be a badass DEO (an alien watchdog government agency) agent but actress Chyler Leigh just can't pull it off.  The character isn't bad, the casting is just wrong and should be changed for a second season.  DEO boss Hank Henshaw (a tremendous David Harewood) pulled a masterful bait and switch by revealing him not to be Cyborg Superman as in the comics, but the Martian Manhunter.  The reveal was perhaps one of the best executed 5 minutes of nerd television ever.  The show juggles threats-of-the-week along with an ongoing threat from a gang of Kryptonian criminals, and for a weekly show handles its effects fairly well.  Melissa Benoist handles the role quite well, and is at her most effective when the show allows her to really let loose with her emotions (and what Cat Grant has to say about showing emotions is quite insightful).  Another weak point it's that the villains-of-the-week have a clunky, BBC, classic-Doctor Who quality (Red Tornado was particularly horrendously executed in translation).  Often there's too much going on in any one episode, but overall it's enjoyable and certainly a different perspective on fantasy heroes than we're getting from most places (Agent Carter and Jessica Jones excluded).

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I'm a season or two behind on Rick and Morty because it has not aired on Canadian television until now and I've been a little to spendthrift to buy it on DVD.  Having watched the first half dozen episodes of the first season, I'm wishing I splurged on those DVDs long ago.  I shouldn't have expected anything less than genius from Dan Harmon. Given how obvious his influence was on Community (as witnessed by the atrocious 4th season after he was fired), I should have suspected that his storytelling style, pop culture influences, and tumultuous emotions would find a good home in an animated environment, particularly one with a science fiction conceit.  Rick hijack's Morty's life to escort him on adventures through space, time, and dimensions, exposing his just-developing teenaged grandson to the untold horrors and just as horrific pleasures of the universe.  Why, exactly, it's Morty that needs to accompany him is never clearly actualized (despite being broached head on when Morty's sister, Summer, forces her way into one of Rick's adventures).  In a medium with no-holds-barred storytelling, Harman and co-creator Justin Roiland do exactly that, breaking any storytelling convention they wish.  It leads to tremendously ingenious comedy, but also to moments of heavy introspection or devastating emotional weight (softened only by the fact that it's a cartoon).  Rick and Morty pushes at its audience to accept it from moment one, with Rick being a rather salacious character, a perpetual slather of drool under his lip, and uncontrollable burping interrupting his speech... yet he grows on you rather quickly with a weird ability to twist logic into lies and vice versa.  The show  keeps pushing boundaries with ideas that may be in bad taste in concept but get explored with an actual emotional stake for the character that the offense dissolves.  I'm beyond impressed, to the point that if they've managed to do such amazing work with their first batch of episodes that it can only get better as they settle into their characters and storytelling/animation style.  One of the best shows going!

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It's amazing to me that DC's Legends of Tomorrow exists.  The crew of the CW's Arrow and The Flash collected an amazing roster of guest players on those respective shows that they decided to see if they could build a comic book-style team-up series around them.  As a result we get half-season of a series where Brandon Routh, Victor Garber, Caity Lotz, Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell play superheroes and supervillians bonded together by a time traveller from the future (Doctor Who's Arthur Darville) in an effort to stop history's greatest monster, the immortal Vandal Savage, from taking over the world.  The Atom, Firestorm, Hawkman, Hawkgirl), White Canary, Captain Cold, Heat Wave...few are actual household names, but it's irrelevant, for this is a show where personality, not powers, rule the day.  The fun of the show is not the time travelling, or the fighting, or visual effects, but rather who can scenery chew the best.  So far the experienced of the bunch (aforementioned Garber, Miller, Purcell, Lotz, and Routh) all go toe to toe on screen masticating everything around them.  Poor Darville, Ciara Renee (Hawkgirl) and Attack the Block's Franz Drameh just don't have time on Flash or Arrow under their belt to punch up that high.  Main baddy Casper Crump gets it though...his demonic grin under that beard his greatest asset.  Oh, it's by no means a great show... it's clunky and the characters (including at least two qualified geniuses, a criminal mastermind, a time master and a master assassin) far too often miss the logical way forward in any given situation, but it is fun as hell.  Miller's poker-faced, gravelly Captain Cold is the utter highlight while Routh just seeps charm.  Lotz delivers nice emotional weight through pursed lips while also seeming to have a tremendous amount of fun playing dress-up in multi-era wardrobes.  Hopefully Drame, Renee and Darvill can get into the spirit (hints from both Darville and Drame in the most recent episode, but Renee just seems lost.  It doesn't help that they're completely mishandling Hawkgirl from moment one).  I'm hoping for a second season with a cast juggle that can include Matt Ryan's John Constantine and Megalyn Echikunwoke Vixen.

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Holy shit, Mr. Robot!  There's a lot of great TV happening these days.  "They" (who?) are calling it a golden age.  I can't disagree.  It seems a few times a year I watch something that just hits every button correctly, a Fargo or Rick and Morty or Mad Men Season 7... Mr. Robot is decidedly of that ilk.  Eliot (Rami Malek) An on-the-spectrum computer wizard working for a corporate systems security company is enlisted by a mysterious figure (Christian Slater, as the titular Mr. Robot, in his best performance in 20 years) to help his small band of hackers take down the colloquially dubbed "Evil Corp", creating international market chaos and debt revolution around the world (sort of an action-less Person of Interest in some ways).  But Eliot has his vices.  He's addicted to morphine and is equally addicted to virtually invading the lives of everyone around him.  His memory leads him to sometimes see things from a skewed perspective (which, given that he's our narrator, leads us, the viewer to have a skewed perspective to what is actually happening).  The show does an amazing job of investing us in Eliot's life and the intense and uncomfortable situations he's involved in while also keeping us at just enough of an arm's distance away as to always be wary of what Eliot is telling us and why.  The show negotiates its side characters as skillfully as its main character, bringing us into their lives as sympathetic bystanders to Eliot's chaos in some respects and manipulative participants in others.  The whole show is built up on a very 1980's aesthetic that recalls Michael Mann's films/Miami Vice era, with a killer soundtrack of mostly modern tunes that likewise are built on an 80's aesthetic.  It's incredibly cinematic and each episode feels blazingly propulsive but the intensity makes it hard to binge watch.  I could get max two episodes in one sitting before I had to have a break (but by the latter stretch I was on it every day). I was unaware in advance that there was a "twist reveal" but it's not the crux of the show.  It's a huge facet to understanding Eliot's character, sort of a "secret origin", but it's not what the show builds towards.  It actually builds towards its logical conclusion, where we wind up with a world within the program that no longer resembles our own reality.  The writers have almost hamstrung themselves for season two, but with an excellent coda, have managed to keep the intrigue going. 


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I did a review of the first episode of Black Mirror a while back, which, to summarize, traumatized me a little.  The first episode, that is, not the review.  So it took me awhile to get back to the show.  That type of psychosomatic juggling was not something I was eager to repeat, and yet, the goodwill this show has engendered among the SF community was enough to keep my interest piqued.  Breaking my one paragraph challenge, here's an episode by episode breakdown (since each ep of Black Mirror is like a mini-movie).

"Fifteen Million Merits" takes us into a world where what we see of humanity is largely confined to drudgery and base level distraction.  Humans in this story live in tiny cubicles that are wall-to-wall screens, thrusting advertising at them at all hours demanding they pay attention to dismiss them.  Their entertainment consists of an "American Idol"-style competition show, pornography, and first person shooter video games.  Their work lives take them to another station in the same building where they ride stationary bicycles to power the grid, again facing a screen.  When our protagonist, Bing, backs the girl he has a crush on to go on the reality show with two lifetimes worth of credits, it's in the optimistic hope she can escape this reality.  But the judges don't see her as the next pop star, instead as another beautiful face to be broken in porn.  Bing rebels, and takes the screen hostage with a heartfelt screed against the way they live.  The episode is a potent and damning extension of the way we live, more and more sinking into our screens to escape reality, only to qualify that we would take any opportunity to rise above it by being the adored, not the adorer.  If not the best episode, then at least the show's most effectively delivered message.

"The Entire History Of You" pokes at our perpetual need to document our lives with videos and photographs and extends it to the next level, where we are constantly recording our lives, storing them in a hard drive in our brain, allowing for untainted access to our past at all times.  It allows us to scrutinize and analyze the events of our lives with a terrifying amount of clarity and detail.  Nothing is forgotten.  The ability to obsess over the past takes one couple down a heart-wrenching path as a husband suspects his wife of cheating, and goes to extreme ends, sacrificing his happiness, his family and to some extent his sanity in proving it.  The reality painted here feels so real... where the preceding episodes felt surreal, or even fantastical to a small degree, this feels like a peek into the near future where new technology has changed the way we live and relate...like cel phones or computers have in such a short time.  It's naturalistic storytelling but painful in the exploration of some of the darker side effects.  Are our memories best kept as faulty as they are?

The most star-powered episode, "Be Right Back" was lucky to have Haley Atwell and Domnhall Gleeson before they became much more recognizable faces.  The episode finds Atwell left mourning Gleeson's death just after they moved to isolated countryside.  A friend signs Atwell up for an experimental program from a Google like company which has developed the ability to extract the personality and memories of the deceased from online videos, email and social media.  At first it starts as text based chat, venturing into voice calls, and ultimately an artificial life form acting as host.  Unlike, say, Her, this isn't a story about an AI achieving sentience but rather an AI being a close-but-not-quite replacement for humanity.  It would be a rather silly episode if it didn't negotiate the emotional toll so amazingly.  The coda, which steps forward a few years ahead, is so filled with nuance that it can't be simply parsed as to what it means, emotionally.  Quite brilliant this one.

I remember being petrified by The Twilight Zone as a child, the imagery at times were just so foreign to young eyes.  "White Bear" sent me into flashbacks early on, absolutely terrifying me throughout much of its run time.  It's an intense, white knuckle run, as a woman wakes up tied to a chair, a static image of a stark black and white logo emblazoned on the screen.  She steps outside to find no one will talk to her, instead just standing there, trance-like holding up their mobiles, recording.  The new world becomes more terrifying as she encounters raving, masked murderers and survivors who try to explain what has happened (involving an alien signal messing with people's brains).  There's a twist ending here which itself is the crux of the episode.  As effective as it is at being scary, the twist is almost too far fetched or ridiculous and the episode does suffer for it.  And yet the point comes across, at what point does the punishment, the public damnation, shaming and trauma, become worse than the crime?  If you haven't seen the episode, that last sentence may seem incongruous or spoilery, and it is both, as I'm being vague for spoilery reasons.  But as much as it doesn't stick the landing "White Bear" ramps up the intensity again in the closing credits crawl as it unpacks the events of the episode from another perspective.  Distasteful and potent.

"The Waldo Moment" is by far the weakest episode of the show, with no less an important message that screams its relevance more and more with each passing day as Trump seeks the Republican Nomination.  In the show an annoying, foul mouthed, blue troll-like animated character named Waldo is voiced and controlled by an otherwise unsuccessful comedian.  But during a well-received failed interview with a political official (think Ali G, only dumber) Waldo finds himself a voice of the people, spewing out lame platitudes and ignorance to a section of the populace who find him a refreshing voice amid the dry dialogue of the established politicians.  With the power of media and promotion behind him, Waldo actually begins to gain viable political traction running in a by-election, creating a mockery of the establishment, mostly for the worse.  Waldo is unfortunately uncharismatic and annoying with nothing really to say, so it makes his sudden popularity surge a conceit forced upon the audience rather than one the audience believes.  The journey feels forced and overall it's a bit tedious to watch, with nary a likeable character on screen.  The coda is an absurd extension of the episode's idea pushed to paranoid conclusions.  And yet, one can 100% see the parallels between Waldo's stab at politics and what Trump is doing today.  Hopefully history proves Black Mirror wrong, but it's eerily prescient.

There's a feature-length "Christmas" episode starring John Hamm, but I don't have access to this episode.  I'm keen for the Netflix season of Black Mirror to come, though I worry if it will be too American, or too much at once (if they do a 10 or 12 episode season).

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The X-Files is back!  It's not a nostalgic return, it's not just a self-congratulatory we-kinda-changed-television pat on the back either, it's the X-Files returning to forms.  Yes, forms.  The X-Files, like a shape-changing villain of the week (I'm not nearly nerdy enough to pull out the exact character in reference), took on many different storytelling styles and formats during it's initial 9-year run.  It excelled at monster-of-the-week storytelling and at the personal drama of its two leads (which it managed to get a good 5 years out of, and a not-so-good four years to follow).  It started off reliably strong in establishing its own "mythology", an ongoing narrative that the monster-of-the-week episodes sometimes frustratingly interrupted, and that really came to a head with the feature film, subtitled Fight The Future.  It was all downhill after that.  It became evident that show creator Chris Carter didn't have a plan for the story and after 5 seasons it just ambled along, unsure and aimless.  So yes, Season 10, in the guise of a 6-episode order, is a return to form, for better or worse.  The first and last episode act as the "mythology" episodes, putting a feather into the cap of the drudgingly  long-running alien and smoking man conspiracies in about the most ham-fisted and baffling way possible.  The season ends with an uncontrollable contagion outbreak and an eye-rolling cliffhanger that made me question whether I wanted more if this is what I was getting. The middle four episodes take the monster-of-the-week shape and excel, feeling 100% like vintage X-Files, going from direly serious to outrageously silly from one episode to the next, which the show has always, stragely, felt comfortable with.  The fifth episode is conflicting as it introduces young Mulder and Scully analogs and hilariously sends Mulder on a freaky LSD-style psychedelic trip (where he dances the Achy-Breaky Heart), but unfortunately opens with a young middle Eastern man in Texas who turns into the stereotypical terrorist threat, which is disturbingly cliche, and in many ways harmful.  By delivering 3 and 1/2 good or great episodes and a couple of clunkers, the new X-Files season pretty much matches its track record on its best seasons, so truly it's good to have it back.  Hopefully Vince Gilligan can make it back for Season 11.

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The Mrs. Kent and I (and Toasty too!) have quite the affection for the handsome and charismatic Josh Hollaway (aka Sawyer from Lost), and are quite sad that Mr. Hollaway is too old now to play young Han Solo in the planned young Han Solo movie since he's really the only actor besides Harrison Ford to truly embody that "Han Solo vibe".  He was the star of a short lived 6 Million Dollar Man knock-off a couple years ago (the poorly named and shoddily executed Intelligence should have be much more fun than it was), he had an all to brief role in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (he should've been pegged to take over that franchise instead of Jeremy Renner) and otherwise hasn't been to visible.  The Colony reunites Hollaway with Lost showrunner Carlton Cuse, putting him in a V knock-off that, thankfully, manages to eschew its knock-off status rather easily.  I joined the show in progress, meaning I missed the first few episodes (looks like I came in on Episode 3) but was rapidly entranced by this world which takes place in the year after (suspected) aliens have come and divided various cities into different blocks, putting up gargantuan walls between them, blocking them off from communications with the outside world, and the "alien"-established government trying to maintain some sense of normalcy and order.  But this "Colony Transitional Authority" is tyrannical, controlling the populace with shows of force, violence and scare tactics.  Holloway is the show's primary focus, as a special operative of the CTA hunting down extremists.  And there is resistance, both organized and not, violent and vocal, of which Holloway's wife (the doe-eyed, perpetually stunned Sarah Wayne Callies) is an increasingly important part.  The show explores the politics, the violence, the blackmarket, the underground, the regular people and the middlemen all extremely well.  Toasty noted the pilot wasn't all that special in his first episode review, but having skipped that and jumped into the fray I've found it quite engrossing.  It's went from curiosity to must-watch, as I'm finding myself more and more intrigued by how this new world works, what happened to it in the past, and how it's all going to escalate.  Cuse and co-creator Ryan J. Condal are taking a different tactic than many genre shows in the wake of Lost.  They're truly world building and slow-burning, while still maintaining a sense of forward progression.  None of the episodes have yet felt like spinning wheels (though the sub-plot with Callies' sister working for an art reclaimer has taken its time paying off).  There's no sense of The Colony stagnating here, there's no status quo that it, nor the characters wish to maintain, and that they're all at odds on how to move forward, therein lies the drama.  It's also not enamored with sensationalism, special effects, or even the fantastical elements of its show.  It truly is focussed on the various human elements at play.  I can totally see season one being the launchpad for a much, much bigger season two, but I like how ground level it is.

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Sick n Binging: Zombie Time

NOT a soon-to-be-regular category, but one Kent is welcome to, since he is more often exposed to virus laden bacteria machines, i.e. kids, this one is about laying on the sofa coughing and hacking and sneezing and having not enough energy to even sleep properly, so might as well watch Netflix.

Maggie, 2015, Henry Hobson (title designer) -- Netflix
Re-Kill, 2015, Valeri Milev (Wrong Turn 6) -- Netflix

Really, I should have been watching contagion style movies, but my fever wasn't that high and I didn't have the shakes. So, zombie infection was good enough, and I felt & sounded like a shambler.

Maggie is the attempt at a contemplative zombie movie where her family deals with the slow spread of a zombie plague through their daughter, and the societal weights all around her. It's not a very successful attempt.

Enter a new zombie infection that starts with a scratch or bite and ends up with a decaying, but living, biter. This is the world of the infected, not the risen dead. NecroAmbulism, a virus that leaves them dying on their feet, has swept the world and the government protocols are struggling with control. Most infected are either put down, if in the final stages, while the newly infected are quarantined. A brief wander through the halls of a hospital shows people acting quite matter of fact, as the severely infected moan and struggle in their restraints, all the more just like people with a bad disease. Which is what this movie has it as.

Maggie was bitten when she ran away to the city. Arnold Schwarzenegger comes to the city to retrieve her from an isolation ward, his daughter from his first marriage, his connection to his late wife. He has pulled strings with a local doctor to take her home, in his custody, until she shows signs of turning. He gets to spend some time with her. But just in case, he sends his kids from his current marriage to their aunt's.

Contemplative movies hope emotion can be portrayed through silences. There are lots of those typical scenes, focused on people's faces, the background blurred out, no dialogue. This is rural life, a simpler life but what they are dealing with is so much more complicated. And there is the comparison of the decaying rural lifestyle to the decaying daughter. But all the implied emotional impact is just ... boredom. I admit, I find it hard to connect with Abigail Breslin and really don't see Arnie as the grieving, gentle father, so all the connective scenes were bland and unremarkable. Which is a good summary of the film.

Meanwhile Re-Kill is a silly, Canadian (as in shot in the west, using familiar faces) scifi, zombie actioner attempting to portray what World War Z should have. I stole that last bit from Marmy. The premise is again post-zombie (ReAns) plague, but focused on a Cops like TV show that follows members of a Re-Kill Division squad. R Division is tasked with hunting down and re-killing the zombies, hoping to prevent Breakout 2.

Great premise. Silly execution. I was OK with the TV presentation style, but for the repeated sex commercials. OK I get it, there has to be some T&A in a straight-to zombie actioner, but boy was it tacked on. I actually rather enjoyed the interview segments and recollections of the zombie war 5 years previous, all reminiscent of the best parts of that book I mentioned. But the main focus of the movie is the squad being sent into the walled off city of NY to find out why someone was trying to deliver a truckload of zombies.

Sigh. 1) If the city is walled off, how exactly would you have a reason to drive a truck into that zone? Who would let you do that? 2) Why would they only send a small squad of glorified SWAT members, along with a TV crew, into a zone that was created because there are too many zombies there?  Anywayz, as is typical, they quickly begin to pick off members of the squad while mowing down hordes of extras. There is a mystery to be solved that is lifted from one of the latter Romero movies, and not one of the good ones. We are left with one member alive and a premise for a sequel. Not that I believe it will be made.

Sick n Binging: Guys Shooting People

NOT a soon-to-be-regular category, but one Kent is welcome to, since he is more often exposed to virus laden bacteria machines, i.e. kids, this one is about laying on the sofa coughing and hacking and sneezing and having not enough energy to even sleep properly, so might as well watch Netflix.

The Gunman, 2015, Pierre Morel (Taken) -- Netflix
Shooter, 2007, Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) -- Netflix

I am often confused about what constitutes a movie being made for the Straight To market vs the proper theatre release. A tired, familiar plot shouldn't inspire theatre release just because of a main star and some proper backing. But this is what Sean Penn ended up with -- another story about a gunman done wrong. But I was in the mood for crime stories, so this did well for me. I enjoyed it but was also rather bored with it.

In The Gunman, Sean Penn is Jim Terrier, a tough guy working as security for an NGO in The Congo. But what he is really there for is wetwork, as directed by Javier Bardem. Javier Bardem also wants Terrier's GF Annie, so chooses Jim as the guy to shoot the Minister of Mining, securing their client's contracts in the country and forcing Jim to leave. Javier steps in and replaces Jim in Annie's bed. Yeah, another female character as plot accessory instead of character.

Years later.  Someone is trying to kill Jim. He has given up the assassin life and is doing proper NGO work back in The Congo. But now he knows someone wants him dead and, of course, it must be connected to his work years ago. Yes, because, because he didn't have any other work that was shady, before or since. Anywayz, thus begins the Bourne-ian journey around Europe seeking knowledge of his hunters, killing mooks and reconnecting with Annie. Oh, and a meet cute with Idris Elba as an Interpol agent.

The only really impressive thing about this movie was Sean Penn's body. Part Sly Stone physique, part Liam Neeson skills, Jim Terrier is a well oiled machine over 50. And they use any opportunity to remind us of this by having him shirtless. But for the fact he also suffers major post-concussion syndrome (y'know, to make it current) from years of guns firing off in his ear, he would have waded through the conspiracy. In the end (and yes, Spoiler) it pulls out the usual crime reveal of having his good friend, the first person he reconnects with after the attempt on his life, turn out to be the Bad Guy.

Bleah, I expected more from Morel.

On the other hand, I am always happy with the way Antonie Fuqua does things. Starting way back with Training Day and Denzel as an unlikable, corrupt cop Fuqua allows his movies to have some weight to them. And remember The Replacement Killers, that brilliant and fun nod to Chow Yun-Fat and his Hong Kong actioners?  That was Fuqua. I am not saying he is Shakespeare but he does a little bit more with the action genre that raises the bar.

Right off the bat, from the intro story to our shooter, there is some skill to the directing, the lines between Mark Wahlberg and his spotter, and the camera work. You just get a gut feeling you are going to enjoy what you see.

Not that I am saying this is a completely original story -- snipes who get done wronged by their country is pretty common. But I liked the way this one played out, even as I was mentally yelling at the screen that he was being setup. After Bob Lee Swagger (now ain't that an American good ol boy name if you ever heard one) does not shoot the American president, he goes on the run. I am not sure how a trained special forces sniper also knows all these counterintelligence technique, but he gives the other special forces people hunting a good run for their money. Mooks in their dozens die.

The best parts are the quiet parts where Swagger swaggers, calmly planning his next move and inspiring those helping him with utter confidence, who includes Michael Peña as a bumbling FBI rookie and a surprisingly not-skinny Kate Mara. As they played up the sexuality of her character, to no good reason (tanktop no bra, she covers up modestly, but not before we get a good look) I wonder will we ever rise from female characters as accessories in Hollywood.

Sure, things blow up and lots of people get shot, but there is a way Fuqua handles everything that is quietly satisfying.

I Saw This!! (2015 Unreviewed) - the one-paragraph-rundown challenge

Blerg!
As I've mentioned pretty much every time I've written in the past year, I've been absolutely terrible about writing about movies or TV in anything resembling a timely manner.  It's gotten pretty ridiculous. Four of the movies below I'm almost at the 1 year anniversary of having watched them.  Do you really think I can pull together a viable review of a film I've seen only once almost a year ago...?
Of course I can.  
But the point is I don't have time to.
So the challenge here is can I summarize my feelings on a particular movie in just one paragraph and still have any resembling a meaningful contribution to the discussion of the film?
Let's see shall we...

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Neighbors - 2014, d. Nicholas Stoller --superchannel

Don Jon - 2013, d. Joseph Gordon-Levitt --superchannel

Space Station '76 - 2014, d. Jack Plotnick --superchannel

Mission Impossible III - 2006, d. JJ Abrams --superchannel

The Maze Runner - 2014, d. Wes Ball -- netflix
Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau - 2014, David Gregory -- netflix
Hardware - 1990, d. Richard Stanley -- dvd

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Zak and Dave have a DeNiro party

After seeing Neighbors I became a Zak Efron convert.  He's handsome, beefy and honestly a surprisingly capable comedic performer.  He was quite able to nail the role in a film like this where he's tasked with being a bit of a dope, somewhat of a tool andan unrepentant frat boy party prince, all while hiding a wounded little puppy of a soul underneath.  (If you know Marvel Comics, based on this he would have been perfect for the role of Starfox, Star Lord's dad, in the next Guardians of the Galaxy movie.  I think Kurt Russell's doing it instead, which is okay too... YOU'RE WASTING WORDS, KENT!!!) Anyway, this movie was funny as shit.  Tremendous casting all around.  Seth Rogen has stepped into his pre-mid-life crisis phase of playing 30-ish men transitioning into responsibility, and he does it better than any of his contemporaries.  Rose Byrne, for her part, is right there with him, playing a comrade-in-arm, a willing participant, rather than a nagging wife or some form of 'TskTsk'-er.  Supporting characters in the likes of Dave Franco, Ike Barinholtz, Carla Gallo, Lisa Kudrow and Jerrod Carmichael were all bang on, but even beyond that, cameos from the Lonely Island, the Workaholics crew, Randall Park, Hannibal Buress, Jason Mantzoukas and Natasha Leggero all rounded out the film as a power-house comedy.  It seemed too simplistic and too cliche a premise to be this entertaining but, dammit if it didn't succeed.  And the trailers for the sequel look pretty damn funny.

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Don Jon is director-writer-star Joseph Gordon-Levitt's pondering of one man's internet porn addiction and how it affects his love life.  Sort of.  In the end it's more about how you shouldn't make all the compromises in a relationship (you need to make some but it has to cut both ways).  But there's a few other things going on too, dealing with various aspects of relationships, sex, sexual dynamics, power struggles, happiness, and personal betterment.  Don Jon isn't a bad movie.  It's not even an unfocussed movie.  The ideas and even their general execution are sound.  Everyone acts well and the message(s) come through.  It's unfortunate then that Levitt chose set his first major directorial effort in the thick of the New Jersey shore, making his character a wife-beater-wearing lug and his object of affection an all-too-game gum-chewing Scarlett Johansson.  I mean, Tony Danza plays Jon's dad.  TONY effing DANZA!  The problem is these characters don't feel like real people, but broad stereotypes one would normally find in a Saturday Night Live sketch.  Or on MTV's Jersey Shore, but I couldn't stand to watch two minutes of Jersey Shore without wanting to gouge out my eyes and stab myself in the ears with uncooked spaghetti, so Levitt's decision to center the film around these broad stereotypes made the journey of watching them unattractive and somewhat painful.  I would have much rathered it be set in Philly or Boston.  Long Island probably would have been just as problematic.

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By purposefully going retro-futuristic, 1970's-style, director Jack Plotnick sets up expectations for a whimsical Naked Gun or Black Dynamite-style farce, only to deliver a surprisingly effective close-quarters drama instead.  It's a bait-and-switch that's difficult to accept at first, but eventually the films rhythms, and excellent cast (including Liv Tyler, Patrick Wilson, Matt Bomer, Marisa Coughlan and Jerry O'Connell) suck you into the lives of these people, leaving the anticipation of self-aware comedy gags a distant memory.  About as funny as the film gets is with Dr. Bot, the station's therapist who is only capable of spouting cliched platitudes in response to anyone's emotional unloading, but otherwise it steers away from its corny surroundings, avoids too much wink/wince inducing space-jargon and actually tries (and succeeds) at establishing real characters and real moments between them.  The most unfortunate thing about the film isn't the expectations vs. reality, but rather the fact that most of the effect are digital rather than practical... and pretty crappy at that.  It's sad that Plotnick and company didn't splurge for the extra effort of miniatures.  It's of nominal difference to the actual story at hand, but visually it would have been even more wondrous.  The practical sets and wardrobe, looking like remnants from Space: 1999 were both hokey and sumptuous, note perfect, making those CGI elements stand out awkward and atrociously.

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As past reviews on this site have mentioned, I've got a yen for espionage films...one I don't satiate quite enough.  The Bond movies feel like high points (even the bad ones) because the satisfy not just the spy element, but action, sci-fi, adventure, globetrotting, car chasing, and all sort of other elements, even if it's at the expense of being true espionage.  The Mission Impossible movies were meant to be Americanized Bond, in many respects, creating a high-octane action-adventure superspy sans accent, and I never bought into it.  With the first film, despite some excellent direction from Brian DePalma, the fact that the IMF team is immediately killed off leaving only Tom Cruise:Action Hero as our focus was quite the turnoff.  The less said about John Woo's second entry, the better (except to say that because of it we got Hugh Jackman as Wolverine instead of Dougray Scott, so thanks!).  I skipped the third entry, because I just didn't care, but the fourth entry drew me back in, since it was director Brad Bird's first live action.  Even still I only came back to MI:III not because of Ghost Protocol, but rather in anticipation of JJ Abram's Star Wars coming down the pike.  I've discovered, however, that in the end it doesn't really matter who's directing the damn thing, ever Mission Impossible movie is forgettable.  I remember next to nothing about any of them, except for the big action moments we see in the trailers all the time.  Tom Cruise's jumping away from an exploding helicopter in the second film is just as sharp in my mind as his jumping into the big swirling vortex in Rogue Nation... a film I haven't even seen... and I can't even remember a major action sequence for M:I:III.  The this third film has Michelle Monaghan as Ethan Hunt's wife (or wife to be, who can remember) being kidnapped (and apparently killed in a fake-out opening flash forward) by Philip Seymore Hoffman (RIP).  Then some stuff happens.  Keri Russell is there for some reason. Everything works out and Ethan Hunt goes off with his not-dead wife into retirement, only to return in two more films where I don't think his wife is even mentioned.  These are the epitome of "whatever" summer blockbusters.  They certainly pass the time, but as a series of films they don't connect well at all, just like it's an impossible mission to connect with or care about Ethan Hunt as a character (see what I did there?).  And those posters...woof, can they get any more dull?


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I tend not to watch most of these sci-fi-light-teen-dramas-based-off-a-young-adult-novel-series movies.  There have always been a copious amount of teen-focused novel series, but since the Harry Potter explosion they're being adapted to screen in ridiculous numbers in the hope of having the next Harry Potter, or Twilight, or Hunger Games (the cream of the crop).  The b-list has the ongoing Divergent series, the odd entry into the Percey Jackson mythology, the randomness of Narnia, and now The Maze Runner.  Of the b-list, The Maze Runner is by far the best of them, even if its plot, purpose, and eventual twist conceit is utterly ludicrous, it manages to sell it pretty well.  This first entry in the series manages to introduce its setting, add complications to it, explore the mysteries within it, and create a lot of meaningful (if cliche) dramatic friction to such positive effect that by the time it gets to revealing what the hell the maze is all about it's only stupid in hindsight.  There's a Lord of the Flies aspect that likely stems from James Dashner's source material, but the divisiveness amongst the young men never really reaches the same dire head (the threat is almost always without, rather than equally being within).  Mercifully, the introduction of a female into the all-teen-male setting doesn't send everyone on a primal hormonal rampage, and to its credit Teresa never faces a threat that the other boys don't also face.  In fact, there seems to be an intentional bucking of these sorts of in-fighting and stupid-machismo bullshit trends that stories like this usually take on, which is perhaps why I liked it so much.  Instead of things resolving with the expected drama there's often an air of civility to it, like these kids have figured things out a little better than we have.  Obviously the story ends with a sequel in mind, which David has conveniently already written up.
(and here's David's take of the first)

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In this, the Twenty-Teens entertain-you-glut where Television and Movies and web programming and video games and board games and comics and novels can be created and distributed by anyone, there's a whole subgenre of documentaries emerging: movies about movies.  In the past these were a rare beast, Hearts of Darkness (the making of Apocalypse Now) being the first major entry in the subgenre back in 1991.  But with DVDs presenting a viable medium for distributing behind-the-scenes documentaries as special features, it became commonplace to create a documentary alongside a film.  Retrospective documentaries of popular phenomenon like Star Wars were also frequently in the offing, but it's only in the past few years, especially with Netflix catering to the documentary crowd and Kickstarter providing a vehicle for funding niche passion projects (spurring on the rise of docs about films that were never made).  It's almost too much.  But something like Lost Soul, detailing how a passion project became a major flop straddles the middle ground, presenting you with a vision for a film that never got made because it was so corrupted by the people who eventually made it.  In Richard Stanley's efforts to bring H.G. Wells' novel to life, he found himself out of his depth wrestling the demands of a big studio, big stars, and the elements of a remote location wholly not designed for major motion picture production.  Summarily he was booted off the film which went from being one unfortunate train wreck to just a flat out miserable experience under the guidance of a completely detached John Frankenheimer.  It's a fascinating talking heads picture detailing the personal and emotional turmoil the film had from a broad swath of people involved, including Stanley (the oddest of odd ducks, bless him), some of his cast (Kilmer didn't participate and Brando was obviously unable to, but they loom as large of natural disasters as the typhoon that struck the set), makeup and effects teams, producers, script writers and others.  It's very thorough and very weird, plus it's a thousand times more interesting and entertaining than the actual film that wound up getting released.  (For the record, Frankenheimer jumped on the project because he had no other opportunities at that time, and did so only with the caveat of having a 3-picture deal with the studio.  Ronin was on of those pictures, so it was totally worth it to him to dispassionately crank out this shitty, already troubled adaptation).

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Having watched the above mentioned Lost Soul documentary that worked on the thesis of Richard Stanley being an unheralded and misunderstood visionary of then-modern horror, I made a concerted effort to find a copy of Hardware on DVD (I didn't need blu-ray...in fact, Hardware seems made for the grainy, warbly, crisplessness of the VHS home video market).  It's one of those films that seemed exclusively advertised in mature readers comics and (I'm guessing) horror magazines like Fangoria.  I don't recall ever watching a trailer, but the comic book ads lingered in my mind for decades.  I don't know that I ever saw a copy of the film on a video store shelf back when there were video store shelves.  I certainly can believe I would have ever passed up the opportunity to watch it should it have presented itself.  Suffice it to say I'd waited a long time to watch it.  And yep, it's a post-apocalyptic piece of garbage.  Literally and figuratively.  Like Rey in Star Wars Episode 7, Dermot Mul...ahem Dylan McDermott ventures out into the wastelands to find useful remains amidst the detritus of a great war.  Some he sells and some he gives to his girlfriend, a welding artist who makes sculptures from trash.  One piece is an old Terminator skull (it's not an actual Terminator, but it's a military war robot of similar ilk) which reboots and starts rebuilding itself from the scrap.  Some stuff happens, people get killed, scream queen style screaming, gloopy red blood, good-for-their-time-but-pretty-crappy-by-today's-standards gore effects.... Hardware is a rash of cliched and derivative moments cobbled together for a wholly unsatisfying viewing experience.  It's like if this were the disappointing, somehow smaller sequel to Terminator the way Predator II is so much the lesser of Predator.  It's not even bad in the let's-entertain-ourselves-by-making-fun-of-it way, it's just kind of there.  It certainly did little to cement Stanley as some sort of auteur or neglected filmmaking genius as posited by Lost Soul.  Had he not lost the Dr. Moreau opportunity he may have had the opportunity to develop a unique voice, but Hardware shows only slight promise of anything fantastic to come.

3 Short Paragraphs: Absolutely Anything

2015, Terry Jones (Erik the Viking) -- download

I love Simon Pegg, I love Terry Jones and I love godcomplex movies. Bruce Almighty did it before, Click has done it (and had Kate Beckinsale to boot) -- a movie where someone is given godlike powers and things go hilariously wrong. Things do go wrong in the movie, but hilarity is hard to find.

I watched this movie in two sittings, as is my wont these days. Life always interrupts. Attentions wane. The first sitting had me watching in detail the humorous antics between Pegg's schoolteacher Neil, with his crush on the gorgeous neighbour (Beckinsale)  and his alien-given magic hand. Said aliens are a council of Monty Python actors testing to see if humans are worthy of obliteration or continued existence. He does fun things, silly things and selfish things only to be done in each time by a childish version of the genie's lamp wish -- liberal interpretation. Then it hits that key point, that happened just as I was moving onto sitting two.

The number one antic for socially awkward lonely men to do, once they get powers, is make the the girl of their dreams love them. Or just have sex with them. And you get the latter is rape, right? If she has no choice because you control All, then you are basically forcing her. Icky. The movie tries to get around the uncomfortable bit by having him lose his powers for a brief period (unbeknownst to him) and Kate getting drunk & horny. They have sex. He thinks he made her do it and feels terrible. It was a cute way of sidestepping the issue, but it really didn't. He could have said no, because she was drunk. Suddenly, after that deed, the movie falls apart as if it lost its direction. Things just got sillier without any introspection and couldn't be dragged up by Robin Williams as a dog. But at least Pegg made some money so he can get to making the next Star Wars & Star Trek movies.

3 Short Paragraphs: Everest

2015, Baltasar Kormákur (Contraband) -- download

Why do men climb mountains? Because they are there? Seems a little facile doesn't it? Everest focuses on the men who keep on climbing the mountain, often as continued attempts to reach the peak that has eluded them. And supporting them are teams of "adventure companies" whose job and expertise is to guide the climbers safely. So, yes some men climb mountains because it's a paycheck.  Those are the guys are who intrigue me, not the idiots who spend vast quantities of cash to be frozen, exhausted and potentially dead. They were the reason I watched this movie.

Notice I said men, men, men. Jason Clarke (Terminator Genisys) leads one adventure company, Jake Gyllenhaal leads the other. The people they are leading up include John Hawkes (Deadwood), Josh Brolin, Michael Kelly (The Adjustment Bureau) and ... Naoko Mori (Torchwood). Emily Watson, Keira Knightley and Robin Wright are also in the background as support and wives. This is a man's movie about men doing as men will do. In this biographical flick, we get these two groups (lots of other nameless climbers in the background) combine in order to successfully reach the peak in spite of some bad weather coming up. And it all goes wrong. People die. There is something eyerolling to be said there about men doing as men do.

So, you have a handful of great actors and a decent director building a challenging story around icey set pieces and fake snow. There is a reason the best scenes are in the camps at the foot of the mountain. The rest is low key disaster flick footage, unless you are into climbing -- scary precipices, narrow ledges and blinding snowstorms. This was another reason I watched it, to see if they could build a movie from the small idea of people going up and getting back down. The drama is very low key, focused on loss and strength of character. People are going to die, so you are just ... waiting. Why? How? Railing against stupidity and ego was my primary emotion, as few of these men are unlikable. I did not get out of it any more than I expected and confirmed my own desire to not climb it, because it is there.

I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching (Pt. 6)

In this new trend of "leaking" things early, I am surprised I did not give the first episode of this alternate history series a brilliant review.  Brilliance on part of the show, not the review. Anywayz, I loved the first episode of this PK Dick story adaptation about a world where the Nazis won WWII, along with the Japanese. The Americans entered into the war too late for Europe, which in turn allowed the atomic bomb to fall into the Nazi hands. The war ended when they dropped it on Washington DC. We enter the story in the early 60s, a generation into America living as an occupied country -- Nazis controlling the east coast, Japanese the west coast with a neutral freezone (but still not America) in the Rockies.

This is an uncomfortable show to watch. Sure, we are still deeply seated in accepting Nazi Germans as bad guys (with no argument of them being so, but they are so deeply embedded in our forefront Bad Guy brain, more so than any other historical force) but the Japanese are generally considered decent, hardworking if a bit pervy these days. But in this world, both cultures are dominating, ruthless and downright scary. But the Nazis come out on top for the Bad.

The story focuses on two young people: Juliana, in San Francisco, whose sister is killed as a resistance agent and Joe, in NYC, a truck driver for the resistance. Both are quickly caught up in a conspiracy involving movie reels from The Man in the High Tower, the leader of the resistance. These reels show an alternate history where the Allies won the war -- our history.

The uncomfortable part is watching the show depict societal norms, even more upsetting than some we already had in the 60s. Joe drives his truck west, through a light snow fall, that is not snow. They are burning the old, the infirm and the insane. Just good population control for the Nazis. And in San Francisco, Juliana's boyfriend is detained & tortured, his Jewish ancestry used as leverage to have him confess to a conspiracy he knows nothing about. His sister and her children sit in a nearby room, a room with gas vents. He knows this. A generation under an occupation and most just ... accept it.

I love alternate histories, where you get to explore all the little bits of change. You can postulate how bad things can get, and how things could have just been different. And of course, you can comment on how some people just accept the world as it is, no matter how horrible it gets. Ahem America, we are all talking to you.

Time to binge watch the rest of the season.

Doctor Who started a trend, well at least in North American eyes -- maybe the Brits have been doing it for ages?  It is the Xmas special. No, not like us, where we have a themed Xmas episode, but a single episode that stands alone from the other stories, usually why the show is inbetween seasons or on a long hiatus. A tasty snippet while we wait.

The Abominable Bride is the first such for Sherlock. It picks up the continuity from last season, in that plane. But really, it takes place in the mind of Sherlock, in the Victorian era, giving us Sherlock and Holmes in their original timeline.

Hee! As a fan of the original books, I loved revisiting that setting.

But it doesn't stop there, as they twist and turn, mixing the stories together with a bit of breaking the 4th wall. As Sherlock investigates a mystery of a bride returned from the dead, he uncovers a rather odd conspiracy of .... feminists?

This episode was for the fans, as it just dives into the characters and their playful interaction with each other. The juxtaposition of 19th century versions vs the current ones, the contradictions and the ever presence ghost of Moriarty. The mystery is just a canvas unto which the characters paint themselves. Great fun! And yet, we are still connecting seasons together, considering how things went last season.

And from great fun to great-gawds-this-is-terrible we get Shadowhunters. This is the TV adaptation of the YA chicks-with-knives genre book series. Yes, the one that had a failed movie franchise attempt starring Phil Collins daughter Lily. Chicks with knives? You know, those books in the store that have a girl in tight, dark clothes usually with tattoos (often a tribal tramp stamp), a sword or dagger and she gets mixed up in Urban Fantasy, usually vampires.

The Mortal Instruments, as the books were called, is about a group of attractive, counter culture youth descended from Angel blood, who are charged with protecting the human world from Demons, and other monsterish creatures. Great idea. No idea about the execution, but boy does it lend itself to a CW style TV show. These shows practically are born on this station. But this one comes from Freeform, formally ABC Family, which might explain why it is so so so terrible.

The main character Clary is coming of age and bumps into Shadowhunters (the pretty kids in leather an abs who fight demons) in a nightclub. Before she can drag out her true history from her mother, the woman is attacked and taken. Clary is left piecing together the story by stalking to Shadowhunters back to their CSI style lair (lots of glowing set pieces, monitors and equipment) and learning of her heritage.

Help me find my mother! Help me find out who I am! Tell me what a Mortal Cup is! These are the strained cries of Clary as she goes from pretty highschooler in jeans and tees to Shadowhunter in short skirts and leather. Its not much of a transition for she looks ridiculous in the outfit, which is not surprising because she got it from a girl who seems to want to look like Vampirella in a pair of tight leather pants. Like the original movie, the boys put and argue over Clary not wanting to get wrapped up in her anguish but knowing they must.

The Vampire Diaries does it better. And yet I have watched a couple of more episodes, not to see if it got better but to see if the incredibly terrible was a fluke, a bad first episode. Nope. Stinker. Not even "I'm on a horse!" Isaiah Mustafa can raise it from the filthy floor.

The most annoying thing about the whole show, movie and book series is that it stole MY idea for a d20 Modern campaign that was also called Shadowhunters, stole its idea from Buffy but used the template of Angel blooded vs Demon blooded. Mine was better. But still had a chick with a dagger nee sword.